Dr. Charles Mok explains how Premarin, originally made from horse urine, became a standard menopause treatment. The drug contains multiple estrogens, but using estrogen alone caused uterine lining overgrowth, so progesterone was added to prevent that problem and create an effective combination therapy.
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The next step was Premarin. This is a 5 year old mare's urine is putting out all kinds of non human estrogens and some human estrogens. And that seemed to work pretty effectively for symptoms of menopause. And at first they were actually using dried up horse urine product and eventually they synthesized the exact same thing from actually from soybeans. And that was going on in the 70s and 80s. And then we found that using Premarin by itself would cause uterus lining to grow. So we had to add progesterone to it. Progesterone combats uterine overgrowth of Premarin. Now there's other targets for progesterone, but that's when we understood in the 80s and 90s. So we added in progesterone and then Premarin became the number one worldwide drug in the world for any cause. And it's basically for treating menopause.