Tag Archives: women’s health

Sierra Kate: Reusables, Self-Reliance & Feminine Hygiene, Part 2 – How Do They Perform?

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Last week I wrote Part 1: Options, about alternative reusable menstrual products from a prepper perspective. However, potential users of a new alternative feminine hygiene product will also want to know how well it performs/functions. That is what I am here to discuss this week.

FIRST – OUR CHOICES:

Disposables

  • Pads & Tampons – semi-synthetic rayon
  • Pads & Tampons – cotton
  • Menstrual Cups – elastomer

Reusables

  • Pads – cotton
  • Tampons – natural sea sponges or cotton
  • Menstrual Cups (bell-shaped cup used internally) – natural latex rubber or medical-grade silicone

Let’s compare our options, shall we?

Reusable Menstrual Pads

Reusable Tampons – Sea Sponges

Reusable Menstrual Cup

 

SECOND – REVIEWING PERFORMANCE:

1. Comfort

  • Interior winner – Menstrual Cups. No internal options are felt, but cups win because they are non-drying and do not interfere with one’s healthy and natural lubrication or secretions.
  • Exterior winner – Unclear. It’s a trade-off; next to sensitive skin the winner is probably the more bulky cotton pad that is soft and breathable. But some prefer the thinner, less breathable rayon,  but it does have potential irritants.

2. Convenience

a) Capacity

Winner – Menstrual Cups. The 1-ounce cups have double the capacity of a max-absorbency tampon. That means half the bathroom trips!

b) Portability and Active Living

Winner – Menstrual Cups. You only need one cup at any time, they are easy to clean and there is no trash to hide. Cups are popular with outdoor enthusiasts, including wilderness backpackers. Also, the non-drying cup can be put in the day before you expect your period.

3. Cost

Winner – Menstrual Cups. Both reusable cups and pads last at least 5 to 10 years. A cup costs about $30 to $40; a commercial set of reusable pads about 2 to 3 times that. A set of two sponges costs $13 and last 3 to 12 months.

4. Health

a) Hygiene 

Winner – ALL. No menstrual products are sterile; however they are all sanitary with proper care.

b) Harmful Substances

Winners – Reusables. Processing rayon requires a lot of chemicals that are potential toxins or irritants that may leave traces in the final product.

c) TSS and Microbes

Internal Winner – Menstrual Cup. The cups smooth surface does not lend itself as easily to microbial growth; tampons, especially high-absorbency, seem to be associated with TSS, along with causing micro-abrasions.

d) Odor

  • Internal winner – Menstrual Cup. The menstrual fluid is not exposed to any air, which eliminates odor.
  • External winner – Cotton pads. Cotton allows moisture to evaporate, which reduces odor.

5. Environmentally friendly

Winners – Reusables

6. Anatomical Fit Concerns

For cups a good rule-of-thumb is if the person (this includes virgins) has no problems using tampons then they should be able to use cups. If you can’t use disposable tampons, but dislike pads, consider trying sea sponge tampons. At the bottom I’ve included a link to a positive review of them by a women affected by pelvic organ prolapse.

7. Learning Curve

Cups are more hands on, and require you to be comfortable, or willing to become so, with your body and intimate anatomy. Most users say it takes 2-3 cycles to get the hang of easily inserting and removing them.

8. Customer Service

Winner – Reusables. Companies of reusables are knowledgeable and helpful. They have to be, they mostly advertise by word of mouth.

9. Care, Cleaning, and Storage

Reusable winner – Menstrual Cup. The cup’s smooth surface is simple to clean. It is also easier to care for away from home than the reusable absorbent options. In a pinch, after emptying, if both the cup and your clean hands do not come into contact with anything else then it isn’t necessary to wash the cup before reinserting.

10. OKAY, but are they pretty?

Really…? Sigh. Yes! They have cute pouches. Many pads do come in awesome colours and patterns. A few cups come in bright pretty colours. Sponges, I think, already look decorative. And then you can make your own pads, tampons or carry pouches as beautiful as you like. What I find beautiful is how well reusables work. The disposable synthetic products, to me, are a disappointment, not just environmentally but from a health and performance point of view.

 

Disclaimer: I claim no special medical knowledge. I wrote from my personal experience with rayon products and menstrual cups; most of the rest was obtained from Internet research.

 

RESOURCES

Disposable 100% cotton pads and tampons:

Disposable menstrual cup: http://www.softcup.com/faqs

Reusable cloth pad brands:

Pads4Girls: http://lunapads.com/about-us/donate-pads

To make your own cloth pads:

Reusable sea sponge tampons

Reusable menstrual cups

Lastly, the following is a link to a story with a very rare concern with tampons that is not about rayon, dioxins, chemical irritants or even TSS bacteria. Open at your own risk of being utterly and horrifyingly grossed out: http://www.wfaa.com/news/consumer/Test-Results-Confirm-Mold-on-Tampon-147404735.html

 

Sierra Kate: Reusables, Self-Reliance & Feminine Hygiene, Part 1 – Options

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Contributed by Guest Blogger: Sierra Kate

Question: What can make you self-reliant for longer that uses up less space and money? Answer: Using reusable items instead of one-use disposables. I am here to discuss a much-neglected category under disposables: Menstrual Products. <Crickets>. Humour me for a moment and contemplate this, I read about one family that had an estimated seven years of tampons stocked. You want an idea better than that right? Consider reusables menstrual products. Believe it or not reusables are better in many ways, but that is literally a whole other post.

Pads, tampons, and menstrual cups all come in reusable forms. Reusable cloth pads are typically made of cotton, a breathable absorbent fabric. Commercial cloth pads are about $10 per pad. Many people make their own pads to reduce costs; there are plenty of how-to instructions on-line (see Momma Bear’s post: Home-Made, Reusable Sanitary Napkins). Cloth pads last 5 to 10 years. Commercial cloth tampons, or patterns to make them, are much harder to find, but they are out there. One non-cloth option is reusable tampons made from natural sea sponges, a 2-pack is $13, and they can last 3 to 12 months.

I favour the reusable menstrual cups. They are bell-shaped and are typically made from natural latex rubber, or silicone. About the size of a shot glass, they sit internally and collect menstrual fluid instead of absorbing it. They cost about $30 to $40 and last 5 to 10 years. You can easily increase your self-reliance by stocking up. Doing the math, 4 to 8 individual menstrual cups (or sets of cloth pads) could last a woman until menopause.

What about being able to make them yourself and be truly self-sustainable? Most people wouldn’t consider it on this matter, because it requires a lot of research and hard work, and the above options for self-reliance don’t take up a lot of space. But, out of curiosity, “what if”?

If you are interested in self-sufficiency when it comes to menstrual products you have a few options. Start with growing a natural fiber. Cotton (a sub-tropical bush), soft and absorbent, is the best option. The second best would be low-THC hemp (wide geographic range), however daft legal issues currently abound on this topic. Natural sponges have been harvested for millennia as luxury items; however this is dependent on a viable sponge population living nearby (such as Florida). Lastly, ones made from rubber. Natural latex rubber has many uses, and is created by curing latex, a milky plant sap. A tropical tree is used commercially; other sources of latex are guayule and common dandelions. Silicone rubber is made from silica (a sand used in glass-making) and other compounds and has been produced for about 60 years. You can find rubber mold-making-kits if you want to tinker, as rubber has all sorts of uses. The Native Americans made latex rubber for millennia but theirs may not have had the quality or consistency of modern rubber production.

Ironically, there are many other good uses for disposable tampons after TEOTWAWKI. There are a total of ten(!) survival uses in this article: The Swiss Army Survival Tampon – 10 Survival Uses.

So from a  self-reliance prepper perspective, stocking reusables is great. But perhaps you, or a fellow prepper, are not convinced. If you are wondering if this will work well from a user perspective, I use menstrual cups and I’ll tell why it is better in next week’s Part 2 post.

Sierra Kate’s Bio
Kate currently lives in small-city Canada and has just come across the world of prepping. What initially grabbed her interest in prepping is how well it fits in with her own intellectual inclinations and desires for a healthy lifestyle that has sustainability, self-reliability, utility and minimalism in mind. She enjoys solitude and her hobbies include reading and biking.

 

Momma Bear: Women’s Maladies

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Sometimes being a woman is really the pits. I imagine it will be even worse in a post-SHTF society where our modern, quick-fix, take a pill for it remedies are no longer available. I’m talking about those dreaded conditions that are almost exclusively “women’s ailments”: yeast infections, vaginosis, vulvitis, UTIs, hemorrhoids, leaky bladders, migraines and menopause. Bleck! So what is the best way to prep for these lovely maladies? Like other areas of preparedness, we need to tackle this with a multi-step approach.

Knowledge: Know your body. You need to be able to recognize the warning signs of an impending ailment so that you can attempt to prevent a full-blown illness. Know your genetic predispositions and history. Ask your mother, grandmothers, and aunts about what female health conditions run in your family. Heredity is a funny thing and frequently cannot be avoided. While you may maintain a painstakingly rigorous “healthy lifestyle,” sometimes nature still throws that heredity-curveball at you. You might be young enough that many of these have not yet happened to you, but at least study up and be prepared to recognize and treat them if they occur (to you or others). In my family we get three main conditions: hemorrhoids, leaky bladders, and menstrual migraines. The first two can normally be treated by surgery and the last can be controlled by using birth control pills and prescription meds. But what will we do without access to routine medical care and medications?

Prepare: If there are medications you can get that you might need someday, GET THEM and stock up. You might never have had a yeast infection in your life, but if you live someplace hot and humid and suddenly your life has no A/C, infrequent baths and changes of clothing (because you are washing everything by hand!), you might have a serious run in with a yeast infection. Stock up on any OTC meds that you can. The other way to prepare is to not put off those elective surgeries (this seems to have been mentioned in plenty of other articles). These days both leaky bladders and hemorrhoids can be treated with surgery, but they are not ones that most of us would rush right out to get. I think you will find that surgery is preferred over living with the problem in a post-SHTF world. Last, maybe cleanliness IS next to godliness. Keeping clean and dry will prevent some of these conditions from starting in the first place. The military has been doing this for years…with feet. Every time they stop, they change their socks because it prevents a plethora of foot ailments. I say every time you sweat too much, change those undies. If you can’t stay cool, at least stay dry.

Take your knowledge a step further: None of these ailments are new. How did they treat these ailments in the past? Or how do they treat them now in third world countries? Look for “old school” remedies. Read up, research, ask someone very old who grew up in a rural environment what they did. For instance, yogurt is a common treatment for yeast infections (and I am not talking about eating it). And here I mean all natural, home-made, BASIC yogurt, not the flavored variety they carry in the grocery stores today. Culturing your own yogurt at home is actually pretty easy to do, but few Americans do it. Drinking cranberry juice works well for treating UTIs. There are “alternative” treatments for a number of ailments, but most of us have grown up in a society where these remedies have become obsolete due to our easy access to medications.

It will take time to research and practice these remedies before the SHTF. But it’s better to practice it now when you don’t need the remedy desperately.  Like other types of medical care, it is best to study up long before the SHTF!

(Friday: What We Did This Week To Prep)