The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed On Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth - Hardcover

Seaman, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786868538 ISBN 13: 9780786868537

Publisher: Hyperion, 2003

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

About the Author

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 cofounder 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, and Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

*Starred Review* Science journalist Seaman, cofounder of the National Women's Health Network, takes no prisoners in this scathing indictment of hormone replacement therapy in general and estrogen in particular. Her account of pandemic abuse of the trust women place in their doctors cuts a wide swath of guilt that begins at medical practitioners but scores drug manufacturers as well as the Food and Drug Administration. The experiment with hormone replacement--called an experiment because the drugs were manufactured, marketed, and prescribed either without or in defiance of scientific proof of their safety--began in 1938 in England when a biochemist published his formula for synthetic estrogen, diethylstilbestrol (DES). The ensuing story reads like an X-Files conspiracy script as, for the next 65 years, doctors and authorities ignored mounting evidence of the sometimes-fatal consequences of taking these hormones. Seaman has long been an outspoken opponent of what she calls medicalization, which places such normal occurrences as pregnancy and menopause under medical control, and has advocated full drug disclosure so that women may be made aware of drug side effects and health hazards. She has been accused of being an alarmist, but recent evidence of the dangers of such drugs as DES rather validates her alarm. A wake-up call to women about unquestioningly accepting doctors' orders. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786868538
• ISBN 13: 9780786868537
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352