The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed On Women

With the ardent tone of a close friend, Barbara Seaman draws on forty years of journalistic research to expose the "menopause industry" and shows how estrogen therapy often causes more problems—including breast cancer, heart attack, and stroke—than it cures. The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women tracks the well-intentioned discovery of synthetic estrogen through the unconscionable and misleading promotion of a dangerous drug.

For nearly as long as women have been around, they have been going through menopause. It is a bodily process as old as human birth, death, and of course, menstruation. Like many normal biological events, menopause was gradually medicalized, and with the rise of pharmaceutical medicine, women and their doctors were convinced that it was an "estrogen deficiency disease" that could be treated by supplementing the body's declining estrogen levels with hormones. By 2002 hormone treatment had been on the market for more than fifty years when doctors and women alike were shocked by the results of a massive clinical trial, the Women's Health Initiative: women taking hormones had more heart attacks, breast cancer, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, and blood clots than women who did not, and patients were left scrambling to find new and sometimes difficult answers to their menopause and midlife health questions. In The No-Nonsense Guide to Menopause, Barbara Seaman, a legendary figure in the women's health movement, and Laura Eldridge have written a comprehensive, easy-to-use resource that will give you all the information you need to make smart and informed decisions that will put you in control during this time of transition -- medically, psychologically, sexually, and even financially. With the latest research on everything from hormone replacement therapy to skin creams to preventing osteoporosis, The No-Nonsense Guide to Menopause is the definitive manual on this important subject. You'll find out which changes are expected and natural and which can be a cause for concern; how hormonal shifts can affect your heart, your sex life, and your mood; and what you can do to address these issues. Whether the authors are discussing the risk factors for heart disease, the benefits of lifting weights, or if you should consider a hysterectomy, they offer unbiased, straightforward information and advice with a signature blend of wisdom and sensitivity. Perhaps most important, you'll learn how to evaluate what you read in magazines, hear on the news, and are told by your doctor, so you can distinguish between solid facts and dubious claims. By learning how to read and evaluate scientific studies and becoming familiar with what goes on behind the scenes in research labs, at doctors' offices, and at pharmaceutical companies, you will be able to become your own advocate. The next time you go to the doctor's office, you will know how to make the most of your visit and leave feeling confident, informed, and in command. There is no one way to experience menopause and no single way to handle the challenges it can present, but as a no-nonsense patient, you will have the tools you need to make decisions that are right for you.

In this volume, Cutter argues that gender-specific disease and related bioethical discourses are philosophically integrative. Gender-specific disease is integrative because the descriptive roles of gender, disease, and their relation are inextricably tied to their prescriptive roles within frames of reference. While the text mainly focuses on gender-specific diseases that affect women, Cutter also includes examples involving men, children, and members of the LGBT community.

The Contemporary Womans Guide to Midlife is an autobiographical tour through midlife. The author takes the reader through her transformation in early midlife and allows a brief, but intimate, glimpse of one womans perspective on the process. Essay topics include the empty nest, menopause, values and relationships. A must read for anyone approaching or knowing someone who is approaching midlife or major life transitions.

"Exorbitant prices for lifesaving drugs, safety recalls affecting tens of millions of Americans, and soaring rates of addiction and overdose on prescription opioids have caused many to lose faith in pharmaceutical companies. Now, Americans are demanding national reckoning with a monolithic industry. In Pharma, award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author Gerald Posner uncovers the real story of the Sacklers, the family that became one of America's wealthiest from the success of OxyContin, their blockbuster narcotic painkiller at the centure of the opioid crisis. The unexpected twists and turns of the Sakler family saga are told against the startling chronicle of a powerful industry that sits at the intersection of public health and profits. Pharma reveals how and why American drug companies have put earnings ahead of patients"--

In 1941 the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of diethylstilbestrol (DES), the first synthetic chemical to be marketed as an estrogen and one of the first to be identified as a hormone disruptor—a chemical that mimics hormones. Although researchers knew that DES caused cancer and disrupted sexual development, doctors prescribed it for millions of women, initially for menopause and then for miscarriage, while farmers gave cattle the hormone to promote rapid weight gain. Its residues, and those of other chemicals, in the American food supply are changing the internal ecosystems of human, livestock, and wildlife bodies in increasingly troubling ways. In this gripping exploration, Nancy Langston shows how these chemicals have penetrated into every aspect of our bodies and ecosystems, yet the U.S. government has largely failed to regulate them and has skillfully manipulated scientific uncertainty to delay regulation. Personally affected by endocrine disruptors, Langston argues that the FDA needs to institute proper regulation of these commonly produced synthetic chemicals.