Dr. Betty Murray discusses how an FDA warning about hormone replacement therapy created two decades of misinformation, leaving women without treatment for menopause symptoms and other health conditions. The conversation examines what the warning actually said versus what doctors and patients believed it meant.
I'm hopeful that we can remove particularly the black box warning off of that. Shouldn't be on any of them. But vaginal estrogen is a joke. Like. Like, it's. It's not even systemic. Like, I was having a conversation earlier with a client and. And you know, she had been terrified by her doctors, and she's like, I can only do estriol and in a really low dose because I want to protect my bones. And I was like, and it will do nothing to protect your bones because estriol does not have that effect. You know, and the truth is, we've been using conjugated equine estrogen, whether you like it or hate it, since the 40s, and not a single study before and or after showed that taking estrogen replacement increased breast cancer mortality at all. Full stop. Never a question. It's complete and utter bullshit.
I always tell my clients, like, like you there, if your doctor tells you that hormones cause cancer, asks to see the studies because there simply aren't any. But b, even if they did get conjugate equine estrogen, right, Even if they're on birth control pills, like, what is the risk of clotting increase? It's like 6 in 10,000 if you take it orally versus transdermally. So it's like, come on, people. I mean, it's just. It's ridiculous, it's maddening. And yes, it really needs a rebrand. I mean, it's like a digital weaponization of hormones for women. It's really like holding the hormones hostage for preventing women to get them even though they're FDA approved. And I always tell women to ask their doctors, like, this is FDA approved. Why wouldn't you prescribe it then? Why would these hormones exist and be FDA approved if you won't prescribe them? Or the other really big game changer. And this can feel uncomfortable for a lot of people, but I'm like, you can also say, so you won't give me hormones. So now I need you to document that in the chart that I have asked you for hormones and you will not prescribe them. Oh, you know what? Let me. Okay, if you want, I'll try it. It's like all of a sudden, that flips the switch. I have these symptoms. The doctor told me it wasn't hormone related, so it must be in my head. How many women have said that to you? And you're like, are you kidding me? Like, why on earth would you question the wisdom of your body over a white coat? Who doesn't live inside your body, you're your own best doctor. A lot of women say to me, I don't have any symptoms, so why should I take hormones? But then you start talking to them and they're like, well, then I have this autoimmune disorder and I have all these achy joints and oh, you know, I started having pain panic attacks 10 years ago. And it's like, do you not understand that your panic attacks are actually a symptom of your, your hormone decline in particular progesterone. And same with those achy joints. Like your progesterone is a natural opioid producer. Like you can really reduce your joint pain. And then the light goes on and they start to put together, but they, they don't. It's like you said, Dr. Bay. Like, they think it's just hot flashes or maybe vaginal dryness. Yeah, I've never had a hot flash.
Yeah, I've never had a hot flash. If that's my only gauge, then yeah, then I would have been mistaken. But yeah, I just. Yeah. And I look at it and I say, okay, so women have paid the price for that. So we have an inability to get care for something very fundamental that can reduce our risk of all cause mortality, particularly things that put us in a wheelchair or nursing home unnecessarily. And then on the other side of it, we have political policies and other things that are now damaging our planet that is probably going to make all of the endocrine disruption worse and make our food supply more dangerous. Right. It's like we have, we have this like on one side we're like, yay, we're getting something hopefully taken care of with the fda. And then in the back door we have all these scary things happening with our food supply and our environment. Like, does it matter if we get red dye off the shelves if our waterways and our food are toxic?
I know. I don't know how Bill Gates, this may be controversial, what I'm going to say. I don't know how Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci are not locked up in jail forever. I really don't. Who on earth approved MRNA sprays on our food? Who approved this? Like, the only way, Excuse me. The only way to avoid this, and I'm not Even convinced it's 100% is to buy organic. But a lot of times organic farms are next to non organic farms. So we do know there is, you know, cross pollination. Right. And so it's like. But not everyone has the bandwidth or resources or, you know, lives in the countryside to grow their own food either. So it's just. It really feels. It feels heavy, you know, and frustrating. You're like, oh, my God, we're just poisoning our kids, giving them apples. It shouldn't be like this, you know?
