|
Risks of
Hormone Replacement Therapy Exposed
July 22, 2002, Time
magazine
"The truth about hormones.
Hormone-replacement therapy is riskier than advertised. What's a woman to
do? 'Women are mystified and confused. People like me don't know where to
go.' 'Everyone was in the dark about the risks of HRT. I wouldn't use it
now with what we know today.' 'Ten years ago, it was almost malpractice not
to endorse estrogen. Now the bubble has burst.' " Dr. Isaac Schiff, Mass.
General Hospital.
July 22, 2002, Newsweek
magazine
"A new study raises fears
about the risks for millions of women.
Women were told for decades
that hormone-replacement therapy would protect their hearts and preserve
their youth. Now the evidence is in, and an era is over. The end of the
age of Estrogen?"
July 16,2002, The
Denver Post
"Midlife women opt for natural
remedies to alleviate menopausal symptoms…..The Women's Health Initiative, a
large-scale study on HRT intended to last until 2005 and backed by the
National Institutes of Health, was abruptly ended last week because
participants showed increased incidence of breast cancer, blood clots,
stroke and heart attack. For the directors of the study- and for a good
portion of the estimated 6 million women who take HRT- the risks of
treatment now outweigh the benefits.
"What Your Doctor May Not
Tell You About PreMenopause", John R. Lee, M.D., Jesse Hanley, M.D.
and Virginia Hopkin
"Taking one of the strange,
not-found-in-nature synthetic hormones created by the drug companies is one
of the best and quickest ways to confuse your body and throw it into a state
of imbalance. These drugs are created not because they work better than
natural hormones but rather because they can be patented, and patent drugs
have a much higher price tag than natural substances."
"The Truth
About Estrogen Research"
"The closer you get to
menopausal age, the harder conventional medical doctors will try to push
estrogen on you. We hope you'll resist these biased efforts and make an
educated decision about whether or not to use estrogen" ".Estrogen is a
wonderful and useful hormone to be used with great care only when necessary,
in very small amounts, in its natural form (meaning that it is identical to
the estrogens made by your body). The primary symptoms of true estrogen
deficiency are hot flashes, night sweats, and vaginal dryness. An estrogen
deficiency can also cause fatigue, memory problems, and foggy thinking, but
estrogen dominance can cause the same symptoms. Estrogen deficiency symptoms
can often be relieved with lifestyle changes such as an increase in exercise
and dietary changes; by using some natural progesterone, which is a
precursor to estrogen; or with some herbs that have estrogenic properties….
There is absolutely no doubt that estrogen can be very helpful to women who
are truly estrogen deficient but taken in even the slightest excess,
estrogen becomes a potent promoter of cancer, and you need to always have
that in the back of your mind when you're using it. This also makes it
extremely important that you always use estrogen with progesterone to create
hormonal balance…
The tendency of conventional
medical doctors to blithely prescribe estrogen for any type of
Premenopausal or menopausal symptom is irresponsible, dangerous and has
tragic consequences."
The John R. Lee, M.D. MEDICAL
LETTER
The following information
comes from John R. Lee, M.D. He writes a medical letter once per month and
this is from his July 2002 letter. He states "To assist you
in educating your doctor (and friends who have questions), this issue of the
newsletter may be freely copied." We will take exerts from this very
informative letter as follows:
Dear Reader,
Last month I received
an e-mail from a woman who had read one of my books and as a result had gone
to her doctor and asked to be taken off of Prem-Pro and put on natural
hormones. His response was, "Now why in the world would you want to do
that?" When she tried to explain he interrupted her, ended the visit, and
left her with another prescription for Prem-Pro. Since then, as most of you
know, there have been two major studies published showing that conventional
hormone replacement therapy (HRT or ERT) does more harm that good. This
woman, and millions like her, deserve an apology at the very
least….Conventional medicine needs to change its attitudes toward women, and
it needs to disentangle itself from the big drug companies.
What We
Already Knew:
It's been evident for
over a decade that HRT is only marginally effective for treating
osteoporosis, and that it causes heart disease, breast cancer and strokes.
I wrote about this in my first self-published book about progesterone in
1993. Why has it taken conventional medicine so long to catch up to the
obvious? Drug company money and politics, what else? The two studies
mentioned above were so large that the evidence could no longer be ignored,
but in the meantime tens of thousand of women have been killed or
permanently harmed by taking HRT. Conventional medicine, which trumpets
that it is "evidence-based," allowed millions of women to be given HRT
without evidence that it was safe or effective.
The practice of medicine
in America has been hijacked by the big drug companies, who control every
thing from medical education, to continuing education credits, to which
studies are published in our largest medical journals. It's the job of
medicine to heal, and to the extent that American medicine allows itself to
be controlled by drug companies it is not about healing, and is needlessly
harming millions of people every year.
And then there are
antiquated medical attitudes towards women….There is strong implication that
women are just making up their problems. Conventional medicine treats women
with an attitude that says, "We know better than you do what you're
experiencing and if it doesn't fit our picture it's all in your head, and
we'll anesthetize you emotionally with antidepressants, or tranquilize you
with anti-anxiety drugs."
The same type of
mistreatment has occurred with millions of women over the past two decades
who have been put on conventional HRT, complained to their doctors about
side effects such as weight gain, anxiety and insomnia, been told it's all
in their heads, and given anti-depressants such as Prozac or anti-anxiety
drugs such as Xanax. Little did they know they were also being given heart
disease, cancer and strokes.
MEDIA LIES
It's likely that American
doctors as a group are feeling somewhat chagrined that they've been handing
our HRT like candy, only to find out that it can be deadly and wasn't even
effective anyway (except for controlling hot flashes and night sweats).
However, their response in the media has not been encouraging. In the past
two weeks I have read or heard doctors in the media claim that,
"it's only 8 out of
l,000 women who are affected, which is a very small number," (The 40,000
women who have died or been seriously harmed in the past decade by HRT, and
their families, may not agree.);
and,"
it's still fine to
use HRT on a short term basis, (Do these doctors believe that cancer just
suddenly appears one day our of the blue? It takes breast cancer years to
develop into a noticeable mass);
and," there are no
alternatives to HRT that work" (Clearly they haven't tried any
alternatives.)
Women need to take their
health into their own hands; they need to trust their intuition about what's
right for them; and they need to assertively insist that their doctors
listen to them. The good new is that a door has been opened for women to
bring information about natural hormones to the doctors. For many doctors,
it's going to take a lot of courage to admit they've been misinformed, but
they can make up for the harm they've done by opening their minds to other
possibilities and looking outside of the drug company standard of care for
answers. Some doctors are going to be defensive and never shift gears, but
many will now be open to learning about natural hormones."
GETTING OFF HRT
AND ONTO NATURAL HORMONES
"You can have balanced
hormones, and relief from menopausal symptoms, without using conventional
HRT."
" A portion of the
Women's Health Initiative study was canceled because of a high risk of
breast cancer, heart disease and stroke associated with using conventional
combined HRT. The study analyzed the health of 16,000 women aged 50 to 79
years. After five years, those using conventional combined HRT (Premarin
and Provera, aka PremPro) had a 29 percent higher risk of breast cancer, a
26 percent higher risk of heart disease, and a 41 percent higher risk of
stroke.
To personalize these
numbers a bit more, of the 6 million women who are using PremPro (this is a
very conservative estimate and doesn't count the millions of women on other
combinations of HRT), this translates to approximately 4,200 women who got
breast cancer, 4,800 women who got heart disease, and 10,800 women who had a
stroke in a five year period because they were taking this form of HRT. If
we extend these numbers out over a decade, nearly 40,000 women were harmed
(many of them killed) by taking these drugs. That's an epidemic, and
doesn't include all the women who suffered from weight gain, fatigue,
depression, irritability, headaches, insomnia, bloating, low thyroid, low
libido and gallbladder disease and blood clots."
THANK YOU DR. JOHN R. LEE
Dr. Lee has become a hero and
a spokesman for women of all ages who have chosen natural progesterone for
hormonal balance.
John R. Lee, M.D. is
internationally acknowledged as a pioneer and expert in the study and use of
hormone progesterone and on the subject of hormone replacement therapy for
women. He used transdermal progesterone extensively in his clinical
practice for nearly a decade, doing research that showed that it can reverse
osteoporosis. Dr. Lee has had a distinguished medical career, including
graduating from Harvard and the University of Minnesota Medical School. He
retired from a thirty-year family practice in northern California and has
been writing and traveling around the world speaking to doctors, scientists,
and lay people about progesterone Dr. Lee taught a very popular course on
optimal health at the College of Marin for fifteen years. He is the author
of the best-selling book," What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About
Menopause", (Warner Books, 1996), "What Your Doctor May Not
Tell You About Premenopause," plus many other books, audio and
video tapes. Reference, "What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About
Premenopause," page 393.
ORDER MORE
INFORMATION HAPPY GIRLS
|
