BMJ 1995;311:1228-1229 (4 November)

Letters

GPs were swamped by calls

EDITOR,--The way in which the Department of Health handled the information from the Committee on Safety of Medicines on the risk of thromboembolism associated with combined oral contraceptives was inept and dangerous.1 Any possible theoretical benefit from saving a very few women from thromboembolism will have been swept away by the fact that a huge number of women, panicked by the media hype, will have stopped taking their pill immediately. Any scare about oral contraceptives causes a higher morbidity from pregnancy or terminations than it saves. This does not take into account the appreciable extra stress caused to general practitioners, primary care nurses, and receptionists faced with one and a half million extra consultations in one and a half days. There is also no way of measuring how many really urgent consultations were displaced by the clamour of the pill taking population.

The whole exercise was made infinitely worse because . . . [Full text of this article]


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