Posted on 06/29/2004 8:24:46 PM PDT by neverdem
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:16:59 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
LONDON -- The American study that triggered a worldwide scare over the risks of hormone-replacement therapy was fundamentally flawed and not applicable to most women going through menopause, according to a group of leading researchers.
The Women's Health Initiative appeared to show that hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) increased the risk of heart disease and breast cancer.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
PING
You couldn't get me on HRT if you paid me. I totally believe it's the reason for my cousin's fatal ovarian cancer and my sister-in-law's breast cancer.
bttt
Good article - it confirms my evaluation.
Why is the world accepting of Viagra, but skeptical of female hormone replacement? And why just focus on hot flashes, bones and uterine function, but not on female sexual health? It seems strange to me that women have been routinely castrated ("complete hysterectomy") and that men are supposedly put out by our relatively lower libido, and yet the first sexual performance enhancement drug is for men!
On my more cynical days, I'm sometimes convinced that either these men are more concerned with their own "performance" than in true intercourse, or that they're sleeping with someone other than a post-menopausal wife.
On the other hand, we're seeing men with diabetes or high blood pressure much earlier because they come in for Viagra. Not everyone is waiting until the first heart attack, any more.
After reading this, as is the case with many science articles these days, my conclusion is that you can't believe the researchers one way or the other on such a politicized subject. They usually find whatever they want to find.
Which is unfortunate.
They're only in it for the research grant money, to hell with everything else.
The dirty little secret that no one is saying is that if you stop hormone, you triple your risk of osteoporosis fractures.
And more importantly, it has negative effects on one's love life...if you heard that the real numbers of the "double risk" were low (increasing from 12 out of 10 000 women per year to 20 out of ten thousand women per year) but that it lowers hip fractures from 30 to 10 out of ten thousand per year, it might make you think.
As for the increased "risk" of breast cancer: Yes, but the cure rate is higher if you took hormones...
If my women are married, and their husbands still able to keep them sexually happy, I tell them to take an aspirin, get a yearly mammogram, and keep thier love life alive.
If they have risk factors for any of these diseases, I tell them to stop the hormones...
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