making good decisions – in business, and in life – requires two things. First, they need all the information about the decision – they need the right data. Second, they need to think about the right way to weigh the pluses and minuses of the decision
The numbers were not forthcoming. I asked my doctor about drinking. She said that one or two drinks a week was “probably fine”. “Probably fine” is not a number.
When it came time to think about whether or not to get an epidural, I was able to use data from randomised trials – the gold standard evidence in science – to figure out the risks and benefits.
Actually getting the numbers led me to a more relaxed place – a glass of wine every now and then, plenty of coffee, exercise if you want, or not.
More than even the actual recommendations, I found having numbers at all provided some reassurance. At some point I wondered about the risks of the baby arriving prematurely. I went to the data and got some idea of the chance of birth in each pregnancy week (and the foetal survival rate). There wasn’t any decision to be made – nothing to really do about this – but just knowing the numbers let me relax a bit.
The key to good decision-making is taking the information, the data, and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses.
I looked at the evidence on the epidural, combined it with my own plus and minus preferences and decided not to have one. My friend Jane looked at the same evidence and decided to have one. In the end, I felt fine eating deli meats; my uni housemate Tricia looked at the evidence and decided she would avoid them. All of these are good decisions.
Researchers found that the chance of having any children was very similar for women who got married at any age between 20 and 35. Then it began to decline: women who got married between 35 and 39 were about 90 percent as likely to have a child as those who got married younger than 35; women who got married between 40 and 44 were only about 62 percent as likely; and women who got married between 45 and 49 were only 14 percent as likely.
After twelve cycles, the pregnancy rate was around 75 percent for women under 30, 62 percent for women 31 to 35 and 54 percent for women over 35. In this oldest group things were similar for women 36 to 40 and over 40. More than half of the over-40 women in the sample got pregnant within a year.
consistent with other studies, from the United States and elsewhere.3, 4 And the effects aren’t limited to outcomes during pregnancy. Obese women have a harder
was more “welcoming” to the sperm. The very good news, however, is that these effects are relatively short-lived. In the German study, virtually everyone had a normal cycle by nine months after going off the pill. For some women it is much faster: 60 percent of women in
The pill makes things more complicated. As my doctor noted, sometimes the cycle returns to normal straight away, but sometimes it takes a bit longer. The advantage of referring to the actual studies is that we can be more precise.
As with the pill, it takes a bit of time to recover fertility after using an IUD.
women who had just gone off an IUD took (on average) a month longer to get pregnant than those who had just stopped oral contraceptives, but 80 to 90 percent (depending on the study) were pregnant within one year.
There are three common ways to detect ovulation: temperature charting, checking cervical mucus and urine sticks.
For the first half of the month, your temperature will be low – typically below 37 degrees Celsius. The day after ovulation, it will jump up, usually at least a quarter of a degree and sometimes more. This is the sign that you ovulated. Your temperature will stay high through the rest of the month and then drop on the day your period starts, or (often) the day before.
how the baby develops at the very, very beginning. For the period between fertilisation (around ovulation or a day or two later) and your missed period, your baby is a mass of identical cells. Any of these cells could develop into any part of the baby. If you do something that kills one of these cells (such as heavy drinking or some kind of really bad prescription drug use), another cell can replace it and do exactly the same thing. The resulting baby is unaffected.