Hot Topic:
The Last Birth Control Pill without Lactose
Updated August 12, 2003
Lactose is used as a filling or coating in hundreds of medications,
both prescription and over-the-counter. (For more details, see my
Pepcid AC® and lactose in medicine page.)
Most categories of medicine, fortunately, have several lactose-free
choices. Birth Control Pills (BCPs), of all things, were the one
exception. The only lactose-free BCP was Demulen.
Then came the rumor that Demulen had added lactose. Panic city.
Demulen is made by Searle, which is a division of Pharmacia, a part of
Pfizer.
Prizer has information on its Demulen page,
a page in .pdf format, which means you need the free
Adobe Acrobat reader to see it. However, I'll save you the trouble. Good
news! The rumor, like most rumors, was at best only half true.
Here are the facts.
BCPs come in 21-day doses, to cover the active portion of a
woman's cycle. But experience showed that some woman forgot to
start up the new cycle on time if they had to take a week off
without any pills. So the pharmaceutical companies came up with
seven-day placebo or spacer pills, inactive pills that were simply
place-holders, allowing women to take a pill every day and make
it into the kind of automatic habit that left no gaps.
Well, the Demulen 21-day active pills still are lactose-free.
It's just those additional 7-day placebo pills that now
contain lactose. This may be an annoyance, but it doesn't
affect the value of the active pills. Ask your doctor for
Demulen 1/35-21 or the higher dosage 1/50-21, not the 1/35-28 or
the 1/50-28.
If you don't want to chance even the slight amount of lactose
in the placebo pills, check with your doctor to see if there
is a different placebo that you can take. Or get creative in
ways to mark off the week's gap between cycles by taking different
pills or just marking off a calendar.
Just don't believe every rumor until you check them out.
For information, the Searle address is:
G. D. Searle LLC
A subsidiary of Pharmacia Corporation
Chicago, IL 60680
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