What the question box told us this year

We end every session by handing out slips of paper. Anyone can write a question, nobody signs it, and we answer as many as we can before we leave. The rest we take away and answer on the next visit.

Two things came up far more often than we had planned for. The first was pain. Girls describing periods that stop them standing, who had been told by somebody they trusted that this was simply ordinary. It is not ordinary, and a good deal of it is treatable. The second was contraception and fertility. A large share of the adults, and very nearly every adolescent, believe that using a modern method now makes children impossible later. That one belief is shaping more decisions here than cost or access ever have.

So two things change. Menstrual disorders move from a paragraph to a section of their own, with a clinician in the room wherever we can arrange one. And fertility gets taught explicitly rather than mentioned in passing, because leaving a myth unanswered is much the same as agreeing with it. We will publish what happens either way, including if it turns out to change nothing.