BEEN to doctors, had tests run: I’m totally normal, I just am a heavy bleeder. They happen. These people exist!

If I were you, I’d talk to your doctor and get educated on the fact that heavy bleeders exist and it won’t actually kill you. Because uh. You’re not bleeding out a vein here. The fact that you think you can die from this is really amazing to me. Please educate yourself before arguing further, instead of advising everyone who has it that they’re medical abnormalities. Some will be, and you’re right that it can be a warning sign to check out that something MIGHT be wrong (as it can overlap symptom with other problems), but it is not a guarantee of a problem — some people (many, to judge by personal experience, but that’s not statistically sound!) are just like this.

Please educate yourself before talking further.

Catgirl: here’s the thing. When it’s recommended that you call the doctor if you’re using more than 1 pad an hour, what’s inherent in that recommendation is that you overflowing a pad an hour is UNUSUAL for your body. Because if it’s unusual, it’s an indication of something, quite possibly a early miscarriage (which you want checked out because if it’s incomplete you may want to/need to have a D&C).

When it’s exactly how it occurs every four weeks, doctors shrug and tell you you’re a heavy bleeder. A doctor may recommend HBC, but it doesn’t always work as advertised for heavy bleeders. As long as you’re not presenting with other symptoms of blood loss (dizziness, headache, etc) they will assign it to the realm of “normal.”

This is NOT a situation that can be going on for a few days - you’d loose to much blood. Of course you can decide to change a pad without soaking through it even every 5 minutes, but that’s not the issue.

Ha. And it’s a situation where if you go to an OB/GYN about it, they’ll either use it as a excuse to do some testing and get some money from your insurance before declaring you “normal” and “over-reacting,” or they’ll simply tell you to stop “over-reacting” and diagnosing your ills via the Internet.

I’d watch with the “nearly universal trait” up there. There are a good deal of us who understand a bit more of what we are doing and what we are NOT doing when we attempt to model some weak reflection of some semblance of “the real world.” Sometimes the results are pretty awesome. Often they’re crap. Unfortunately, tenure committees don’t always make that distinction.

To the rest of the thread; I humbly apologize for this epsiode of NerdFight and will shut up immediately.

to derail well further:

I did alg geometry in an earlier life and still use a few of the tools now. If you haven’t already, I strongly urge you to read “Undergraduate Algebraic Geometry” by Miles Reid. Despite its title, it’s actually a pretty damn good explanation of what’s actually going on behind all the weird abstract nonsense. He wrote it after getting frustrated with, in his words, “students who did two semesters of Hartshorne and couldn’t draw a fucking curve.” I’m also a huge fan of anything Sturmfels writes on the subject (for some downright weird applications of algebraic geometry to phylogenetics, check out the book written by Bernd Sturmfels and Lior Pachter).

No, it’s not. It’s obvious in the way you refuse to abandon your a priori conclusions in the face of empiric contradiction.

It’s a nearly universal trait of mathematicians that once they prove something on paper, they almost always ignore the myriad ways in which the real world proves them wrong.

Here, you’re doing it now. You’ve previously concluded that there’s no way normal menstruation could be so heavy, therefore any woman who menstruates so heavily must be abnormal, despite a weight of medical opinions to the contrary. You’ve already assumed it; therefore, nothing so profane as real-world observation could possibly change your mind.

It’s the gulf between mathematicians and scientists. It’s the reason so many of you are creationists.

My area of research is “computational topology.” In theory, this involves trying to make educated guesses at various homological features of unknown
(generally high-dimensional) spaces from a rough point sample. The
immediate applications are to image cleanup and compression. The more pie-in-the-sky applications (but the ones that bring in big grant money) are to a variety of biological problems, in which the data is so fuzzy that more geometric data analysis techniques aren’t really all that helpful; the hope is that more holistic descriptors from topology (like number of clumps, local dimension, periodicity or not) might help make sense from chaos.

Inevitably, the work involves talking to a lot of CS and Bio people and attempting to explain some math to them. It’s perhaps this that makes me generally a bit shirty with the attitudes of most pure math folks towards communication: they may well have fancy definitions memorized, but if they can’t communicate the basics of an idea to a smart but not technically informed person, they aren’t really worth shit in the greater scheme.

5) good lord, I hope you’re kidding in your response. The difference between reasoning abstractly about Stieffel-Whitney classes and shit that affects real people should be apparent; one comes with a great deal more accountability attached.
Have you gotten to the point yet where you walk into a crowd of people and start trying to define who should be allowed to vote, working only from first principles? That kind of shit blends in well at your better faculty lunches.

As for the rest, whatever. I really don’t think the studies you read, or indeed the terms you use, are well-defined enough to use in order to dismiss “anecdotal experiences.” Perhaps the symptoms that some people feel monthly and describe quite articulately are caused by the phases of the moon. And perhaps they may have done as much research into the topic as you have.

Nonetheless, peace. Good luck with your program.