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As confusion and seemingly conflicting messages are being sent to women in menopause about the safety of hormone therapy, more and more women are choosing unregulated non-FDA approved hormone therapy. In this important public health episode, Dr. Hirsch discussed how this industry got its wings, and how it is taking advantage of women seeking help during menopause and midlife. In this episode, Dr. Hirsch discusses the history of compounded non-FDA approved hormone therapy, and the many dangers these compounds have on women.

 

SHOW NOTES:

Hey everyone, welcome back to this show. Well, it’s a little noisy in my house. We are excited because we are renovating the attic space and I just can’t wait because I’m going to put my office up there. We’re doing the shiplap, the whole HD thing, totally psyched about it, but they’re literally one floor above, pounding nails and hammering away. So if you hear any of that noise during this episode, that’s why. This episode today, I wanted to talk about pellet injections, as well as the other non-compounded, non-FDA approved hormone therapy regimens that are out there. And specifically, I want to talk about this because I want to explain a little bit more behind the boom in this industry and the dangers of using these types of medications and then ultimately a why and how to get yourself off of them. And if you have a friend in a similar scenario, how to talk her out of it as well, certainly she could listen to this episode, but my dream is that you also gleam some background information that can help explain this to someone else because when we can explain it to someone else, that means we’ve learned it.

 

So for many of you who’ve been listening to my show for a long time now, you know that there was a lot of misleading information from the initial results of the Women’s Health Study or the Women’s Health Initiative that came out in the early 2000s. If you had not already listened to my podcast episode on the Women’s Health Initiative, it’s a few episodes down so scroll back and I would definitely listen to that before you complete listening to this, because it will put it in a lot of context. But because of those fears from the use of commercially available conjugated equine estrogens, which was Premarin at the time, and it’s combination buddy medroxyprogesterone acetate, which is the progesterone component if you had an intact uterus, there grew a new field of air quotes, safe, and air quotes, hormone therapy.

 

Now, if you really think about it, this was a pretty genius move. People who were looking to invest, or to make money, or who were burned out of their traditional either academic positions, or some of these folks were pharmacists or other allied healthcare professionals looked around and said, “Ah, there’s a niche here for women in menopause who don’t feel good. There’s a niche to help women with vague symptoms. There’s a niche that women are going to fill. They’re going to do anything they can to improve the look and feel of their bodies, their sexuality, their hair, their weight, anything.” We certainly live in a society where getting a miracle cure is a really great marketing tool.

So these wellness clinics formed. Now, I use the term wellness clinics,