Daylight Savings

[smoore188]

I take my BC pills every night at the same time (9:30). When the time changed I continued to take them at 9:30 every night. Is the effectiveness decreased since I didn't change the time that I take the pill?

[Redskies]

Changing the time of your pill-taking (or, having the clocks change ) by one hour is absolutely fine.

For a combined pill (progestin and estrogen), a pill isn't a late pill until it's 12 hours after you were supposed to take it. (Although, an erratic pill-taking schedule would be a bad idea, because that makes it hard to keep track and makes mistakes and mess-ups way too easy.)

For most mini-pills (progestin-only), you have a 3-hour window in which to still take your pill correctly.

So, either way, the clocks changing by one hour won't impact your pill's effectiveness.

[smoore188]

Thank you for the reply! So that many pills in a row being off schedule (instead of me taking them at 9:30) won't matter?

[Sam W]

Yep, it won't matter

[smoore188]

Hi! I have another question about the terms "typical or perfect use".. If I take all of my pills at 9:30 or say for instance this month when the time changed and I continued to take them at 9:30 instead of changing the time, is that considers typical or perfect use? I haven't missed any pills and the latest I take one is up to an hour past 9:30.

[Redskies]

Effectiveness rates for perfect use and for typical use are calculated for a whole year of use. That means that nobody, really, is going to be at the perfect use rate, because almost nobody manages to be so flawless as to do something completely correctly, laboratory-standard correctly, every day for a whole year! But for people who are taking their pill correctly, aren't doing things like having missed or late pills or not making up after throwing one up, you can figure that your own effectiveness is between the typical and perfect use rates. And as Sam and I said, taking your pill with just one hour's difference is taking your pill correctly.

Are you also using a back-up method, like condoms? If you are, then you're very well covered If you're not, and you're having continuing concerns about your pill, might you feel better if you added another method to give you that extra backup?

[smoore188]

Yes I am using condoms as well as the pill. I just like to be covered as much as possible..

[Ashleah]

Hi Smoore,

Since you are backing up with a condom, I wanted to share this article that gives you an idea of the level you can expect using your two methods of birth control.

http://www.scarleteen.com/article/sexua ... ol_with_a_

[smoore188]

Thank you for sharing that with me!

[smoore188]

I'm just curious about this and maybe you have a link that explains it but I know when you're on the pill you're not suppose to ovulate. So whenever you get your period and start a new pack of pills (or a new cycle) and you don't miss any of those pills in that month and take them on time, shouldn't you not ovulate that month? Taking all of the pills should suppress ovulation, correct? Or do the pills from the previous pack effect that?

[Onionpie]

Hi smoore118. Yep, the pills of a pack stop you from ovulating during that cycle! Have you checked out this article yet? How do birth control pills really work, even during the placebo period? If not, it goes into lots of detail about how exactly the pill works, and hopefully that'll help you understand all the whys and hows that you'd like to know!

[smoore188]

So if I am understanding correctly, whenever you start a new pack of pills and you take all of them without missing any then you should not ovulate? I'm sorry if I sound like I'm being repetitive. Once I was told that the pills from the previous pack come into play.

[Heather]

Yep. Suppressing ovulation is the primary way oral contraceptives work.

[smoore188]

So the majority of the time people that become pregnant while on the pill are people that miss pills or do not take them correctly? Because I know Redskies said that the effectiveness is calculated over a year but if you don't miss any pills in the particular pack then you should pretty well be covered right?

[Heather]

For EVERY method of contraception that involves a user having to do a thing, when those methods fail, they most often fail because people have not used them consistently or correctly. This includes oral contraceptives.

So, any method, including the pill, if it is used consistently and correctly, is unlikely to fail. How unlikely depends on the level of effectiveness that method can provide. Again, oral contraceptives have over 99% effectiveness in one year of "perfect" use, and around 91% in one year of typical use (which is what will apply to most mere mortals over a whole year). If those numbers are confusing for you, it might help to think about them as perfect use of OCs resulting in around one in every 2,000 people per year who use them becoming pregnant (that's the figure usually cited when cited in this way), and typical use resulting in around 9 in every 100 people using them becoming pregnant in one year.

We just can't chop up those ratings into less than a year (especially when we're not talking about methods like condoms or Plan B that are per-use methods) because that's how they are figured. I get you want us to, but we can't soundly mess with facts and figures that way.

No method is 100% effective, even in perfect use, so people will and do still become pregnant with every method, every year. For those who want greater protection than any single method can offer -- who want as close to 0% risk as possible -- dual contraception, using two methods, is what we know from a lot of study works best (especially when a method like an IUD or implant isn't in play), and does the best job at giving people the kind of almost-no-risk protection they want while not asking them to be superheroes instead of the human beings prone to the occasional mishap we all are.