Fear and Menopause: What's The Real Story?

Fear of menopause, of a halting of the body's "natural processes," of being just that much closer to death, has pushed a lot of hormone replacement therapy prescriptions over the years.  I recently boggled while listening to Suzanne Somers talk about her personal hormone replacement therapy regime, which includes smearing herself with estrogen cream all day long, and injecting off label hormone treatments directly into her lady parts.  Oh Suzanne, no!

Suzanne's thinking (if you can call it that) is that menopause means that a "kill switch" has been thrown in your body.  She believes that our evolutionary purpose is to breed, and once we are unable to do so, our bodies figure it's time to throw in the towel, and start shutting down.  

This is a classic example of the "correlation does not equal causation" fallacy.  Yes, your systems start breaking down more as you age.  The older you get, the worse your body works.  But this isn't some kind of evolutionary stand-in for God, it's just the natural consequence of aging.  Your body knows how old it is, regardless of how much pregnant mare's urine you inject.

This fear has been used by marketers for years, ever since a book called Feminine Forever was published in the mid 1960s.  Feminine Forever was written with "a potent mix of fear and desire," according to Huffington Post guest blogger Susan Kim.  It told women that they could live forever if they started taking Premarin.  Less public was the author's ties to Wyeth, the manufacturer of Premarin, which had underwritten his book and his research on which it was based.

We recently learned about a secret cache of Wyeth emails and internal memos which document that company's aggressive efforts through the 1990s and 2000s to market HRT (hormone replacement therapy) as a cure for things it isn't.  Wyeth said that HRT would prevent not only menopause symptoms, but other diseases of old age, such as Alzheimer's and heart disease.

Unfortunately, HRT also strongly increases your risk of breast cancer.  I recently wrote about Barbara Ehrenreich's attack on "pink ribbon feminism."  Ehrenreich is a breast cancer survivor, and her article "Welcome to Cancerland" is a watershed work on the topic.  Ehrenreich has been a strong campaigner for the idea that we should be working harder to prevent breast cancer in the first place. 

We know what causes breast cancer, we have a long list of chemicals in our environment which are known to kick it off.  And HRT is on that list, as well.  Ehrenreich herself stops short of blaming her own course of HRT in the 1990s for her breast cancer, but she does mention it.

Menopause can be a difficult transitional period, with a host of physical symptoms, some of which can be alleviated by hormone replacement therapy.  But there are a lot of risks involved with HRT, as well.  Serious risks which should dissuade all but the worst cases from starting an HRT regimen.  

Don't start HRT out of fear, either of diseases that it will mysteriously prevent, or of growing older.  We love you just as you are!