Nonetheless, any health professional making the assumption that both you and someone they may never have met will be doing that and giving out advice based thereon should probably be shot. (More realistically, lectured.)
Actually, the pill's margin for error is pretty low--the stats I can find for someone who actually does something like read the freaking instructions and not pop it like a vitamin pill instead of taking it at the same time every day is about 0.3% per year (and this staistic likely includes people whose stress levels have hit the point where it's messing up their hormonal balance and interfering with the ability of the pill to regulate their ovulation). But yeah, this is still probably a little high for a margin of error, and condoms can reduce it to 0.006%/year, so go nuts even if you're both throughly tested. (Mind you, condoms can fail to protect you against herpes anyway.)
Incidentally, protection is usually either immediate or after one week, depending on when you start; the recommendation to use condoms for however long (I've heard one month, six weeks, two months, three months) tends to be based on the idea that those silly little laypeople won't get into the habit of using them properly for at least that long, and should use condoms not because the pill won't take effect before then but because they won't learn how to use it properly for that long.
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Date: 2004-11-17 09:09 am (UTC)Actually, the pill's margin for error is pretty low--the stats I can find for someone who actually does something like read the freaking instructions and not pop it like a vitamin pill instead of taking it at the same time every day is about 0.3% per year (and this staistic likely includes people whose stress levels have hit the point where it's messing up their hormonal balance and interfering with the ability of the pill to regulate their ovulation). But yeah, this is still probably a little high for a margin of error, and condoms can reduce it to 0.006%/year, so go nuts even if you're both throughly tested. (Mind you, condoms can fail to protect you against herpes anyway.)
Incidentally, protection is usually either immediate or after one week, depending on when you start; the recommendation to use condoms for however long (I've heard one month, six weeks, two months, three months) tends to be based on the idea that
those silly littlelaypeople won't get into the habit of using them properly for at least that long, and should use condoms not because the pill won't take effect before then but because they won't learn how to use it properly for that long.