SURVIVING HEALTHCARE Chapter 8 HORMONE SECRETS--HOW HORMONE USAGE WAS SUPPRESSED
Cui Bono, the Latin phrase meaning “who benefits,” says the motive for an act or crime lies with the person who has something to gain.
Only twenty percent of our senior women and even fewer men take hormones. Outside Europe and the US, usage is rare. How is this possible? The “bio-identical” or “human” forms of these drugs are not promoted because they can rarely be patented to make the big money. But they work better and are safer than other medications such as statins, antidepressants, many cancer treatments, and the proprietary imitation hormones made by big Pharma. These industry cash cows are supported and protected, while in contrast, natural hormones are defamed and restricted. Chasing profits has ruined science.
To explain, here is how the Women's Health Initiative study (WHI) was hijacked by its own authors and sabotaged patient care. This huge National Institutes of Health trial (published in 2002) examined 160,000 women aged 59 to 79. It found an increase in breast cancer for patients taking both Premarin, the horse urine estrogen, and Provera, the patented synthetic progesterone. But those who took only Premarin had a decrease in breast cancer. This proved Provera was responsible, and other trials confirmed it. The WHI should have ended this medication’s use for long-term applications, but it did not.
The WHI took 11 years, and by that time it was complete, the two drugs it examined were obsolete. But the study statisticians claimed they uncovered critical dangers, and the authors sensationalized and embellished their threadbare findings. Medical academics buffed their reputations by declaring that they, too, could see the emperor’s clothes. The media joined the parade—baloney sells advertising—and the public soon believed that all female hormones were killers. This “man bites dog” story still terrifies everyone. Once a bell is rung, it cannot be unrung.
In the public and medical eye, hormones were branded with cancer, dementia, and other problems. One reviewer wrote that the study authors were “overselling hysteria.” John Goldman, MD, wrote in Medscape, “[The study] has undermined the credibility of the research and the medical community as a whole.” Abraham Morgentaler, MD, and others (Harvard) explained how the panic was generated:
The (WHI)… reported increased risk of adverse events of only 19 events per 10,000 person-years of exposure for the estrogen–progesterone arm [Premarin-Provera] compared with placebo. This means that if one woman in every generation of a family used estrogen–progesterone for 10 years, it would take 50 generations, or about 1,000 years, to see one extra adverse event in that family. The result may have been statistically significant, but they were clinically meaningless.
Avrum Bluming and Carol Tavris described the study’s statistical trickery and atrocious sensationalism in Estrogen Matters (2018), a superb book about the science and politics. One of the WHI’s principal investigators, Rossouw, had an agenda to “change the thinking about hormones.” Six years before the WHI was published, he wrote it was time to put “the brakes on that bandwagon,” referring to the growing support for estrogen replacement. And so the WHI authors ignored their colleagues’ advice and rushed to publication before completing the study. This spawned thousands of meritless lawsuits.
Bluming and Tavris cited follow-up trials showing that estrogen decreases the chance of breast cancer, heart disease, colon