Bioidentical Hormones - U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging

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see a doctor tell a diabetic near coma to go get a massage instead of taking insulin. That
would be tantamount to murder, but that's what women in 2003 got from the WHI
historic report on synthetic drugs with hormone-like effects, PremPro and Premarin.
These substances were donated by the pharmaceutical company that had sold
them since 1942 because the assumption was the drugs would be found safe and
effective. Nothing could have been further from the truth. After nearly 800 million
taxpayer dollars and 14 years later, the overly emphasized negative results of the
Women's Health Initiative were released in May 2002. This study was poorly designed,
strangely monitored and incompetently analyzed.
The Study that Still Needs to be Studied
The WHI is now the "gold standard" regarding hormone therapy. Interestingly,
the WHI never looked at hormones, only drugs with "hormone-like" effects that were
dosed in a regimen far from that of human replacement. This study has led us to believe
that conjugated equine estrogens (from pregnant mare urine) and a synthetic progestin
(Prempro) dosed on a daily basis in static doses is clearly very harmful to women after
only a few years, and yet, in contradictory reports from the same agency, PremPro
seemed to have had positive effects as well. The other drug studied, daily Premarin,
seemed to show substantially less harmful effects. Even though the death rate for all arms
of this study was equal, the study was dramatically halted early in a very public effort to
"save lives."
This confusing and frightening media spin caused millions of women to
immediately stop taking their Premarin or Prempro, or any other product deemed a
hormone. Physicians also threatened by the negative media reports stopped prescribing
them, thus leaving millions of symptomatic women without any reasonable clinical
guidance, except the ludicrous exception to the bad news, that lower doses of Prempro,
the killer drug, taken for less years is safer.
This advice has not left women feeling safe.
As was alluded to in the beginning of this testimony, the mortality and morbidity
of menopause is substantial, as substantial as it is being elderly. Young people very, very