Hormone Replacement Therapy
Struggling to Make ‘Cents’ of the Hormone Replacement Disaster
By
Roby Mitchell, MD
I recently spoke with Walter Willett, MD, chairman of the Dept. of Public Health at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Willett was a lead investigator in the Nurse’s Health Study. Our conversation quickly turned to the abrupt cancellation by the NIH of the study of combined estrogen and progestin hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in healthy menopausal women. The study was cancelled due to a finding that the treatment resulted in an increased risk of invasive breast cancer.
Dr. Willett agreed with me that: 1) the results were not surprising–as he and his colleagues have been releasing this information for years; and 2) it is naive to think the manufacturer, Wyeth-Ayerst, didn’t know this years before. They basically murdered thousands of women by allowing them to get breast cancer, heart attacks, and strokes, using an unsafe product.
It took the NIH five years to deem this therapy unsafe. However, the products have been on the market for over 50 years. The NIH budgeted $600 million to fund the complete 8-year study that was stopped after only 5 years. Wyeth-Ayerst and their parent company, American Home Products (who also brought us Fen/Phen) have made billions of dollars selling Premarin and Provera. This company, the world’s 10th largest, posted global earnings of $3.22 billion last year, up from $3.03 billion the previous year.
Much of this increase was from consumer advertising, using stars like Patti Labelle and Lauren Hutton. American Home Products made $522 million dollars selling vitamins like Centrum in just one quarter. With that kind of money they could have easily paid for this study years ago if they had consumer interest in mind. Their interest is profits.
Medical Silence
The medical profession has to share in the blame of this national disgrace, in particular, teaching institutions. Pharmaceutical companies spent about $60 billion in 2000 financing 70 percent of the clinical drug trials. Academic centers vie for these dollars to keep their departments going. This creates a severe conflict of interest that leads to a tainted flow of information to the general medical population. A survey of 192 medical experts in the Feb. issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that 90 percent of said experts had some type of financial relationship with a drug manufacturer, including research financing, speaking and consulting fees. You wonder how on earth it took 50 years for the dangers of Premarin and Provera to come to light. Silence from medical experts was paid for. Also bought was the proclamation from medical experts about the many benefits of Premarin and Provera. The Dept of Ob/Gyn here at Texas Tech Medical School (my alma mater) receives more than one income stream from Wyeth and routinely brings in Wyeth subsidized experts to train a new generation of physicians about the benefits of Premarin and Provera.
Synthetic HRT
The downplaying of the risk of using animal-derived and synthetic HRT is even more despicable. The spin doctors calmly stated that for every 10,000 women on HRT during one year, only eight more will have invasive breast cancer, only seven more will have a heart attack, only eight more will have a stroke, and only 18 more will have blood clots. Sounds benign, doesn’t it? It does, until you do the math.
There are 8-10 million women currently using HRT, according to Dr. Willett. Using conservative numbers, that adds up to 6,400-8,000 cases of invasive breast cancer, 5,600-7,000 heart attacks, 6,400-8,000 strokes, and 14,400-18,000 cases of blood clots to organs such as the lungs. That adds up to 32,800 cases of drug induced morbidity EACH YEAR!!! If only 1/10th of these women died, that would be equivalent to having a 9/11-type disaster each year. We’re looking for the wrong terrorists. And these numbers don’t include other side effects of this therapy such as fluid retention, weight gain, gallbladder disease, vaginal bleeding, depression, diabetes, and reduction of the cancer fighting B vitamin, folate.
Environmental Effects of HRT
Unfortunately the harm that these drugs do doesn’t stop with women. Once they go through the liver they are conjugated to make even more potent hormone analogs. These are then excreted as human waste and flushed down toilets into lakes, streams and rivers. An EPA scientist first detected drug contamination in our waterways 30 years ago, according to Christian Daughton, chief of environmental chemistry for the EPA. If you know the chemistry of estrogens and progestins you can extrapolate some disturbing explanations for the increase in many common diseases.
Estrogens increase cell multiplication in estrogen-sensitive tissues, a cornerstone in the causation of cancer. The association of Premarin with breast and uterine cancer is well established, but most physicians are still unaware that the prostate is an estrogen-sensitive tissue, also. The prostate is formed from the same embryonic cells as the uterus. Why has the incidence of prostate cancer gone up each year since Premarin was introduced?
These same estrogens are effective in causing premature puberty in girls (a risk factor for breast cancer) and breast tissue growth in boys. Ask any older pediatrician if these are new developments since the introduction of Premarin. Estrogens facilitate the growth of yeast in the body. Yeast causes inflammation in body tissues, like the lungs, similar to the inflammation seen in diaper rash and vaginitis. Asthma is another disease marked by inflammation, and it has become epidemic. I’ve cured most cases of adult onset asthma in my practice by treating patients with anti-fungals.
Estrogens increase brain activity by speeding up neuronal transmission, facilitating neurotransmitter production and increasing nerve connections. Sounds like a good thing, and indeed it is when it allows a woman to perceive the sniffle of a newborn while dad sleeps through. However, in the brain of a male child who doesn’t have much of the anti-estrogen effect of progesterone, you can predict ADD and ADHD. Estrogens inhibit thyroid function. There is an epidemic of false negative hypothyroidism (clinical hypothyroidism in the face of normal lab values) here in the U.S. according to top endocrinologists like Ridha Arem at Baylor Medical School. Hypothyroidism then leads to a cluster of other problems like chronic fatigue, depression, carpal tunnel syndrome and osteoarthritis. These associations may seem a stretch to the uneducated, but validated estrogen chemistry is the link that ties them all together.
The results from the NIH study with Premarin and Provera are just the tip of a big iceberg. I deem it criminal for them to continue the Premarin only arm of the study. We know too much about the cancer-causing effects of this drug. Human hormone analogs have been available here for over 20 years, and it makes no more sense to continue using horse estrogen than it does to continue using pig insulin. Premarin continues to be prescribed because it makes cents!
Roby Mitchell, MD, trains doctors and pharmacists on the adverse impacts of deficiencies in estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, thyroid hormone, growth hormone and DHEA in men and women, and the benefits that can be achieved through replacement therapy using bio-identical, rather than synthetic hormones.
Dr. Mitchell is host of a live radio talk show, Keeping Fit with Dr. Fitt, broadcast every Tuesday, from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm, CST, on radio station KJRT 88.3FM (available online at www.kingdomkeys.org).