“Buyer beware” is a phrase that we’re used to hearing when you need a gadget or car or some other chintzy consumer goods. You have to protect yourself against people who sell you things that are not in your best interest.
Unfortunately, the same can be true with your own doctor. Welcome to our fundamentally flawed culture of health.
(please forward this article to any who need to see the doc for any reason) 
I have reported here on the new research on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) — that, yes, there may be some cases in which it can be beneficial. But only when given in the smallest dose, over shortest period of time.
Despite these data, which are very well known, doctors are still inexplicably giving women high-dose pills that are linked to strokes and cancer, according a study by Dr Randall Stafford and colleagues at Stanford University.
Dr Stafford looked at data from 340,820 patient visits to hospitals, clinics and doctor’s offices, as well as information from telephone calls. “We’re disappointed,” Dr. Randall Stafford of Stanford University in California, who led the study, said in a statement.
Are you one of those women?
“Yes, there was an increase in the use of low-dose preparations, but it was not sizeable.”
They found that the overall use of HRT has decreased, but the women who were still prescribed HRT were often still getting the dangerously high doses of hormones.
“Despite reduced use, standard-dose oral (HRT) remains the dominant formulation, yet lower dose transdermal and vaginal preparations may yield less harm,” they wrote in Menopause: The Journal of the North American Menopause Society.
Why?
Are the physicians unaware of the link between breast cancer, heart disease, and larger aggressive tumor formation that can form in the women they are giving these pills to? Really?
Do they have extra stores of the drugs they have to “use up”? Or do they simply blow off those research findings because they’ve always done the same thing in the same way. I know, I know, I’ve wandered into the land of speculation at this point, but can you give me another plausible reason for these data uncovered by the Stanford researchers?
Bottom line
Whatever the reason, you have to be your own doctor, and check up on the doc you happen to have, or the one you happen to be assigned to. Get second opinions, third opinions, do your own research, find your own answers. Then, use that knowledge to make an informed decision for yourself. Unfortunately, you have to.
Older U.S. women stick to hormone pills: study | Reuters
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