Let’s be honest, we could all benefit from learning more about sexual and menstrual health. For many of us, sexual education in schools didn’t really teach us much and our parents didn’t go into much detail when they spoke to us about ‘the birds and the bees’.
So it’s up to us to make sure we stay clued up about menstrual health, especially for women. Men should learn about our bodies too, but according to Flo Health, there’s a staggering degree of misinformation and prominent gaps in the knowledge when it comes to how much women know about their own bodies.
Flo Health released a survey titled “MIND THE GAPS: Menstrual & reproductive misinformation in the UK in 2023”, which highlights how little women know about sexual health and though the findings are disappointing, they aren’t shocking.
While the United Kingdom has free, universal health care and compulsory sexual and reproductive health education, £1 billion in cuts to sexual health services since 20151 and a wider NHS crisis mean women have fewer credible places to gain knowledge.
Consequently, women are going online in search of knowledge, turning to search engines, online forums, and social media. On TikTok, #womenshealth content alone has so far amassed 7.3 billion views.
The internet can be a great source of knowledge but it also has the potential to leave women vulnerable to misinformation. Especially since, according to the study, 72% of women never double-check the health information they get on social media, while nearly one in five women aged 18–24 go to social media for information about menstrual health.
We should all be aware that the pullout method isn’t a reliable form of birth control however the survey found that one in 10 wrongly believe that the “pullout method” is 90% or more effective in preventing pregnancy, while nearly half (46%) don’t know when it’s the best time to have sex to get pregnant.
Whilst, over a quarter don’t understand that you can catch sexually transmitted infections (STIs) during oral, vaginal, or anal sex, and a staggering 59% of British women not knowing that you can catch an STI without having sex.
This lack of knowledge even extends to menstrual health as more than half (54%) were not aware of premenstrual syndrome before their first period, while one in 10 figured out by themselves how to use menstrual products like pads and tampons.
Shockingly, nearly one in 10 mistakenly believe that the more sex you have, the looser your vagina will be; 7% wrongly believe that tampons can stretch your vagina; and 11% believe that you should wash inside your vagina.
Dr. Claudia Pastides, MBBS, Director of Medical Accuracy at Flo Health, believes that low health literacy leads to poor health outcomes. “Every woman’s body is different, and every woman’s experience with her menstrual and reproductive health is unique, but this is not taken into consideration enough,” she says.
The findings show that there is an urgent need for online platforms to focus on fact-checking and ensuring that users can easily identify credible information sources, especially given that fake news reaches more people than the truth and spreads deeper, faster, and more broadly online. The future of women’s health is at a turning point, and according to Flo’s predictions, these are the developments we can expect in the next 12 months:
- The role of artificial intelligence (AI): While the technology has advanced rapidly, especially with the recent launch of ChatGPT, it still needs to be determined how advanced forms of AI can complement the expertise of medical professionals or give personalised health insights.
- The misinformation pushback: The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how vulnerable we are to health misinformation and how dangerous that can be. Flo predicts that efforts will be made to increase digital literacy. We will become increasingly aware of how to identify misinformation and disinformation and become more knowledgeable about how to access trustworthy sources online.
- The rise of a personalised health experience: With search engines and social media influencers only offering “one-size-fits-all” generalised advice, women will seek to supplement their menstrual and sexual health knowledge with personalised health insights, whether that’s on-demand virtual consultations with medical professionals, wearable devices, or apps that can learn from your inputs and provide relevant information, including period and ovulation trackers like Flo.