Menstrual health tracking assistant

The core value of the menstrual health tracking assistant has never been to "calculate for you when your aunt will come", but to help you establish an exclusive body database, which can not only help ordinary people quickly identify abnormal body signals and avoid menstrual triggers in life, but also provide accurate reference for clinical diagnosis, which is much more useful than the vague "my aunt is not accurate".

The first time I realized that this thing is not an IQ tax was when I went to gynecology with me when I was a child last year. She used to have painful menstrual cramps that made her vomit in a cold sweat. She always felt that she was born with a cold uterus, and the brown sugar and ginger tea she drank for more than half a year was of no use. Later, she was forced to keep a record of her menstrual periods for three months. She even kept track of what her aunt had eaten the week before and what time she stayed up. Marked, the doctor glanced at the record and said, it's uterine cold. You must drink more than 2 glasses of ice cream in the week before each pain, and you stay up for 3 days and nights to catch up on the plan. Stop drinking ice cream first, don't check your phone until 12 o'clock before going to bed, and you don't need to take medicine. She went back and followed the instructions, and the pain dropped by two degrees in the second month. Even the leakage caused by the heavy volume was much better.

However, not everyone is suitable for recording such details. The girls around me who use tracking tools are basically divided into two groups: one group is obsessed with details. They even record whether they have breast swelling and pain that day, whether they are inexplicably irritable, and even how much ice they eat. They also make monthly comparisons to find their own menstrual cycle patterns.； The other group is the minimalist, who just write down the start and end dates, and at most, whether there is any special pain, for fear that if you remember too much, you will become anxious - for example, if you have nothing to do, but when you look at the app and it says that you are expected to come today, you will not come, or you will be browsing on Baidu until midnight and suspect that you have a serious illness, but endocrine disorders will delay it even later. In fact, both are correct. Girls who are prone to anxiety really don’t need to burden themselves. Memorizing the core information is enough. If you are preparing for pregnancy or want to adjust your menstrual period, remembering more carefully will help you find the triggers faster.

I have been using it for almost two years, and I have encountered many pitfalls in the process. At first, I followed the tips of popular bloggers, which asked me to remember the status of cervical mucus and basal body temperature. I couldn’t even tell what cervical mucus was, and I couldn’t even get up to measure my basal body temperature in bed. I gave up after persisting for half a month. Later, I asked my senior sister who is the attending physician in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She told me that ordinary people don’t need to be so complicated. They just focus on three core items: First, the start and end time of each menstrual period. Calculate the range of cycle fluctuations. ； The second is pain, which can be divided into levels 1 to 3. Level 1 does not affect normal work, level 2 requires ibuprofen, and level 3 cannot get out of bed. ； The third is whether there are any abnormalities, such as non-menstrual bleeding (called abnormal uterine bleeding in medicine), blood clots that look like small meat balls, and menstrual periods that are not clean for more than 10 days. These are the signals that need to be paid attention to. If you remember too much, it will be confusing.

Speaking of which, I have to mention the controversy that everyone is most concerned about: Many tracking tools will mark the safe period and ovulation period for you. Can you trust it? I specifically asked two different doctors before and got really different answers. A reproductive doctor said that if your cycle is very stable for more than six months in a row, with fluctuations of no more than 2 days, then the safe period is a fairly high reference, and the contraceptive success rate can be over 80%. ； However, the doctor at the gynecology clinic did not recommend relying on this contraceptive method at all. She said that she had just seen three girls who believed in the safe period of the APP last month. After all, staying up late at night, traveling to a different city, or even having an argument with your partner may cause ovulation to advance or be delayed. This so-called safe period is really not that accurate. It can be used as a reference. If you really want to prevent pregnancy, you should wear condoms or take short-acting contraceptive pills.

Don't tell me, I had a junior sister in my previous company. After memorizing it for half a year, she figured out her own pattern. Every time she came to visit my aunt, she would break out acne three days ago and her mood would get so bad that she would explode. Now she has moved all important contacts and cross-department meetings in those two days in advance, and deliberately avoided milk tea hot pot. Even her acne breakouts have been mostly improved. Last week, she told me that her colleagues have recently asked her if she has changed to expensive skin care products.

In fact, to put it bluntly, the Menstrual Health Tracking Assistant is just a tool to help you understand your body. You don’t need to regard its conclusions as an edict, and don’t think of it as a useless showpiece. After all, everyone’s physique is different. The “standard 28-day cycle” and “ending in 3 to 7 days” mentioned on the Internet are just for reference. The real data you write down for several consecutive months is the instruction manual that best understands your body. If there are really abnormalities for two or three months in a row, it is much more efficient to go directly to the hospital with the records than to hesitantly say to the doctor, "I seem to be having trouble with my aunt recently."