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To: Mrs. Don-o
1, The article doesn't answer the question: If the estrogen in waste-water comes from the urine of women who take birth control pills, why wouldn't all young healthy women release estrogen in their urine?

2. What about all the older women taking estrogen supplements? (This number is lower now.) Does the author want to ban this too?

3. There are now a number of products for both men and women that involve hormones applied to the skin. In this case the hormone can be washed directly into the sewer system without even being processed through the body.

22 posted on 04/22/2008 1:43:10 PM PDT by wideminded
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To: wideminded
Those are all good questions, and --- as you said --- not answered in the article. As I mentioned previously, there are 55,000 articles out there on google alone, and some of them are of course more research-intensive and scholarly. I think Science and Scientific American have done more detailed reporting.

One possible distinction --- here I'm just musing or speculating --- would be between women's naturally-occurring estrogens on the one hand, and estrogenic chemicals used in oral contraceptives and hormone-replacement therapies on the other. Women's naturally-occuring estrogens are at a level normal for the body and quite complexly in-sync with other hormones, metabolic products and catalysts. The healthy body knows how to use or metabolize them effectively.

On the other hand, HRT estrogen can put women's bodies seriously out-if-whack. Females my age have been really whiplashed by the controversies over the past 20 years: women who faithfully and conscientiously "treated" menopause on their doctor's advice, found themselves at elevated risk for pulmonary embolism, coronary heart disease and stroke, even greater risk of osteoporosis (which it was supposed to prevent or cure). And then they kept re-jiggering the dosages and tweaking the formulations to add varying amounts of progesterone and even testosterone, etc.

One's evaluation of it depends on what one considers to be "optimal, normal" menopause, which has never been adequately defined ---or even whether menopause itself is considered a healthy phase or a regrettabke and reversible symptom of aging and decline.

It's even more striking with OC's, where the purpose of the hormone is to thwart what are clearly healthy and natural physiological processes. My hypothesis is that deliberately disrupting normal cycles interferes with the body's ability to regulate levels; hence the body just tries to excrete the excess.

That's just my guess.

26 posted on 04/22/2008 2:45:12 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (Mammalia Primatia Hominidae Homo sapiens. Still working on the "sapiens" part.)
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