53. HRT Myths, Metabolism, and Midlife Health with Danielle Kepics (The Hormone Disconnect Series Episode 4)

So let's dive into this because let's be honest, the 2002 Women's Health Initiative study did women dirty for, like, two decades.

Can we talk a little bit more about what this research study was about, what went wrong with it, and why? And then to piggyback on that, why are so many women still being told that HRT is dangerous even after everything's been like, "That's all false"?

Yeah.

So the WHI, which is the Women's Health Initiative, which literally that research came out when I graduated high school, which was 24 years ago now, which I don't know how I'm that old.

[laughs]

I'm still 25.

And so-

Right

... yeah, it just doesn't make any sense to me.

And there were multiple arms to this research study, and I don't have information pulled up about it right now, but what happened was the researchers actually didn't say, "This causes breast cancer," but some people at a headline at the New York Post or whatever, I can't remember, I think it was the New York Post, "Estrogen causes breast cancer." And I still wanna know who paid that person off to write that article.

Like, strap a tinfoil hat on me real hard.

Where did we get that from? Because that wasn't the deduction, right? And so all physicians saw were, "Oh my God, estrogen causes cancer.

We need to rip all these women off their hormones.

I'm not writing for hormones anymore.

This is dangerous." There was a lot of fear-mongering and gaslighting, and women paid the price because we now have a study, I think it's called the Mortality Toll of 65 Plus Women of Unnecessary Deaths Due to Lack of HRT Prescribing.

So they went back and they did a retrospective analysis.

There's another name for that type of study, and it's just the word finding.

It's perimenopause, it's like Where's Waldo-

Yep

... for words.

But they did a retrospective study a- and they looked at how many women died unnecessarily, all-cause mortality, morbidity and mortality, because they were denied hormones, and the number's astronomical.

I wanna say it's, like, 60-something thousand to, like, there was a range that they gave.

Women literally died because they were denied HRT.

And why is this still persisting? I think, personally, in medicine, that there is a lot of indoctrination.

Who's funding the medical schools, right? I've long said that the issues in medicine are an institutional level problem, and by institution, I mean wherever the person received the training, right? And this is not a knock on the professors.