I took my sugar pills early. I took the first one yesterday. I have around 7 active pills left in this pack. When I finish the sugar pills, do I take the active pills left in this pack and then start a new one or do I leave the active pills left in this pack and immediately start a new pack? Thank you Brand: Daylette

You could do either, so go with what you prefer

@Yi_eune Are you sure? When I went to Chat GPT it said that if I take the leftover active pills it could cause spotting, hormonal disruption and possibly reduce contraceptive effectiveness

Wouldn’t trust AI for medical advice, not reliable as it’s regurgitating information from the internet, could be from any random source and half the time actual doctors give outdated or just plain wrong info to patients on birth control. Also there’s no way to predict irregular bleeding on the pill, at any time you could start bleeding for no apparent reason at all 🥲🤷🏻‍♀️ As @Yi_eune said either way is fine, protection wise. Keep them as spare pills or for when you want to take an extra few pills before taking a break or something if you start a new pack.

@bookgirlie relying on AI is the worst thing you can do when it comes to medical advice. AI doesn’t equal truth. Do your own research. Don’t become reliable on AI for every day things or your education, and know how to use it securely. AI is known to get fed with unreliable information with malicious intent. Be more careful with its usage in the future, especially everything you feed into it. It’s meant to be used as a supportive resource, not to function as a pharmacist or doctor (or any job for that matter).

@bookgirlie i know the other two have already said AI is not the place to go for medical advice, but i want to address the claims you said from it directly. spotting is normal and an expected side effect of birth control. “hormonal disruption,” if it just means interrupting normal hormone cycles in the body, is the entire point of birth control. and taking active pills consecutively will only make your protection more reliable, since before and after break weeks are the times your protection is most vulnerable if you were to miss a pill. why were you taking sugar pills before your active pills? every pack i’ve seen always specifies to take all the active pills first.

@jorts22 Thank you for your reply. I missed a pill in my last pack and have been spotting for three weeks because of it, and in the last few days the spotting became very heavy and bright red instead of brown like it was before accompanied with mild period cramps. I figured I cannot live like this for the next two weeks so I just started my period early to hopefully speed it up.

@bookgirlie ahh okay, i see. bleeding can be so frustrating! if the early break hasn’t worked then it seems like you’ll just need to wait it out until it stops, which it should eventually. if it doesn’t then it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor if it becomes worrying. and make sure you don’t take a break between active pills that’s longer than seven days :) i would suggest searching on the internet for more reliable information than AI can give you. planned parenthood and mayo clinic are two websites with info on birth control that are considered trustworthy. and if you’re ever unsure about a website being credible, search something like “is (website) credible?” that’s what i do. it can be hard to tell sometimes, and it’s a little more effort than chat gpt, but it’s totally worth the extra effort when handling important info!