Look up and report Rx drug side effects online

reference
In the past few years several consumer-driven databases have sprung up that allow you to look up and report side effects to prescription drugs. The FDA's method of collecting and reporting side effects is slow and inefficient and relies mostly on doctors' reports of patient complaints. Apparently doctors tend to report only "medically serious" complaints like nausea or abdominal pain, and consider things like sexual dysfunction to be not worth mentioning. On top of that, many people don't even bother sharing side effects with their doctors, probably because they know the exchange will go like this: Doctor: Any problem with the flurextrothimstim? Patient: Yeah, my eyelashes started to fall out. Doctor: Really? I've never heard of that! Give me a call in a few months and tell me if it's…
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Six months using a sea sponge tampon alternative

self-experiment
W A R N I N G: Graphic lady-parts talk follows! Please, Lord, don't let me accidentally post this on my writing client's WordPress account, or 5,000 muscle car owners in Texas will get a nasty shock. In addition to the Niagarrhagia I documented last year, I've also been plagued by steadily increasing pain during my periods that started to get distracting a few years ago. It originally started a decade ago, but once I switched to organic tampons it went away for several years. This isn't the usual cramping pain, but a something-has-gone-very-wrong inflammation kind of pain. And of course a series of exams and fancy-ass tests with beeping, blinking machines revealed nothing. For a while the pain would start several days into the period. Then it started at…
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