The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed On Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth
- ISBN-10
- 0786868538
- ISBN-13
- 9780786868537
- Category
- Health & Fitness
- Pages
- 352
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2003-07-09
- Publisher
- Hyperion
- Author
- Barbara Seaman
Description
"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.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2011-01-04
- 352 pages
- Ebook
- Seven Stories Press
-
- 2009-09-01
- - pages
- Paperback
- National Geographic Books
Similar books
-
The No-Nonsense Guide to Menopause
By Barbara Seaman, Laura EldridgeFrom hormone replacement therapy to hysterectomies, from advice on what questions to ask doctors to strategies for assessing the validity of new data, this is a complete, accessible, and easy-to-use resource that will bring comfort and ...
-
I Want My Mommy: A Parents Guide to Child Care and Education
By Cameron KidstonThis guides intentions are to bring parents and others up to date on the child care industry in the United States that is being driven by demands from our modern day culture.
-
Estrogen's Storm Season: stories of perimenopause
By Jerilynn C. Prior"This fiction book begins as eight frustrated midlife women-from all walks of life-meet Dr. Kailey Madrona, a woman specialist. All are in perimenopause, the long and chaotic transition to menopause....
-
The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation
By Strobe Talbott... and the right to live in peace extended to the multitudinous and distinctive tribes and communities that made up the state. Many of those were Christians and Jews. Christians had to be careful not to build their churches with spires ...
-
The Doctor's Case Against the Pill
By Barbara SeamanA reassessment of a thought-provoking work raises questions about the safety and reliability of birth control pills in the light of such modern technologies as hormone replacement therapy and Norplant implants. Reprint. Tour. IP.
-
Vaccine A: The Covert Government Experiment That's Killing Our Soldiers--and Why GI's Are Only the First Victim
By Gary MatsumotoIn this provocative look at the US military from the Persian Gulf War through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto contends that an anthrax vaccine dispensed by the Department of Defense was the cause of Gulf ...
-
We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan
By Elizabeth NormanGeneva Convention, 131 Gilbert Islands, 184 Gillespie, Colonel, 86–87,94 Goddard, Paulette, 128 Gorzelanski, Helen, 29 Grant, Helen, 173 Gray, John Glenn, 76 Greenwalt, Peggy, 152,211 Grimes, Father, 231 Grinnell, Carroll C., ...
-
Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments
By Alex Boesepsychology at the University of California, Irvine. She had implanted a memory in Chris's head. Not with surgery, but through the power of suggestion. It was a trick she had performed often. In her book The Myth of Repressed Memory she ...
-
The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream
By David M. RubensteinBlight's broad knowledge about Douglass was aided immeasurably in this book by a treasure trove of Douglass family ... 151 6P_Rubenstein_AmericanExp_EP.indd 151 6/23/21 12:14 PM 6/23/21 12:14 PM DAVID W. BLIGHT on Frederick Douglass 151.
-
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
By George JohnsonA distinguished science writer critically analyzes ten key experiments in the history of science and their implications for human knowledge, ranging from Galileo's measurement of the pull of gravity, to Isaac Newton's examination of how ...