The Dangerous Practice of Using Synthetic Hormones

For over fifty years, doctors and their patients have been aware of the seeming benefits of the hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, however, the oversight of major pharmaceutical companies has misled and harmed millions of women in the process. Initially, as well as today, hormone replacement in women could be achieved using natural, or bio identical hormones, or through the use of hormones of synthetic. Major pharmaceutical companies, at the time, were aware of the benefits and detriments of both types of hormone replacement therapies; however, they chose to pursue the decidedly more dangerous option of hormones. Why? For profit, well, actually for patent rights to monopolize production rights and in turn, the ensuing profits, because patents cannot be held for naturally occurring substances, which is what bio identical hormones are in essence. Another major reason the promulgation of synthetic hormones occurred, in spite of known lethal side effects, is the fact that most doctors derive any new information in the medical community from the inventing or marketing efforts of the pharmaceutical companies themselves, who naturally touted only the wide benefits of hormones of synthetic in slowing, if not stopping the aging process in women.

Unfortunately, hormones of synthetic, although typically temporarily alleviating symptoms like inability to sleep and hot flashes, did not address more serious issues at hand from aging, and in fact, caused even more harm to women's health in the long run as well. Some of the lesser sinister side effects that hormones of synthetic failed to address in aging women include:

o Brittle bones
o Depression
o Loss of libido
o Hypertension, or high blood pressure
o Weight gain
o Bloated sensations
o Memory loss

Even more disturbing about synthetic hormones, and SHRT, is the direct correlation of these drugs to skyrocketing rates of breast and ovarian cancer in the United States. The statistics speak for themselves: In 2002, one of the largest purveyors of synthetic hormones, Wyeth-Ayerst, gained one billion dollars in revenue from an estimated seventy million prescription of hormones of synthetic sold annually. Likewise, in 2002, the rates of women suffering from breast cancer were one in eight, from a rate of one in ninety-one a little less than one hundred years ago. Not only are breast and ovarian cancers epidemics among aging women, but weight, not uncomfortable weight gain, but rather, life and health endangering obesity is plaguing women across America as well since the introduction of hormones of synthetic.