Recently, journalists have been getting drug-company news releases dismissing the world's best study of postmenopausal hormone therapy.
The Women's Health Initiative randomly assigned more than 16,000 healthy women to take a placebo or estrogen-progestin therapy. The therapy was expected to protect good health. Instead, hormone-takers had more heart attacks, stroke, dangerous blood clots, breast cancer and dementia than women taking phony pills.
While drug companies don't come right out and bad-mouth the study, they suggest it applies only to Prempro, the popular Wyeth Pharmaceuticals brand used in the federally financed research. Their own products, they say, still might be wonderful for women.
I figured this sales pitch would go over like flat-Earth theories. But after reading Barbara Seaman's new book, The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth, I'm not so sure.
Seaman, a veteran activist in women's health, has written a flawed but fascinating chronicle of the century-long evolution of estrogen products, showing how the quintessential female hormone has repeatedly gone through cycles of being ballyhooed, then booed.
Seaman, cofounder of the Women's Health Network in Washington, an advocacy organization that for decades has decried the hyping of hormone therapy, traces the new formulas, new uses and, most of all, new marketing behind the continual resurgence of estrogen.
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