ode to h.r.t.

Gimme an H! Gimme an R! Gimme a T!

What’s that spell? Relief and protection from disease!

Some tireless scientists/doctors/specialists have been working for the last few decades to dispel the myths created by the Women’s Health Initiative, the giant US government-sponsored study that derailed research into women’s health back in 2002.

I, like many of you, suffered from that WHI hangover and assumed its terrifying headlines were still true (e.g., estrogen causes breast cancer). But in researching peri-menopause and menopause, I discovered that the WHI was a horribly managed study whose findings have been disavowed by many of the scientists involved.

On average, women in the US didn’t start living past the age of 50 until 1901 (according to this handy chart from UC Berkeley).

Most women probably didn’t even reach menopause until the turn of the last century. So why do we behave as if it’s something that has to be “lived with” instead of something that can be treated?

Some of the most useful tidbits I’ve come across, that helped change my way of thinking:

Dr. Louise Newsom makes the case that as a profession, doctors have no problem prescribing hormones for other ailments, such as taking synthetic thyroid hormone for those with an underactive thyroid gland. Why should estrogen be any different?

Doctors in the western world happily prescribes all sorts of heavy-duty drugs to combat conditions like high cholesterol, depression and anxiety, UTIs, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, and weight gain. Many of them have horrible side-effects, and limited efficacy.

But yet those same doctors are uniformed and hesitant to prescribe HRT, which has been shown in the vast majority of studies to be incredibly safe, AND protects from all sorts of diseases that magically skyrocket when women hit menopause.

Worth considering, no?

-LR