# Hot Flash Havoc - WTF?



## norajane (Feb 7, 2012)

I just watched a documentary on PBS called "Hot Flash Havoc" and am *furious* at what I learned about HRT (estrogen replacement).

Like everyone else, I had heard about the one study back in 2002 which supposedly showed that HRT leads to breast cancer and heart attacks. Apparently, that's not true, but the bull**** is still out there and women don't know that HRT isn't a killer. Apparently, a lot of doctors also don't know that, so they don't want to put women on it. 

The study was seriously flawed (ages of women starting the therapy, and the type of hormones they were given) and the announcement of the results and the reporting of those results was recklessly exaggerated and misleading, as well as just plain wrong.

*The biggest piece of misinformation was that the results that had been reported so widely applied to all women. The truth is that those results applied ONLY to women who STARTED their HRT in their 70's, and DO NOT APPLY to women who start HRT in their 50's or 60's. There were also far more women in the study who were in their 70's and just starting the HRT than there were women in their 50's. And, even for the women in their 70's, the actual increase in rates of breast cancer or heart problems was only 1 in 1000. Yeah, less than 1 percent of women had increased risks. *

*They took the results that applied only to a small category of women - women who don't exist in real life since no one starts HRT in their 70's - and applied it to ALL women - generalizing at its worst.*

So what are the facts:

*HRT does not increase risk of breast cancer or heart attacks *in women even if they take it forever. 

*HRT actually helps prevent osteoporosis.*

*HRT actually helps prevent heart disease and attacks in women - lowers women's risk by a whopping 30%. *Women have a 50% chance of dying from heart problems. Our risk of dying from heart disease or heart attacks is much higher than of getting and dying from breast cancer. Yeah, heart disease in women needs a _much _better PR agent. Heart disease not only manifests itself differently in women (signs of a heart attack are very different in women than men), but can't even be treated the same as men. For example, no studies have actually shown that statin drugs do one bit of good to prevent heart attacks in women, though there are many studies that show they prevent heart attacks in men. Yet, women are still prescribed statins anyway. *

HRT can improve your sex life in menopause. Your vagina will thank you, as will your lover.

*"Natural" and "bioidentical" hormones are synthetic, just like anything your doctor would give you. Unless the estrogen is made by your ovaries, it mimics your own estrogen and is synthetic. You're better off getting the hormones from your doctor because those dosages legally have to be exact. Your compounding pharmacy that makes the creams might not get the dosage right (they did some testing of compounding pharmacies creams and found varying amounts of the estrogen in there despite the specified dose).* BUT, *if you can't find a doctor to give you HRT and the only place you can get it is from a compounding pharmacy, go for it. 

I am so hating on the medical community, and the media for creating this problem, and am hating on them even more for not correcting this misinformation. They have caused many women to needlessly suffer for fear that HRT might give them breast cancer and heart disease. You can bet your first born child that if men went through menopause, HRT would be sold at the gas station next to the beer and beef jerkey and condoms and this flawed reporting of a flawed study would have been corrected.

If you can find "Hot Flash Havoc" on YouTube or On Demand or Netflix or wherever, I highly recommend it.


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## RainbowBrite (Dec 30, 2015)

I'll look for the documentary, thanks.

How many women's lives have been wrecked for no good reason, I wonder? How many marriages?

I learned long ago that modern medical practice was rife with unscientific thinking, bias and faulty conclusions, was way behind the actual science, and was potentially very dangerous to my health. The upshot being that you can't just accept what you are told at face value; you really must make the effort to seek out all the evidence yourself, evaluate it yourself, come to your own conclusions, and then find a physician who is at the cutting edge (you will probably have discovered one while in the midst of evaluating the evidence), who knows what you now know and will treat accordingly. This for any serious health issue that needs to be handled carefully to avoid long term damage. 

People who sail through life with no serious issues to contend with never learn this, and will tell you that "age, health and hormone levels are all just a state of mind". Just ignore them.


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## norajane (Feb 7, 2012)

Yes, you absolutely have to make sure you inform yourself so that you can ask questions and ask for the treatment for the problems you are having.

The documentary said to find a doctor who takes your concerns seriously and who will stand back and take a look at your whole range of symptoms instead of focusing on just one. 

Relating that to menopause, if you are having migraines, don't just treat the headache. If you are depressed, don't just treat the depression. If you are tired, don't just treat the tired. If you can't sleep, don't just get sleeping pills. You need a doc who will see that you have migraines, depression, fatigue and loss of sleep and are in menopause, so gee, maybe you need more estrogen, which can clear up all of those symptoms.

The other thing is, menopause is not a disease or an illness. It is a process ALL women go through if they are lucky enough to live that long. It's been this way since there were women, so why is it such a mystery to our medical community? Why do so few understand anything about menopause?

Ladies, where is our "Menopause Awareness Month" and where are our "Stop Heart Disease in Women Walk-a-thons" and most of all, where are the pharma companies with their estrogen patch commercials?? This needs to be mainstream - there is real money to made helping women in menopause, yet they are still just giving us more band-aids instead of the actual drugs that can help us.

Of course, we still have problems talking about menstruation and tampons on television without involving white dresses and fields of flowers, so I guess menopause and HRT patches are a bridge too far for our society. I mean, even PBS put a warning on this show: Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised. There was nothing graphic - just some cartoon diagrams of a woman's ovaries and uterus and discussion of hot flashes.


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## RainbowBrite (Dec 30, 2015)

norajane said:


> Ladies, where is our "Menopause Awareness Month" and where are our "Stop Heart Disease in Women Walk-a-thons" and most of all, where are the pharma companies with their estrogen patch commercials?? This needs to be mainstream - there is real money to made helping women in menopause, yet they are still just giving us more band-aids instead of the actual drugs that can help us.


I hear you! This should be not just important to women, but also to the men who love them. Everyone needs to start making some noise about it - it affects us all eventually, in one way or another.



norajane said:


> I mean, even PBS put a warning on this show: Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised. There was nothing graphic - just some cartoon diagrams of a woman's ovaries and uterus and discussion of hot flashes.


Oh, for heaven's sake. Seriously.


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## norajane (Feb 7, 2012)

Lol, there was a section where they talked about sex drive and how it can decline and how testosterone and estrogen can help with sex drive and vaginal health, and there were women sharing their stories. But, again, there was nothing graphic about it.


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## RainbowBrite (Dec 30, 2015)

I'll look for it on Netflix. 

I'm a couple of weeks into bioidentical estrogen/progesterone replacement right now. Have been weighing the pros and cons for a few years now and took the plunge early - am not technically menopausal yet.


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## soccermom2three (Jan 4, 2013)

Thanks for posting. I'm going to check this out.


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## Nomorebeans (Mar 31, 2015)

Fortunately, my OB-GYN is up on all the studies, and is all about the facts, ma'am. Thank God, because hot flashes had been waking me up at night and keeping me there, and I couldn't afford to miss any more sleep than I already had.

And don't even get me started on Jenny McCarthy and the incalculable damage she's done with her anti-vaxxing campaign.


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