[krodriguesdc]

this needs to be posted - the evidence is clear...

my next question is - why synthetic HRT at all when there are alternative methods that would not give these life threatening side effects?

this study really destroys the notion that modern science and pharmaceuticals can solve everything...

[PoisedWoman]

I'd like to see the results of estrogen-only tests. I suspect results will be quite different. Doctors have been prescribing it for years. Some women stay on estrogen for a long time, with nothing but good results. A neighbor of mine, for example, took it for 18 years, and was healthier and younger looking at 75 than most women at 60. I hope that progestin turns out to be the culprit in these tests, as estrogen by itself gives good results.

[SouthCarolinaKit]

What testing was done on this before FDS approved it years
ago? Why wasn't this testing done before that? Is it possible that payoffs between the pharmaceutical co (Merck) and government crooks were involved? What's the alternative treatment? This is BIG!

[freedomcrusader]

Hormones Raises...

Nice grammar!

[gridlock]

For every 10,000 women who take the hormones for a year, seven extra have coronary heart disease "events" such as a heart attack, eight more develop breast cancer and eight more suffer a stroke, as compared to women not taking hormones.

Let's see. Thats 7+8+8=23 per 10,000 per year. So if you are on this stuff long-term, say twenty years, that's an additional 460 per 10,000. Compare that to say, total cancer deaths from asbestos for a twenty year exposure at twenty times the OSHA Permissable Exposure Limit, which will yield an additional 439 cases per 10,000 (Federal Register, June 26, 1986, OSHA). Now if any employer is so irresponsible and criminal to expose his workers to twenty times the OSHA PEL for twenty years, he is going to jail for a very, very long time. What will happen to the doctors who continue to push this stuff on women?

To say that this level of risk is small flies in the face of every other risk reduction effort society undertakes. Of 23 out of 10,000 drivers were killed per year, we would have on the order of 400,000 highway deaths a year. Would that be an acceptable risk? If 23 out of 10,000 smokers were killed per year, we would have on the order of 150,000 smoking related deaths a year. How big would the lawsuit be on that one? We have spent billions of dollars and bankrupted something like 60 Fortune 500 companies over Asbestos, and the risk from these drugs is greater than Asbestos ever was.

[Grig]

"but it raised the number of strokes by 41 percent, heart attacks by 29 percent and breast cancer cases by 26 percent. "

The % of the increase in risk is large, but 500 times zero is still zero. I bet the chance of having a heart attack etc. is still small if no other risk factors are present. I hate sloppy scare-mongering statistics like that.

Also, aren't birth contol pills similar to these? Anyone looking at the effect of those?