THE TRUTH ABOUT PREMARIN
Read What Respected Doctors & Other Experts Say About
Premarin & HRTTHE TRUTH ABOUT HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY - How to Break Free From the Medical Myths of Menopause, By National Women's Health Network.
About the Authors
Founded in 1975, the National Women's Health Network is the only national membership organization devoted solely to the health of all women. The mission of the network is to advocate for national policies that protect and promote all women's health and to provide evidence-based, independent information to empower women to make fully informed health decisions.
To accomplish this mission, the Network:
* Acts as an independent voice for women's health and thus accepts no money from companies that sell pharmaceuticals, medical devices, dietary supplements, alcohol, tobacco, or health insurance;
* Represents and is supported by individual and organizational members;
* Researches and analyzes women's health issues from a feeminist, critical perspective free from the influence of corporate interests;
Creates and disseminates evidence-based information on women;s health issues to consumers, advocates, health care professionals, media, and policy makers; Go to Amazon.com for order information.
Hormone Heresy: What Women Must Know About Their Hormones
by Sherrill Sellman
About the Author Sherrill Sellman, a resident Australian is an author, psychotherapist, university honors graduate (magna cum laud), lecturer and women's health advocate who is passionate about women's healthcare issues. She has acquired over 25 years of experience in the areas of health, community, and human resource development and in corporate trainings. Sherrill's recent eight years of research, which resulted in writing Hormone Heresy - What Women MUST Know About Their Hormones has revealed, to the women of the world, the scandal of using women as 'living experiments' for more than 40 years by the medical/pharmaceutical industry. She is actively involved in lecturing and educating women on complimentary medical options for feminine healthcare problems. Sherrill actively writes for health magazines in over 12 different countries and presents public and corporate lectures and trainings in Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada and England. She is also currently completing her next book on women's healthcare issues and travelling on her American national book tour.
Editorial Review
The Jewish News - Melbourne Australia
Hormone Heresy is a book that examines and questions the use of the most widely used treatment of menopausal symptoms in the world. Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). It's author Sherrill Sellman, while researching menopause and what was happening to her own body, discovered a number of truths that have been disguised for decades. It was simply the changes she experienced in her own body that led her to investigate menopause and its various treatments. What she found was that the pharmaceutical industry has for years, down played the dramatic physical, psychological and emotional effects of HRT on women. Sellman recognises that there is a major change happening in society, where women are able to obtain more information about the subject ... Hormone Heresy is ... designed to empower and inform women to make the best choices for their bodies and their greater health.
Book Description
A most comprehensively researched book that explains how the use of conventional hormone replacement therapies have put women at great risk and shows the suffering they have endured. It provides women of all ages the vital information necessary for making informed choices; such as the scientific research that shows that synthetic hormones used in HRT and The Pill contribute to breast, ovarian and uterine cancers and further, how longer term use contributes to CFS, liver disease, impaired thyroid...
Dr. John Lee & Virginia Hopkins, authors of WHAT YOUR DOCTOR MAY NOT TELL YOU ABOUT MENOPAUSE, The Breakthrough Book on Natural Progesterone, (Chapter 1), Menopausal Politics and Women's Hormone Cycles: "What was once a taboo subject has become a mainstay of talk shows and women's magazine articles. With 30 million menopausal women in North America and some 20 million baby boomer women on the brink of menopause, it's no wonder this is a major topic of discussion. What is a wonder is how we have managed to make menopause, a perfectly natural part of a woman's life cycle, into a disease. We need to realize that menopause is not a disease despite millions in advertising dollars spent by drug companies to convince us otherwise. The pharmaceutical companies have not failed to notice the huge population of premenopausal women in the pipeline, a financial goldmine in the making. Premarin, a form of hormone replacement therapy made from the urine of pregnant mare's urine by Wyeth-Ayerst is already one of the top selling prescription medicines in the U.S. And so far, they've only managed to capture 10 to 15% of market! Industry projections of hormone replacement sales overall by the year 2000 are up to a billion dollars a year! Estimates put Premarin's 1992 sales world- wide at nearly $700 million, and in 1994, Premarin ranked as number 8 in dollar volume in pharmaceutical products, up 12 percent from 1993. A large percentage of advertising and research dollars are spent trying to convince women that estrogen will cure everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's, but there is scant evidence for any of these claims and reams of evidence that synthetic estrogens are highly toxic and carcinogenic.
The good news is that women have become guarded and skeptical about having new drugs pushed on them. After being told that DES, a hormone that was supposed to guard against miscarriages, was safe, hundreds of thousands of women discovered the hard way that it caused cancer in their children. Women were told that Valium was a safe and effective remedy for depression, only to find out that it was addictive. Now their physicians are trying to convince them that once they have reached menopause they should automatically go on hormone replacement therapy featuring synthetic estrogens and progestins. So far, only 10 to 15 percent of menopausal women have chosen to follow this advice despite intense pressure on all women from their doctors and the media. I've had literally hundreds of women tell me that their doctors have "threatened" them ominously with predictions of heart disease and osteoporosis if they didn't take estrogen - regardless of whether they had any risk whatsoever for these diseases. The real tragedy is that the natural forms of these hormones, used wisely and in moderation, could be of very real benefit to millions of women. I believe that the present synthetic versions of hormones are making millions of women sick and putting them at risk for cancer, strokes, and heart disease.In the chapters to follow, we will look more closely at how estrogen and progesterone work in a woman's body and the politics of pushing drugs to women."
Dr. Jonathan V. Wright and John Morgenthaler, authors ofNATURAL HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY For Women Over 45 Smart Publications, PO Box 4667, Petaluma, CA 94955. Ph: 800-976-2783, and 707-769-8308 Fax: 707-763-3944, www.smart-publications
"Despite the overwhelming clinical and marketing success of Premarin and other forms of patentable "estrogen", there has been, almost from the start, a disturbing undercurrent of doubt about the safety of conventional "estrogen" replacement therapy. That doubt can be summed up in one word: cancer. The increased risk of endometrial cancer from "ERT" is largely eliminated when women take a patentable "progestin" or natural progesterone along with their "estrogen" (making it "HRT"), but the risk of breast cancer remains highly controversial. Scores of large, sophisticated, expensive studies have been done over the years to try to answer one key question: Does replacement horse estrogen cause human breast cancer? (I'm NOT making this up!) You, I, and any reasonable high school science student would want to know if replacement human estrogen causes human breast cancer. But then, you, I, and reasonable high school students don't own patents and make huge amounts of money selling horse estrogen.) Despite all the time and money thrown at (some might say, wasted on) the problem of "HRT" and human breast cancer, the answer still remains elusive. There's no direct proof HRT causes breast cancer, but at the same time, it's not possible to say that it doesn't".
Dr. Susan Love, author of DR. SUSAN LOVE'S HORMONE BOOK talks about Problems With Premarin - "Premarin has more of an effect on the liver than non-horse estrogens do. There may be something else in the horse urine besides estrogen that causes some of this additional effect. Another problem is that the level of estrogen produced in the blood of women on Premarin is probably much higher than normal. The levels of the equilin estrogens in these pills are many times higher than our bodies' normal levels of estradiol or estrone. What effect does that have? The pharmaceutical company that manufactures Premarin hasn't told us that. And no one else has studied it. We simply don't know. Premarin decreases bone loss, although this won't ensure that you won't get osteoporosis or fractures. It may have a beneficial effect on the heart, although this remains to be proven. It probably increases breast cancer risk and definitely increases endometrial cancer risk." A third problem with Premarin is that you might not be comfortable with a medication based on urine of pregnant mares. To begin with, it isn't a particularly appealing notion. But there's also the more serious issue of the way the horses are treated. For the reader who tries to buy "cruelty free" products, the treatment of the animals used for her hormone pills might be of interest."
Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, author of SCREAMING TO BE HEARD, Hormonal Connections Women Suspect and Doctors Ignore, (Chapter 5) Published in 1995 by M. Evans & Co., Inc., 216 East 49th Street, New York, N.Y. 10017
DIFFERENT ESTROGENS HAVE DIFFERENT EFFECTS
"While the majority of physicians think all estrogen products for ERT are basically the same, and the manufacturer of the leading products would like you to think they are all the same, this is not the case. Nearly two decades ago (1978-1982) Dr. Malcolm Whitehead and Dr. Campbell, (two leading menopause researchers in England), conducted studies to determine the potencies of various estrogens and the effects of these various estrogens on different target organs in the body. Their research showed that congugated equine estrogens (Premarin) are about three times more potent in stimulating the liver production of renin substrate, which is used to make angiotensin in the body, a factor that causes increased blood pressure. Two other types of estrogen used in the U.S., micronized estradiol (Estrace, available since 1976 by prescription) and piperazine estrone sulfate (Ogen, available since 1959 by prescription), DID NOT show this elevation of renin substrate. The research of Dr. Campbell and Dr. White is compatible with the work published by Geola in 1980 which indicated that 1.25 mg of congugated equine estrogens (Premarin) daily, caused greater than normal effects on the liver synthesis of renin substrate. This research would indicate that Women who have hypertension, would be wise to use one of the native human forms of estrogen, to avoid the harmful production of high levels of renin substrate.
{Ed. Note: Be sure to ask your doctor if he is aware of these studies when he suggests Premarin or PremPro for you, especially if you have hypertension. Remember "knowledge is power" and it may save your life.}
Learn more at: Dr. Vliet's web page
Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of WOMEN'S BODIES, WOMEN'S WISDOM says in her February 1997 Health Wisdom for Women newsletter: "there is evidence to suggest that the metabolic breakdown products of premarin (called "daughter compounds") are stronger than the equine estrogens themselves. When you use a hormone that is native to the female body, such as estradiol, the body will metabolize it into weaker and weaker "daughter" compounds - but with Premarin they get stronger and have the potential to cause more side effects. We really don't know the effects of this - especially high doses over a long period of time. That's why, of all the conventionally available estrogens, Premarin is the most "unnatural" hormone replacement you can take. And of course, there's the controversial issue of how the pregnant mares are cared for on the farms that collect their urine."
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Sonja Timmers, e-mail: nrsprntg@athenet.net
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