Important: You probably shouldn’t use a fertility app to prevent pregnancy
Important: You probably shouldn’t use a fertility app to prevent pregnancy
There are apps for absolutely everything now, and fertility apps in particular are super popular with women trying to become pregnant, or avoid it completely!
But we wonder—can an app really be 100% effective in calculating menstrual cycles and ovulation and predicting fertility better than the woman can on her own?
First, the bad news
A new study in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine says no, nope, NO.
Lead by Dr. Marguerite Duane, the research team analyzed thirty different fertility and period-tracking apps that are highly-downloaded, and found that they typically don’t use “evidence-based fertility awareness-based methods,” and instead employ the use of “algorithms that have not been peer-reviewed, and are therefore not scientifically sound.”
Yup, basically everything is a lie and you can’t trust anything.
Duane says that many apps rely on calendar methods to predict fertility, even when they go to all the trouble of requesting critical information about things like cervical mucus, which is linked to fertility. This results in an inaccurate prediction of fertility, including false negatives.
SHUT. IT. DOWN.
The popular app Glow performed particularly low in this study, while apps such as Ovulation Mentor, Sympto.org, iCycleBeads, LilyPro, Lady Cycle, and mfNFP.net actually predicted fertility based on data provided by the user.
So what’s a girl to do?!
Duane suggests that instead of using apps, women should try to learn fertility-awareness based methods to predict her own fertility window, and those involve using body signals—such as menstruation and hormones in your pee—to predict the most fertile times of the month.
Because, fertility awareness methods have proven to be an effective birth control method, and all you need is some instruction (and practice) to figure out the basics.
Duane admits, “women take a couple of months to feel confident using the method.”
Rise against the machines, you guys!!!!
So the moral of the story is that we are all way smarter than our smartphones, so it’s important not to rely on artificial intelligence to make the most important decisions of our lives.
You know, like when to get pregnant, or when not to get pregnant!
The post Important: You probably shouldn’t use a fertility app to prevent pregnancy appeared first on HelloGiggles.
