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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 4/1/23

Menopause Mongering Returns, Big Time

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What is the dream of drug makers? A medication that a wide swath of the population will take every day for the rest of their lives like statins, GERD drugs and, of course psych drugs for depression, ADHD and "bipolar disorder."* So it is no surprise that drug makers have revived menopause as a "disease" for a generation of women who do not remember the first, lethal round of menopause mongering.

"Every middle-aged woman" will undergo the condition of "VMS"""Vasomotor Symptoms, due to menopause"""trumpets a new round of menopause disease mongering online and on the radio. It's a real disease but "no one is talking about it" blasts the campaign .** What?

But, from the 1940's until 20 years ago, everyone was "talking" about the "disease" of menopause. In fact, in 2002, 61 million prescriptions were written for women in the U.S. for hormones to treat the so-called "disease" which was even once treated with electroshock therapy""yes ECT. Drug makers are banking, literally, on the fact that today's "middle-aged women"""who were 25 when the first pathologizing occurred""don't remember the first lethal dupe of menopause-as-a-disease.

Until the government-sponsored Women's Health Initiative (WHI) found in 2002 that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increased the risk of breast cancer by 26 percent, heart attacks by 29 percent, stroke by 41 percent, and doubled the risk of blood clots, HRT was a rite of passage for U.S. women like getting their first bra or using Tampax . It also doubled the risk of dementia, increased the risks of losing their hearing, gallbladder disease, urinary incontinence, asthma, melanoma, ovarian, endometrial and lung cancers and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

HRT even made detecting breast cancer more difficult. A 1995 article in the journal Radiology said, "an increase in mammographic density" was demonstrated in most subjects undergoing continuous combined HRT. The therapy was such a scourge, when millions of women quit the drugs en masse in 2003, the occurrence of breast cancer fell seven percent in the U.S. and 15 percent in estrogen-feed tumors.

And HRT harm continues to this day. A 2019 WHI follow-up found that "breast cancer risk from menopause hormones may last decades" and that 19 years after using HRT, women still had a 29 percent greater incidence of breast cancer.

The Heart Break Of VMS

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Martha Rosenberg is an award-winning investigative public health reporter who covers the food, drug and gun industries. Her first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health, is distributed by Random (more...)
 

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