by Susan Mcdaniel

Created on: October 02, 2009

Not all hormones are created equally and not all hormone replacement therapy is deadly.

Routine hormone replacement therapy was largely abandoned after the Women's Health Initiative Study abruptly ended in July 2003 (it was slated to run to 2006). The WHI showed women receiving certain synthetic hormones were more likely to die of invasive breast cancer, heart disease, and stroke than those not on the therapy. After five years, participants taking synthetic hormones had a 29 percent higher risk of breast cancer, a 26 percent higher risk of heart disease, and a 41 percent higher risk of stroke. The operative word in those last two sentences is "synthetic."

Unfortunately, after the WHI released its findings, the scaremongers got busy. They deemed all hormones poisonous, scared the daylights out of everyone, and doomed many coming-into-later-life baby boomers to years of unnecessary misery by making them afraid to use any kind of hormone replacement therapy.

Obviously, there had to be a difference between the hormones being used in the WHI study and natural hormones. If you think about it rationally, you will understand this to be true. Both men and women obviously produce hormones most of their lives. Those hormones bring us to puberty; then they allow pregnancy, birth, and lactation. Later on their production tapers off, but it doesn't stop altogether. So how could those very same chemicals be poisonous to our systems? The premise that they were poisonous doesn't make sense.

What does make sense is that the synthetic, engineered hormones are poisonous. Those are the ones that are not the same as our bodies would produce, like the brand names Premarin, PremPro, Provera, and many others. Those particular HRT drugs mentioned above are made from pregnant mares' urine (hence the clever names) and, as the Women's Health Initiative discovered, have basic differences from those humans produce. Other brands are made in other ways, but they all differ chemically from what a human body would naturally produce. Those differences cause mutations, i.e. cancers, in people, clog up arteries and lead to strokes and heart disease.

Natural hormones do none of that. The new catch-word for "natural" is bio-identical. It simply means the chemical structure is the same as that produced by a human being. Again, a natural hormone is an exact replica to what your body would produce. It is not a chemically engineered substitute with differences, however minute those differences might

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