On the bright side, new data on estrogen replacement therapy could be better for Wyeth than many expected (see " Wyeth Lucks Out On Hormone Study").

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Doctors now and women are really - they have a kind of a knee-jerk response to the big estrogen study that was conducted a couple of years ago, and estrogen comes off sounding like toxic waste - estrogen replacement therapy.

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It was another big NIH study, the Women's Health Initiative, that showed that an estrogen-replacement therapy had unforeseen risks of breast cancer and heart attack.

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Estrogen hormone replacement therapy seemed to have all sorts of benefits based on observational studies, but they vanished under the more rigorous lens of controlled clinical trials.

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Let's look at one of the biggest changes in medical practice of the past decade: the decision to stop putting millions of postmenopausal women on hormone replacement therapy, which postulated that replacing the estrogen and progesterone their bodies were no longer making would do them long-term good.

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Women who are being treated for breast cancer are often prohibited from using traditional hormone replacement therapy because breast cancer can be sensitive to estrogen, the predominant female hormone.

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It didn't evaluate any plant-based or compounded kinds of hormone replacement therapy, and I think that it skewed the discussion of estrogen replacement in such a way that now, probably many women are really afraid to touch it with a 10-foot pole, no matter how much they suffer.

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