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Medical Video: Acupressure for Women : Acupressure Points for Menstrual Cramping
Menstruation can be contagious. Once the story that we often hear in the community. It is not uncommon for many women to reveal that their menstrual cycle suddenly changes due to being affected by other women around them. Maybe you have experienced it too; Sudden menstrual periods coincide with your sister, mother, or classmates or workplace.
Menstrual synchrony is a theory coined by an American researcher, Martha McClintock, in 1971 in a medical journal published Nature. This University of Chicago psychologist underlies his research on the same phenomenon of menstruation that occurs in the campus women's dormitory.
McClintock speculates that regular contact between women can affect the menstrual cycle. He found that a group of close friends who lived in one dorm had a menstrual period close to each other at the beginning of the year, compared to the following months; shows the distance reduced from an average of 6.4 days to 4.6 days between one person and another.
This phenomenon is then referred to as the "McClintock effect" and is widely known as one of the earliest clinical examples of pheromones (chemical signals that affect attitudes and behavior) in humans.
However, McClintock's research caused a lot of controversy. Can menstrual synchronization be medically proven?
Who opposes this theory
Although widely accepted as a fact of women's lives, many psychologists and anthropologists doubt the scientific truth of menstrual synchronization. Nearly half of the scientific papers published on the topic concerned did not find strong evidence that regular contact (living together, working together, or often spending time together) would result in menstrual cycles that are close to each other.
In a 2006 study, Zhengwei Yang and Jeffrey Schank reviewed McClintock's theory and concluded that "more cycle variability leads to repetitive convergence of cycles and subsequent divergences that can explain perceptions of synchronization." Meaning: women may think they have a period of menstruation together, whereas maybe it happened randomly and incidentally in the same time. This coincidental phase of menstrual synchronization is most likely later will adjust again to the biological clock of each body.
What's more, a group of pro-synchronization researchers was bombarded with harsh criticism due to messy research designs and too simple a statistical analysis process. The presence of natural menstrual synchrony has also not been proven in studies based on non-human primates, such as chimpanzees, hamsters, mandrill, or golden tamarin.
However, there are still a number of researchers who believe that menstrual synchronization is the real thing because evidence is often found to support this idea. It is difficult to determine whether factors such as stress, sexual partners, and birth control pills have a particular contribution to menstrual synchronization. If this synchronization is real, maybe the factors above contribute to changes in the menstrual cycle, and not just depend on regular contact with other women.
The truth about pheromones themselves is still controversial. Pheromones are chemical signals released by the body of one creature that affects the behavior of other individuals in one species. There is no sufficient scientific evidence to show the effect of pheromones on human behavior. None of the studies have succeeded in identifying the existence of pheromones in the human body.
The absence of strong scientific evidence to support McClintock's ideas does not mean that research around this topic was stopped. Many researchers are still finding out the truth of the theory, and there are still many women who report their experiences regarding menstrual synchronization. But, until there is stronger medical evidence, menstrual synchronization is now only considered a myth.
