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Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com wrote:
> fresh~horses wrote:
> > HRT/HT (and birth control) was/is presented as safe. If we did hear
> > about side effects they were rare rare side efffects don't worry not
> > you.
>
> COMMENT:
>
> Are you certain you heard what you thought you heard?
That's it Steve. I got it wrong, we got it wrong; all the millions of
women who managed to live through this crass turning of a natural event
into an illness.
All of this is
> confused by people going around demanding "safe" drugs and "safe" cars
> and "safe" this and that, when any rational adult knows there is no
> such thing. So what on Earth did you and the doc THINK you were
> talking about?
I have never in my life asked for a safe drug, or asked if a drug was
safe. I have asked, for another class of SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS drugs
what the major side effects were. Could we start from a reasonable
assumption here? I, Mrs. Conklin and most of the millions of women who
had these drugs foisted on them are not imbeciles.
And, not only have I not asked for a safe drug; I have not ever asked
for birth control, HRT, or HT.
> > I guess *you* missed SJdocs last paragraph. Yup. Ummhmmm. Many
> > physicians prescribed HRT/HT (and birth control) with little or NO
> > caution about the side effects. You practically had to fight a
> > prescription off, as another poster attests. They were the answer.
> > Didn't much matter what the question was as long as it happened to a
> > woman. You had to be very motivated to become knowledgeable enough to
> > know why you should fight them off. Hand out information was in the
> > most abbreviated form (rare rare) and self-found information not
> > readily available in pre-internet days without a hassle. Believe me, I
> > have had to be a very assertive many times to get what I wanted.
>
>
> COMMENT:
> I don't know about package inserts in Canada. They've been available
> here in the US to anybody who wanted to ask a pharmacist for one, for
> at least a generation.
They are available in Canada. One must ask. Oh there is an itty bitty
list stapled to your bag. Don't operate machinery...
Women are less assertive than men about this. Your profession was (and
still is, often) very patriarchal. Women who want information and
demand it, as they sometimes must do to get it, may be penalized. We
may be called names like Vitriolic Life Hating es.
MOST people I have advised about the product monograph, male or female,
Canadian or American DID NOT KNOW SUCH A THING EXISTED or that they
could have access to it.
Also keep in mind we are not talking only about the past few years when
consumer medical education has been blown wide open with the internet,
but about 1968, 1987, 1999.
My main complaint is the things don't have an
> executive summary, and are written in such as way as seems aimed to
> maximize attention to legal concerns, and minimize attention the kind
> of writing that would prioritize safety issues. But that's because
> these things are literally written by lawyers at drug companies under
> the (non-optional) oversight of lawyers at the FDA or Health Canada, so
> it's not something I'm going to blame doctors for.
Agreed. And I *do not*.
>
> Mostly when the patient asks if a drug is safe, the doctor understands
> it (I think!) in the context of something like: "Is it as safe other
> stuff I do, like drive my car 10,000 miles a year (risk of death: 1.5
> in 10,000). And the answer to such question is usually "yes." Even for
> HRT. For birth control, you need to factor in how safe it is to NOT
> use it, and some of that is how safe it is to get pregrant and deliver
> a child. Which is a considerably greater risk than driving 10,000
> miles. So there again, communication is the issue.
Patronizing b.s. Steve.
>
> > I have spent my whole reproductive life fighting off first birth
> > control then HRT/HT, and on into menopause and post. Women near
> > menopause are told we can have our reproductive organs removed at the
> > slightest off-kilter test, because they may be dangerous at some time
> > in the future, and we can take HRT/HT drugs after; so what's the
> > problem?
>
>
> COMMENT:
> Well, what IS the problem? Even the WHI study didn't find any
> increased mortality risk in taking HRT, and that was in a somewhat
> artificial group of women who started quite late (I think average was
> about 60), and not at 50, when the major menopause-increase in
> mortality starts to show up in NORMAL untreated women.
The problem is this is not a disease. I think the risk benefit ratio
just went clang on the floor don't you?
>
> I just read an interesting argument that the WHI mortality trends, if
> analyzed properly as a time sequence, actually drop as a function of
> time.
>
> http://www.drtimdelivers.com/WHIMortality10.06.2004/WHIposter10.06.04.shtml
>
> George Conklin, you need to go over this one, too. There more info here
> than you probably want to see, but the two mortality curves of treated
> and untreated women over time, really speak for themselves. They end up
> with treated women doing better. That's the unspeakable HORROR all
> those doctors perpetrated all those years. Yawn. At worst, we thought
> we were doing a lot of good, and just ended up doing not very much good
> or bad, but make drug companies money. At best, HRT may well do some
> good. We haven't looked at it started at menopause, when it's expected
> to do the MOST good.
>
> Women who experience premature menopause (ie loss of ovarian function
> at <35) have a a DOUBLING of mortality rate-- did you all know that?
> That's the epidemiology. If HRT ever showed a risk rate like that, you
> never would hear the end of it. That kind of thing is what doctors are
> trying to prevent.
Well they don't need to medicate every GD woman who walks through the
doors to catch the 34 yr old who needs it. They usually easy to
distinguish from the 52 years old women.
>
> Indeed, what you're hearing now is the result of a study (WHI) showing
> that a group of 10,000 women taking HRT for one year starting at age 60
> might expect (per year) 8 more breast cancers and 6 fewer colon
> cancers. The negative side on non cancer was 8 more strokes, 7 MIs, and
> 8 pulmonary emboli. But 6 fewer hip fractures (which are not a small
> thing-- hip fracture actually has a mortality rate, over the next year,
> higher than any of those other things). As I said, in all they couldn't
> tease any extra deaths due to HRT out of this study.
Those perfect women George mentioned who made it through the winnowing.
>
> By contast, 10,000 women driving 13,000 miles a year will have dozens
> of serious injury-producing car crashes, producing long-term handicaps
> quite similar to hip fractures(indeed will produce hip fractures),
> strokes, and MIs. And I have little doubt all the orthopedic trauma car
> will produce at least 8 pulmonary emboli. And 2 out of 10,000 women who
> make the choice to drive that much, will die. We can't say that about
> HRT, even yet.
Really Steve you have to get over this infantile analogies.
>
> > We were always taking these drugs for the good they would do us. Or
> > because we wanted to be sexual creatures and not have 14 children. We
> > really didn't know what harm they could do, until 2002.
>
> COMMENT:
>
> You STILL don't know what harm they do. All we know is that it's
> probably not worth all press. It still may *very well be* that if we
> remove the progestins (specifically the evil Provera) from HRT, use
> progesterone instead, cut the estrogen dose and add an estrogen blocker
> for the breasts, give everybody aspirin, refuse it to smokers, start it
> AT menopause and stop after a decade, the whole thing may live up the
> promise it had 40 and more years ago. It will take research to see.
>
> SBH
That's right. Millions of dollars later, and gawd knows how many lives
and how much risk yet to develop into something later and we still
don't know.
What a fine system.
Zee
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