HRT is the COVID of Menopause
People who know me often comment about how much I see
parallels among things that most people never associate with one another. They
say I’m odd because most people don’t think the way I do. Of course, since I’ve
had only my one brain in my head all my life and apparently made such
connections between dissimilar things all along, I don’t understand what’s so
odd about the way I think. But I have a feeling that this observation is in
keeping with one of those parallels.
So the parallel is
this: HRT is the COVID of menopause!
I’ll walk you through my thought process.
Starting with history:
While pandemics have been part of the human condition for a
lot longer than menopause has, they both have a long history for humans. It has
never been a question of whether we’ll have another pandemic. Instead, it’s
merely a question of when we’ll have another pandemic. So it shouldn’t
have surprised anyone when COVID hit.
Likewise, now that we’re living long enough to outlive our
ovaries and the hormones they produce, menopause is inevitable. If only women
learned about menopause, they’d discover that it’s gonna happen … unless they
die first.
So, from a historical standpoint, both COVID and menopause
are no surprise, or at least they shouldn’t be.
What about preparedness?
Despite the inevitability of a pandemic, most people were
caught completely off-guard. We’ve had deadly pandemics that have killed
millions upon millions of people, and we’ve had mild pandemics that haven’t
created much havoc. You would think that we’d have adopted a way of life that
either prevents pandemics or prepares us in advance for dealing with them
efficiently. But, nooooo. We live carelessly, ignoring the fact that, in any
contest between man and microbes, the microbes will win.
And, even though menopause is puberty in reverse, bringing
with it over 20 obvious symptoms of estrogen deficiency, most women are
completely clueless even when menopause hits them over the head like a ton of
bricks.
How can we be so unprepared for events that are so
predictable and inevitable? And why is it we are so surprised when they arrive?
Then, there’s the failure to understand or acknowledge the
severity of the situation.
With the COVID pandemic, many people just didn’t believe it
was real. They thought it was a hoax, and they propagated that incorrect
opinion to others. Before long, there were huge bands of people declaring that
there was no pandemic at all.
With menopause, many women believe that menopause will not
“happen” to them. They have the audacity to think that they can prevent it just
by eating whatever they consider to be the “right diet” or doing whatever they
consider to be the “right exercise.”
Why do people have such a hard time accepting things they
don’t like?
One reason is that they fail to make important distinctions
between things over which they have control and things over which they don’t.
A virus is so tiny that you can’t see it, and you don’t know
when you are exposed to it. And it’s everywhere! So, you can’t avoid it by
“being careful,” or adjusting your diet or lifestyle.
Likewise, no matter how much you do to control your risk of
heart attack, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s, nothing will erase the fact that
estrogen loss at menopause increases your risk for all three.
Another reason people don’t accept what they don’t like is
ignorance.
How much of an education do you have on viruses (other than
what your get from the media, which is not a valid source of education)?
Well, if you have no education, why do you think you deserve to offer an
opinion? (My military father used to say, “You don’t deserve an opinion
until you have an education!” Now that I’m in my sixties, I see just how
correct he was.)
And how much of an education on menopause did you have
before becoming a student here at “Menopause University”? Most women know
absolutely nothing about menopause. They’re shocked when they start
learning the facts … which are completely the opposite of everything they thought
they knew.
So, one distortion leads to another, and, before you know
it, people have created all sorts of theories and stories about what they
consider to be the “real story.” These are otherwise known as conspiracy
theories.
Conspiracy theories about the pandemic ranged from
governments collaborating to overpower society to the media creating drama.
Theories about menopause ranged from you’re weak if you
can’t just grin and bear it to the medical profession making it a disease when
it’s “natural.”
Once we have all sorts of disjointed theories, everything
gets more and more exaggerated and extrapolated.
People started protesting against the Coronavirus … as if
the virus cares about protests! Women have long protested against any effort to
talk about menopause and erase the secrecy.
Then we add all sorts of illogic to the mix.
The protests against confinement to avoid spreading the
Coronavirus became protests against infringement of freedom. No longer was it
about a virus that causes a pandemic. Somehow, it was about people’s freedom.
And the fact that menopause is a hormone deficiency just
like any other hormone deficiency has gotten lost in all the rhetoric about
society’s focus on youth and sexiness. Women themselves are in complete denial
about menopause, and their denial only makes things worse for them. If
they welcomed more openness about menopause, it would be to their benefit. But,
instead, they suffer in silence and feel embarrassed if anyone so much as
mentions the word, “menopause.”
After that comes displacement of actual facts with distorted
faux.
Fact: Humans are the legs for any pathogen. If we move, they
move … from person to person, that is. If we pass them from person to person,
they survive and thrive. But if we stay still, and they can’t pass from person
to person, they die off and we thrive
Faux: If you can’t see the virus, it doesn’t exist. Or,
humans are big and viruses are small; so we’ll win if there’s a battle.
Fact: The lifespan of a virus is only a few days, and it can
change its entire genome to adapt to anything we do to kill it in just a month
or two. Humans live for decades, and require over 100 generations to change our
DNA.
Faux: If we just go on about our business, the virus will
disappear. We don’t have to inconvenience ourselves to overcome it.
Fact: Estrogen was your fountain of youth. When you lose it,
you start aging on the inside and the outside. And with that aging comes
increased risks for diseases that are due to estrogen deficiency (heart attack,
osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s). It’s a hormone deficiency that you weren’t
supposed to experience simply because you weren’t supposed to live as long as
we live these days. And, like any hormone deficiency, if you don’t replace the
deficient hormone, you will have diseases that result from the deficiency.
Faux: Since all women eventually lose their estrogen and
experience menopause, it’s “natural.” If you just “get through it,” everything
will go back to normal. You can possibly even avoid menopause with proper diet
& lifestyle.
It’s as if we just can’t handle the truth, so we morph it
into something we find more appealing.
And then what do we do? We try to find a middle-ground
between fact and faux.
We put up little plexiglass screens to prevent the virus
from spreading, impose curfews, and make some people wear masks, but not
others. Do you really think the virus can’t go around the screen, cares what time
day it is, or only targets some people and not others?
And for menopause, we try all sorts of diets, exercise,
vitamins, minerals, supplements, and herbs to “balance” non-existent hormones.
Do we not realize that a hormone is a hormone … and that no kind of diet,
exercise, supplement, or herb can take the place of a missing hormone? Why do
we try fixing the problem with everything except replacing the very
thing that’s missing? Hormone replacement is precisely what we do for every
other hormone deficiency known to man (or woman).
Professionals even drum up mantras to walk the fine line
between knowing that there is benefit in taking hormone replacement for
menopause and acknowledging women’s fears of it: They say, “Take the lowest
dosage for the shortest time.” Isn’t that like telling a smoker she can smoke
one pack of cigarettes daily for only 10 years, but no more … and she’ll be
fine?
The next, and most striking parallel between COVID and
menopause is fear of the antidote.
The antidote against a virus is a vaccine. It consists of a
tiny dose of the dead virus that enables your body to mount a response to it
without your having to get sick. But people fear that the vaccine is more
dangerous than the actual disease, and refuse to get it vaccinated.
Hormone replacement therapy for estrogen deficiency is merely
a matter of replacing your lost estrogen with another source of the same
hormone your own body used to produce. And, just like insulin or thyroid
hormone replacement, it solves the problem of estrogen deficiency in one fell
swoop – eradicating all the miserable symptoms, all the deadly diseases
associated with estrogen deficiency, and restoring your quality of life.
But women claim that hormone replacement is dangerous; that
it causes cancer and will kill them. Does that mean your own body produced a
deadly poisonous hormone for almost 40 years? If so, why do you feel and look
so young and healthy when you have it, but feel and look so old and unhealthy once
you lose it? How did it go from being divine to being dangerous? How can
estrogen replacement be more dangerous than the deadly diseases caused by
estrogen deficiency? If hormone replacement is so dangerous, why isn’t anybody
afraid of insulin replacement or thyroid hormone replacement? Nobody seems to
be afraid of them.
All this fear of the antidote interferes with the ability to
see the big picture.
Yes, the COVID pandemic is indeed a pandemic. But how big a
toll does it take on human lives? It kills only 2% of the people who get it. That’s
the same as the annual flu. This is very unlike some of the pandemics we’ve had
in the past. Yet, we’ve never reacted to much deadlier pandemics with such
massive shut-downs of society. This is the first time we’ve shut down whole
economies and confined whole countries.
Failing to see the big picture of menopause is similar.
Despite the fact that you’ll outlive your ovaries, we have ways of replacing
the hormone deficiency that it will create. This is just like any other hormone
deficiency that we treat with hormone replacement. But, we don’t demonize other
hormone replacements; only HRT for menopause. What’s so difficult about
acknowledging that hormone replacement for menopause makes as much sense as it
does for any other hormone deficiency?
By failing to see the big picture, we create trade-offs.
With COVID, we’ve traded a 2% death rate for a global
economic crisis that will endure for years — if not decades: psychological
breakdowns, business failures, and massive economic setbacks. Is the trade-off
worth it?
With menopause, we’ve traded fear of an inevitable hormone
deficiency and its hormone replacement for a miserable quality of life and a high
risk for three deadly diseases. Does that sound like a good swap?
With both COVID and menopause, our reaction has constituted
either massive overkill or merely a band-aid.
The reaction to COVID was overkill. The trade-offs reveal
the fact that the over-reaction did more damage than good.
With menopause, neglect of the topic, ignorance of its significance,
and rejection of the antidote constitute merely putting a band-aid on a
situation that could be solved. Women are doomed to a lower quality of life.
You would think that people would wake-up to these things
that make both COVID and menopause so wonky. But they don’t. And the reason
they don’t is because they throw out the science and replace it with individual
opinions or collective scare tactics.
When the science of virology doesn’t fit someone’s opinion
or desires, they throw out the science and replace it with their own opinion.
They discount the credibility of the experts in order to justify their own
behavior. Viral biology be damned! How dare anyone tell me I can’t do as I
please because of a microscopic bug!
And, with menopause, basic biology and gynecology become the
enemy if they provide a solution that is not in keeping with the hype of the
times. Marketing and propaganda trump logic. So instead of using reliable
pharmacologic hormone replacement, women fall for scams that promote pellets,
compounded hormones, and supplements that have no menopausal benefit
whatsoever. These other alternatives are labeled as “natural,” whereas the only
reliable solution gets the label of “harmful.”
All of these reactions are due to fear. Fear is the most
powerful emotion on Earth. And, once fear is part of the equation, the response
to it is anything but logical or rational.
We’ve had pandemics in the past, but never reacted (or
over-reacted) the way we have to this one. And COVID doesn’t even come close to
being the most deadly one. So the pandemic itself was not as big a problem as
our reaction to it.
The most significant generator of fear with regard to
menopause was the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study. There have been
hundreds of studies on HRT, and they have always found varying results. But
none of them has been deemed the “bible of studies” and debunked all the
others. Nor has the reaction to any of them ever caused the fear, confusion,
and damage to lives that the WHI has caused. Like the reaction to COVID, more
lives were destroyed due to the irrational reaction to the WHI than to the
actual issue. There just isn’t any logical reason for one study to have ruined
so many lives.
With all these illogical reactions, people fail to separate
an antidote that is personal from one that is societal.
The COVID vaccine is not a personal matter. It’s a societal
one. There is no way we’ll surpass the COVID — or any other — pandemic if the
vaccine against it is a matter of personal choice. There’s no way that an
unvaccinated person doesn’t pose a risk to others. Pandemics aren’t about your
individual rights; they’re about society’s welfare.
HRT for menopause is just the opposite. It’s a personal
matter. A woman’s use of HRT does not affect the rest of society. If she incurs
risk from HRT, it does not affect anyone but her.
So the personal versus societal differences between the COVID
vaccine and HRT create disagreement and division among people.
With COVID, the maskers are against the anti-maskers. The
vaccers are against the anti-vaccers. It’s gotten so bad that vaccers exclude
anti-vaccers from social events, and anti-vaccers destroy vaccination hubs.
With menopause, pro-HRT women are ostracized or terrorized
by women who tell them that HRT is dangerous. Anti-HRT women are marginalized
by their symptoms. There’s even division between patients and their doctors.
Some doctors are opposed to HRT, while others think all women should use HRT.
Doctors who are against it won’t prescribe it for women who want it; and
doctors who are for it push it on women who don’t want it. There are even scams
by doctors calling themselves “hormone specialists,” but know nothing about
menopause. It’s a great big mess!
The bottom line is that people want things both ways with
regard to both COVID and menopause.
For COVID, people want to be able to roam, travel, and
attend public events. They want our former way of life back … but don’t want to
get the vaccine so that we can have it back.
For menopause, women want to feel the way they felt before
they lost their estrogen, and continue to age gradually instead of suddenly.
They want their quality of life back … but don’t want to take HRT in order to
get it back
Unfortunately, we can’t have it both ways. We have to
choose.
As the whole COVID drama has played out over months and
years, I’ve sat back in awe of the parallels between the reaction to it and the
reaction to menopause. I think humans just refuse to accept anything they don’t
like. And the result is a litany of chaos and distortion. In every single way
possible, HRT is the COVID of menopause!