Power Surge Live!
Kicks Off The Fall Season of
Guest Chats
With
Barbara Seaman
Thursday, Sept. 4th
9 PM, EST
In A Discussion About Her New Book,
The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed On Women:
Exploding The Estrogen Myth
The Greatest Experiment is a wake-up call to women about
unquestioningly accepting doctors' orders
A women's health advocate for more than forty years, Barbara Seaman is a
national judge of the Project Censored Awards, an advanced science writing
Fellow at Columbia University's School of Journalism, and the co-founder of
the National Women's Health Network, a women's advocacy group in
Washington, D.C., that refuses money from the drug industry as part of its charter.
A frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Washington
Post, she has been either a columnist or contributing editor at the
following publications: Ms., Omni, Ladies' Home Journal, Bride's, Family
Circle, and Hadassah magazine. She is the author of The Doctors' Case
Against the Pill; For Women Only:Your Guide to Health Empowerment; Free
and Female, Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones;
The Menopause Industry: How The Medical Establishment Exploits Women
and Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann.
Barbara Seaman lives in New York City.
Five Lucky People At The Chat Will Receive
Free Copies Of "The Greatest Experiment..."
Join
BARBARA SEAMAN
who will field all your questions
Thursday,
September 4th
at 9 PM (ET), 6 PM, (PT)
in Power Surge Live!
Read the transcript here
"If a menopausal woman has pain or makes trouble, pound her hard on the jaw."
--Egyptian medical text, 2000 B.C.
For almost a century women have been taking some form of estrogen to combat
the effects of menopause and aging, and more recently to prevent a host of
diseases, from osteoporosis to Alzheimer's to heart disease. For most of
that hundred years, doctors have been prescribing estrogen in either its
organic or synthetic forms, and women have gone to their pharmacists and
dutifully filled their prescriptions. In some cases, menopause sufferers
who were experiencing the most extreme symptoms were in search of relief
from hot flashes, night sweats, dryness, and more, but increasingly in
recent years, women began receiving estrogen sometimes with progesterone as"hormone therapy," not because they were in immediate danger of anything
but rather as a preventative. But was this regimen warranted? Did doctors
know enough about estrogen and its effects to be widely prescribing it for
such a range of ailments? Or were women being used as guinea pigs in a
great experiment, an experiment the author terms "The Greatest Experiment
Ever Performed on Women"?
Since the 1960s, women's health icon Barbara Seaman has been one of the
lone voices in journalism to question whether doctors have sufficient
justification to be writing so many estrogen prescriptions, or whether it
is the pharmaceutical industry that is driving the research, marketing, and
use of hormone replacement therapy. In 2002, several important women's
health studies revealed that estrogen may cause more problems in patients
than it is correcting or preventing, and that in fact it has a dismal
record in terms of prevention.
This groundbreaking book illuminates today's "menopause industry," tracing
the history of estrogen use from its early purveyors, including a well-
meaning British doctor who lost control of the marketing of DES and
therefore inadvertently led to the DES baby crisis, to Nazi experimentation
with women and estrogen, to the present, and looks at how an experiment of
this proportion could have been conducted without oversight, intervention,
or real knowledge as to what its effects would be.
"Barbara Seaman is the first prophet of the women's health movement and
her prophesies are still coming true." --Gloria Steinem
The following is an excerpt from the book
The Greatest Experiment Ever Preformed on Women:
Exploding the Estrogen Myth
by Barbara Seaman
Introduction I: Smart Doctors, Foolish Forecasts
I have a doctor friend who so believed in the value of synthetic estrogens
that when the National Institutes of Health announced a large clinical
trial to compare these pills with sugar pills, she dismissed it as a waste
of money. "Obviously, the women on the hormones will be living longer," she
said. "It's unethical to leave volunteers on the placebos for the full
eight and a half years of the trial. At some point they'll have to stop the
study and offer hormones to everyone."
Her colleagues concurred, but then the opposite came true. On the morning
of July 9, 2002, my friend, along with other physicians and the 30 million
U.S. patients taking estrogen products, woke up to discover that the world,
after all, was flat. A safety-monitoring board had suddenly halted a part
of the study involving 16,608 women because those taking hormones had more
breast cancer, heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, and blood clots
than those taking sugar pills. Yes, the volunteers on Prempro also had
fewer bone fractures and less colon cancer. But not enough to balance out
the risks.
My friend initially heard the startling results on Good Morning America,
where Dr. Tim Johnson described this "somewhat surprising outcome." He
predicted that most women then taking hormone pills would stop "after
talking to their physicians today," failing to anticipate that many doctors
would take their telephones off the hook. My friend switched the channel to
CNN, where Paula Zahn repeatedly exclaimed: "I tell you -- women gotta go
insane today." Channel surfing, my friend caught up with the "usual
suspects," certain doctors familiar to TV viewers whose spin skills had
been developed by public-relations coaches at agencies that handle
pharmaceutical accounts. It was then that my friend got it. These
physicians were appearing on stations where paid ads suggested that if only
we took estrogen we could look like Lauren Hutton and sing like Patti
LaBelle.
That night my friend called me to apologize for having objected to the
title I planned for this book. She had called it "over the top and
ridiculous," but now she said she could almost agree.
WHAT IS THE GREATEST EXPERIMENT?
While the Prempro arm of the Women's Health Initiative, which lasted 5.2
years and included 16,608 women, was a major test, it is only a small part
of what I consider to be The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women.
The experiment began in England in 1938, and it has continued for sixty-
five years. A British biochemist, desperate to prevent Nazi Germany from
cornering the world market on synthetic sex hormones, published his formula
for cheap and powerful oral estrogen. Within months, thousands of doctors
and scores of drug companies around the world were working with this
formula.
That opened the Greatest Experiment. Products made from chemicals that
mimicked the feminizing effects of a woman's natural secretions were
marketed fresh out of the lab. They were prescribed and sold for a host of
concerns -- to slow and prevent aging, to stop hot flashes, to avoid
pregnancy or miscarriage, and as a morning-after contraceptive.
I call the marketing, prescribing, and sale of these drugs an experiment
because, for all these years, they have been used, in the main, for what
doctors and scientists hope or believe they can do, not for what they know
the products can do. Medical policy on estrogens has been to "shoot first
and apologize later"-- to prescribe the drugs for a certain health problem
and then see if there is a positive result. Over the years, hundreds of
millions, possibly billions of women, have been lab animals in this
unofficial trial. They were not volunteers. They were given no consent
forms. And they were put at serious, often devastating risk.
The risks of these drugs have been known and documented from the start. The
British doctor who published his estrogen formula in 1938 spent many years
thereafter warning the world that these drugs, although containing great
promise, put women at serious peril for endometrial and breast cancer.
Since the halting of the Prempro trial in July, despite the ignorance or
hypocrisy of many doctors who said "Who knew?," there is nothing surprising
in the recent findings. We have known since day one that these drugs posed
threats. And since then science has added to, not subtracted from, the list
of estrogen's problems.
If doctors and scientists have known these dirty secrets for so long, why
is the bad press so recent? That is an essential question right now, and
this book seeks to present the answer. Part of the answer lies in the
vigorous efforts by drug companies to protect an invaluable market. These
efforts have included underwriting studies and subsidizing doctors,
participating in medical-school curriculums, advertising heavily in medical
journals, and seeing that continuing medical education is directed by
doctors on the drug industry's payroll. They have also entailed one of the
most elaborate promotion and advertising campaigns in the history of the
media not only in America but worldwide.
This is not the first time estrogen sales have felt the cold wind of
consumer anger. In 1975, the magnitude of estrogen-related endometrial
cancer was established; drug sales sank by half in subsequent years. In
that instance, as in every other that has cast suspicion on estrogen, the
drug companies managed to revitalize sales through new claims, which is why
I say that only through learning how these companies buy and influence
medical opinion can women protect themselves from any new spin, any new
claim that will inevitably emerge about these drugs and countless others.
Estrogen products won't go away, and they shouldn't. One can only wish, as
I do, that they will be used now with caution, based on evidence and facts,
not illusion. My aim is to consider whether hormone supplements are
necessary and for whom. Specifically, I hope this book will help women
navigate the estrogen issue and keep anything similar from happening again.
But the larger hope is that we can make informed decisions about other
drugs as well.
On the sixty-fifth birthday of the Greatest Experiment, I recall a poem by
William Butler Yeats entitled "The Corning of Wisdom with Time":
Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun
Now I may wither into the truth.
Let us hope.
Share Support And Information On
The Web site's message Boards
Synthetic (Conventional) Hormones - HRT
/php/forums/index.php?showforum=30
Naturally Compounded Hormone Therapy
/php/forums/index.php?showforum=31
Soy Isoflavones - Revival Soy Protein
/php/forums/index.php?showforum=29
Alternative Medicine / Vitamins / Herbs
/php/forums/index.php?showforum=27
|