Oestrogen Matters (Revised Edition)

This book is long overdue, and I salute the authors for their courage and effort (and their clear, witty writing). I believe it is an ethical imperative for all clinicians who treat women in menopause or women with breast cancer to alert their patients to this book. It will not only improve women's quality of life, but also, on balance of probabilities, extend women's lives by delaying death from all other causes. Well written, insightful, and hard hitting, Estrogen Matters successfully rebuts the billion-dollar, government-led study known as the Women's Health Initiative, which claimed that hormones for post-menopausal women are harmful. That study was wrong. It turns out estrogens do matter for women's health. How could one flawed scientific conclusion become a persuasive juggernaut that changed the practice of women's health worldwide? In their fascinating account, Bluming and Tavris challenge that conclusion and unpack the reasons for its remarkable impact. This book is long overdue. Having spent over two decades advancing women's health, I was appalled by the Women's Health Initiative's efforts to sensationalize and distort their own findings to promote an anti-hormone-therapy agenda. Personally I have been taking HRT for over 25 years and have no intention of stopping. I hope Estrogen Matters draws enough attention to counter the fears and misinformation about HRT that so many women, and their physicians, still hold. For far too many years women and their doctors have been held in fear of prescribing oestrogens - believing that they were dangerous because of a widely quoted study purporting to show that they were too damaging. Now it turns out that this seems to have been an example of 'fake' news. In a thorough, careful and unbiased assessment of all the scientific evidence Bluming and Tavris debunk this most widely quoted work and show that oestrogens are not only not dangerous, but beneficial for the vast majority of women suffering from post-menopausal symptoms, whether or not they have had breast cancer. This extremely valuable message deserves to be widely disseminated.