quote:

---

Three years ago, the University of British Columbia-based Therapeutics Initiative evaluated the health claims of HRT based on all the available studies at the time and concluded there was no solid evidence for long-term benefits to the heart. Like the WHI study, the Therapeutics Initiatives analysis concluded that HRT should be used only in the short term to relieve menopausal symptoms such as hot flushes.

"It shows how effective the marketing influence is despite the evidence," said Jim Wright, a UBC professor of medicine who is the managing director of the Therapeutics Initiative. "Hopefully, now they will get the point."

---

But from the first HRT has looked more than a little like a "silver bullet" solution to the problems of aging. Many doctors have been prescribing it as a matter of course, even over the qualms of patients who asked questions -- which might account for the large numbers of women who either never filled their prescriptions (20 per cent estimated in Canada) or who stopped taking the medication within a year (50 per cent).

The justifications for taking HRT were often, also, mainly cosmetic -- It will keep your skin so smooth! (So will water retention.) In an article in the New Yorker sometime in the last ten years (sorry: I've been searching for a reference on Google and can't find one) the journalist Francine du Plessix Grey traced the history of the marketing of HRT in the U.S. back to a couple of clever Manhattan gynecologists who wrote a book called Forever Female! (1970s?), in which they warned women that only estrogen replacement could save them from the dreadful fate that awaits all women after menopause: turning into asexual, dried-up, wrinkled, wizened ugly crones.

Some of us worry also that women's medicine is often subject to medical fads, such as the sudden enthusiasm for IUDs in the 1970s, as the first cohort of women to take birth-control pills from adolescence began to approach their mid-thirties and needed to be taken off the pill. IUDs were so doctor-friendly ...

Anyway, I'll stop there. I know there are other arguments to be made on all sides. Perhaps some babblers have experience with HRT, or with the more severe effects of menopause. I know there are no easy answers.

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: skdadl ]

quote:

---

That's my rant for the day.

---

Hee. It's still early in the day. If that's her only rant, I'll be quite disappointed.

The side-effects seem to vary widely, person to person. I know women who put on distressing amounts of weight, eg (like fifty pounds), in only a few months on HRT.

I know some enthusiasts for HRT, though, and their stories of really severe night sweats, loss of concentration, mood swings, etc., are convincing to me. Notice, though, in that anecdote that opens the story in the Grope, a young professional woman's conviction that HRT is part of the regime that keeps her in a hip game ... I mean, she was only 42 when her doctor told her she was going into menopause (did she get a second opinion? I wonder about that doctor ...), and I can empathize with her concerns -- but there's a superficial stylishness to the way her concerns are illustrated that concerns me!

The real problem is the long-term effects. We have known for a long time that there is a link between estrogen supplements and breast cancer, and this study deepens that concern. All the other serious medical concerns HRT was supposed to address, except for bone-thinning and perhaps incidence of colorectal cancer -- well, it turns out that incidence of those other problems rises with long-term use of HRT.

The risks are heart attack, stroke, and breast cancer.... the same ones that I've heard warnings about with bcps.

So, if this isn't safe anymore, what about the birth control pill? Why would that be any more safe?

I think that I'll just stay off of them. I'll look into Luna or something.

Judes:

quote:

---

and they are right about the environmental causes of breast cancer too

---

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: Trinitty ]

Seriously, there are a lot of older people who believe implicitly what they're told. I remember my grandmother recently telling me an opinion of hers on something or other, and I disagreed with her. She said, "No, it's true! They had it on the news! It was right there on the news." I was like, wow.

And it's the same with her doctor - if her doctor says it's true, then it's gospel. Luckily we have an awesome doctor, but geez. They've had crappy doctors in the past, and they trusted them completely too.

Geez, I don't know what to do with her. Herbicides on the lawn, malathion for the garden, round-up on selected weeds, takes Premarin...

Maybe it's because I read Margaret Wente's column in the Grope, and it ruined my day.

Then I read Ellen Goodman's column in the Notional Pest (which, criminally, is not on their scaled-back website: Rebecca Eckler's drivel is there, but not Goodman's wisdom) and felt a lot better.

Don't make me go through Wente's yuppie-spoiled-brat gushings a second time. Once was already too much. She always uses that presumptuous first-person plural narrator, "we," as though she and her airhead narcissistic friends represented anyone at all beyond themselves. Note her neurotic fear of even minor discomfort and of normal processes of aging, which she calls "disgusting," thereby implying contempt for real people who really are old.

She mentions Robert Wilson's disgustingly sexist and age-ist book Feminine Forever, but avoids examining just how transparent a marketing tool it was, presumably because focusing on that background would raise a few questions about how much a part of the scam she has been herself, both as victim and as cheerleader. (I can do her cheerleading history a bit another time.)

She does drop one interesting bit of information in quoting her own doctor:

quote:

---

a generation of doctors learned in medical school that the underuse of estrogen was one of the greatest crimes of the medical patriarchy. "Not prescribing HRT," my (male) doctor told me recently, "amounts to medical malpractice."

---

Translation: a generation of doctors were taught the co-opted, upper-middle-class version of feminism, the one Wente herself has long sold in her columns -- and it sells so well, although it is a chimera ... Och, I am losing my temper again.

Goodman, however, is tonic after Wente. She quotes great patches of Wilson, who opens his book by telling a story he obviously meant to be read as a deeply affecting moral tale, about a husband's complaint about his wife: " 'Doc,' the man said, "they tell me you can fix women when they get old and crabby.' His complaint? 'She's driving me nuts. She won't fix meals ... She picks on me all the time.' Then came the clincher. The husband reached into his pocket and laid a gun on the doctor's table: 'If you don't cure her, "I'll kill her.' Dr Wilson finished this tale by musing, 'I have often been haunted by the thought that except for the tiny stream of estrogen ... this woman might have died a violent death at the hands of her own husband.' "

That's how the selling of HRT started. That book and Wilson's speeches, Goodman tells us, were funded by Wyeth, the company that made the version of the pill Wilson promoted.

Goodman goes on to focus on the history of the marketing campaign and on the intelligent resistance of feminist critics. She also does something that many of the doctors being interviewed by the press this a.m. are still too baffled and maybe too embarrassed to do: she keeps repeating the simple instruction that the WHI has just given the participants in its study: "Stop taking your study pills." They didn't say, and she doesn't say, "Talk to your doctor and together you can evaluate your options." They said: Stop.

In all the news stories this a.m., by contrast, most of the doctors are doing fancy footwork. Most of them are terribly worried that women are going to "panic." (And we all know, after all, how women do that all the time ... ) How long is it going to take the "Let's sit down and evaluate our options" crew to get around to what should always -- always -- have been their first question? What is this medication actually good for, and how do we know?

Drugs don't have civil rights. They are guilty until proved innocent. But this therapy was given more than the benefit of the doubt: it was used as an expression of an ideology, and continued to be pushed even as the evidence of risk mounted.

quote:

---

"The study found eight more breast cancers per 10,000 women," she says. "To you, it may sound like a lot. But to a statistician or an epidemiologist, it doesn't sound like much."

---

You know, I've heard this a few times over the last 24 hours. When I called my mom and talked about it with her, that's what she said too. But I thought the whole point of TAKING this therapy to begin with was to lower the risk of getting heart disease, breast cancer, and blood clots. So if they're finding even an extremely slight increase, even an increase that is statistically insignificant, then why are women taking these drugs? Even if there were no adverse affects at all of taking the drugs, but there were no benefits either, then it's an unnecessary expense and unnecessary medication.

Or is it because it's supposed to be a cure for hot flashes and mood swings? I guess I can see taking a risk if you have really bad menopausal symptoms, but just as a routine thing? Ridiculous.

My stepmother's doctor has been trying to convince her for a while to go on HRT, but my stepmother keeps refusing. She says she asks her doctor, "Can you give me a good reason why I should go on it?" and everytime her doctor comes up with a reason, she replies, "I control that through diet. I control that through exercise." etc.

quote:

---

So if they're finding even an extremely slight increase, even an increase that is statistically insignificant, then why are women taking these drugs?

---

That's the question. That's the question.

The doctor she quoted had a point too - for some women, the very slight risks may be worth it to relieve symptoms, just like the slight risk involved with birth control pills or anything else might be worth the benefits. My only problem with this whole thing is prescribing them routinely, whether a woman shows the need for them or not.

I think when she was making those generalizations about the "disgusting" parts of aging, she was doing it to show the hype around the issue of menopause over the years, not because she personally thinks that. I think she was taking a slightly humourous look at the way women have been manipulating their hormones over the past several decades in the pursuit of youth and health, but I think she talked about it more as an observation of attitudes rather than her own endorsement of women thinking they are disgusting as they age.

Her mention of Wilson was by way of giving background on the beginning of the HRT's major popularity - I don't think she was endorsing his views either, she was just laying them out.

quote:

---

Drugs don't have civil rights. They are guilty until proved innocent.

---

And it's probably a good thing that someone came along to challenge the harsh language I've used above to describe Wente. The thing is, I've been reading her for years, and she is undeniably a propagandist for a small range of things I utterly oppose -- like the New York Stock Exchange, eg, or the virtues of capitalism because it allows you to be a conspicuous consumer, and conspicuous consumption, besides being girly fun, is proof of the virtue of "our" ladder-climbing yuppie cohort. Right? (You see -- I can't resist starting to parody her -- I just can't -- but I'm not making this up.)

If you read her regularly, and if you have also read her mentor at the Grope, former ed-in-c William "I have recessed lighting" Thorsell, now head of the ROM ("We're doing a spectacularly expensive reno at the ROM!"), you would come to think of her, as I do, as the female Thorsell.

I remember her, eg, running on at length a couple of years ago about how all "we" boomer women (we are all handsomely paid execs, you understand) were going to be playing tennis at eighty and looking terrific while doing it, courtesy HRT and other medical advances, the whole column based on the mistaken if common fallacy that fluctuations in the life-expectancy-at-birth tables really mean that we are all going to be living much longer.

I don't see how older or poorer readers could not have been offended by her triumphalism (which, again, I think even a moderately sceptical reader should have suspected was more wishful thinking -- or propaganda -- than anything else). Some of that triumphalism shows even in the column I linked to above -- eg:

quote:

---

What if I dry up like a prune and develop a mustache?

---

quote:

---

Then, when our fertility fell off the cliff, we took one last shot at motherhood and begged to be injected with substances that sent our ovaries into overdrive, no questions asked. Then, the moment we faced menopause, we learned that without estrogen life could turn into hell. Who wants hot flashes and night sweats? They sound disgusting. So does another alleged indignity of aging, something delicately known as "vaginal atrophy." Yech.

---

Michelle, those are descriptions -- melodramatically exaggerated, to be sure -- of some of the real effects of aging. I can't imagine you talking about human experience that way. To me, it takes someone who finds the great unwashed tawsome, all previous human experience an irrelevant bore, someone intent on being a pampered star -- ie, a narcissist -- to write about life that way, even in jest.

Sorry: even before this is political or medical, to me, it is intellectual. There has never lived a self-respecting artist who could tolerate either mere prettiness or "good taste," and that's where Wente's values, like those of the American popular culture she loves so well and promotes so tirelessly, derive from. She is Walt Disney for the upper middle class. She is one of those people in Auden's poem, "Children afraid of the night / Who have never been happy or good."

skdadl's post, where Goodman talks about Wilson's little parable of the murderous husband got me thinking, too... Moody, won't fix meals... That stage of life... How much of that is hormonal, and how much of that is psychological? Women go through the empty nest thing at that age, they go through more than physical changes. How many women are actually in need of hormone therapy and how many just need to find a good therapist and work out how their lives are changing?

quote:

---

Can it really be all hormonal for all women?

---

Of course it can't; but it's of a piece with the same "medical materialism" (to use a phrase I just coined) that insists that depression is nothing but a problem of too-rapid serotonin re-uptake, or whatever it does insist this week.

I've been debating with myself whether to mention it. I've never said anything like this on babble before. But you know where Margaret Wente refers to

quote:

---

something delicately known as "vaginal atrophy." Yech.

---

Hah! There are easy ways to lubricate that. What she doesn't know about yet -- and I wish it for her; I really do! I wish it for all aging women -- is the upside of increasing sensitivity, shall we say (I'm sure we could document this phenom ... should I mention it? ... oh, spit it out, skdadl ...):

Are you ready, boys? On three...

quote:

---

What is spontaneous orgasm??

---

For obvious reasons I'm a little out of the loop on this. But I didn't know until I read this Salon piece that HRT has been in use since the 50s, or that dangers have been suspected since the 70s...

quote:

---

Major pharmaceutical companies have been using women -- duping women -- since the 1950s when a few doctors started classifying menopause as "estrogen deficiency disease," as if this natural passage was an affliction that needed medication for treatment. Doctors "treated" us with tranquilizers and antidepressants. By the 1960s, with an onslaught of advertising money from Wyeth, the manufacturer of the top-selling estrogen product, hormones became the "cure" of choice for menopause.

It wasn't until the 1970s that doctors discovered a problem: Estrogen greatly increased the risks of uterine cancer. Hardly discouraged, the pharmaceutical companies went back to the lab and developed a mixture of estrogen and progesterone designed to block the uterine cancer risk. A relentless bid to expand the market accompanied the new menopause "cure." After initially claiming that hormones only assisted with the symptoms of menopause such as hot flashes, the drug companies steadily added to the list of things it was supposed to help, from bone density, to heart health, to sexual vigor, to enhanced memory, to curing depression.

Every time a study has been released that has challenged the safety of hormone replacement therapy, the pharmaceutical companies have gone into high gear to minimize the results and find new reasons for women to continue swallowing the drugs. They have scared women into thinking they will fall apart when they reach menopause -- even worse, cease to be attractive -- if they don't start taking hormones. If history is any guide, researchers at Wyeth are trying even now to package a new combination of hormones to replace the tainted brew.

---

(psst... skdadl... your first link up above there now goes right to Wente's column...)

[ July 12, 2002: Message edited by: 'lance ]

Read Posner's cold summary of the studies that have been done so far, and then wonder about the irresponsibility of many of the MDs who've been quoted in these parts lately.

I've got to go back to read Posner again carefully -- I was only halfway through when I'd become inflamed enough to write this post. We have got to demand that MDs and gynecologists cut the crap! you know? We really do. Forget about evaluating the options, honeys: have we read the scientific literature? Have the doctors?

And yes: Along with "Follow the money," "Follow the insurance companies," "Follow the CEO stock options," and other such classic caveats of the age, we had better start reciting, "Follow the pharmaceutical companies."

quote:

---

We have got to demand that MDs and gynecologists cut the crap! you know? We really do. Forget about evaluating the options, honeys: have we read the scientific literature? Have the doctors?

---

I think it's dangerous to assume that your doctor know it all, especially in relation to women's health issues. I know that the research I did all on my lonesome was more than invaluable when I was having my babies -- I asked some very challenging questions, and was able to make my own decisions based on both my doctor's advice and my own analysis.

I think the same thing holds true with the issues of aging and menopause. We're taught not to contradict the doctors, we aren't smart enough to look at the statistical data and reach any sort of conclusions that would entail discussion, or, gawd forbid, debate.

There are positive and creative practical ways to cope with transitions like menopause, too, and I hope people will come along to talk about those.

But I have to tell you (you knew this was coming): I keep looking at this paragraph from Wente's article and wondering what it means, and/or how she could have published it:

quote:

---

And another part of the study, testing women who can take estrogen alone because they've had hysterectomies, has found no unsafe adverse effects to date. (That's why women with hysterectomies don't need to worry.)

---

Is there a doctor in the house? I am not a doctor (please insert that as a footnote to everything I say), but I have been carefully instructed on the possible links between ovarian, breast, and colorectal cancer, and I believe that all set off alarm bells against estrogen therapy of any kind. Many women who have had hysterectomies had them because they already had ovarian cancer. Trust me: those women are not encouraged to take estrogen therapy.

quote:

---

I've got to stop sounding so angry. I hate myself when I do that. Really, I do. I know there are cool political ways to think about this story...

---

I don't know, skdadl, usually I take care not to sound angry, either. But then I think of James Thurber:

quote:

---

A little crotch-kicking can be a good thing, if done in anger. I can't stand guys who are merely piqued by the unforgiveable.

---

(You can, of course, substitute grils in there).

Before, during, and since the G8 I've been thinking (heh, heh) more and more about the proper role of anger, and more generally passion, in our politics (whoever exactly "we" are). Since I gave up barstool preaching and ranting (oh, how I could rant, when properly warmed), I've been uncomfortable with displays of both. And I've had little time for that sub-set of activists who seem to thing that just by developing and displaying anger, they've accomplished something (I'm caricaturing a bit, but not much, I fear, not much).

Lately though I've begun to re-think this, and grope my way toward a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the subject. I'll let you know when I get there. My point for now is, don't worry about coming off angry, when it's appropriate (it is) and you're in the right surroundings (you are). Besides, you're (particularly) beautiful when you're mad!

Back to the main point (yikes! twice in one day! Wot's it coming to, etc.). You ask of Wente's paragraph:

quote:

---

Am I wrong? Can anyone explain that paragraph to me? Is it just badly written, or is it mischievous?

---

No, I don't think so you're wrong, though I can't explain that paragraph. But it could be both badly written and mischievous, though without conscious intent....

What I mean is, I've got fifty bucks says Wente has no more read that study than I have, or twenty-five says she's read at most one page of the executive summary. I'll bet she's basing that on someone else's (probably a Glob writer's) summary of a summary, and somewhere the qualifier "women who've had hysterctomies for reasons other than ovarian cancer" got lost. Why, I don't know -- carelessness, sloppiness, skepticism about the study's findings....

Edited to add:

Seems I could take a lesson or two in succinctness from Zoot Capri.

[ July 12, 2002: Message edited by: 'lance ]

quote:

---

Why, I don't know -- carelessness, sloppiness, skepticism about the study's findings....

---

I started to do research. I found that Robert Wilson, M.D., the early salesman for Premarin, contributed greatly to this anxiety by describing menopause in his book "Feminine Forever" as a "mutilation of the whole body" and further intoning that "no woman can be sure of escaping the horror of this living decay". He convinced a whole generation of women that it was a period of inevitable disease. This is explained in a book called "Natural Woman, Natural Menopause" which really gives one an insight into what's happening and warns women of HRT and says that there is no substantial evidence that HRT prevents heart disease but rather, contributes to breast cancer and other cancers.

I sent this book to my doctor but she did not read it. She kept insisting that I take HRT (Premarin) because my father had died of heart disease. I kept talking back to her and refused to accept her prescriptions.

I tried black cohosh, evening primrose oil, Dr. Lee's estrogen creams (derived from plants) - I tried everything and nothing worked. I suffered for 3-1/2 years and finally came to the decision that I'll take the risks because I need quality of life NOW. Went to my doctor and said: "I give up". Write me up a prescription. I promised myself that I would only take it for 1 year. Instant relief! I had a marvelous year. Went back to university, stage-managed a few plays, accepted every social invitation. I felt like a new person - or found my previous self again. Premarin is truly effective for the severe symptoms. I hated taking it but felt there was no real choice for me.

(By the way, how many of you know where Premarin comes from? And how horses (mares) have to suffer to alleviate our discomfort?)

When the year was up, I slowly weaned myself of the HRT. The flashes were back with a vengeance. Life became hell again. I started to rationalize; went into denial about the dangers and tried hard to believe the reassurances of my doctor.

Now the second year is up and the news came out about the dangers. This is what I had been trying to tell my doctor all along!! I'm really angry at her and yet I don't want to switch doctors because she has been good in other ways, and besides, weren't most doctors like her?

Apparently these pharmaceutical companies woo doctors - give them "perks" i.e. pay their expenses to go to seminars and conferences. So the doctors basically get their information from SALESMEN/WOMEN! And then I wonder if they get more perks the more they prescribe the pharmaceuticals products?

So now, back to the drawing board. Back to the health books and the health stores.

My doctor made an interesting comment one day. She insinuated that doctors are nervous about being sued, therefore they will prescribe what has been sanctioned by the medical establishment. Even if their prescriptions prove to be dangerous, they can't be sued because HRT had been sanctioned.

Anyway, I hope my long personal story helps anyone out there. I'm meeting with my doctor tomorrow and I'm still angry. Now she wants to discuss options.

Even as we're railing at the drug companies and the promoters and the doctors who act as pill-pushers (not all of them, I know), and even as we analyze the way that they have misconceived ( ) the problem, we still have to admit that there are conditions to be taken seriously and addressed -- no one's making up flashes (flushes) or sweats or constant distraction that severe.

I really admire you for continuing to question even as you faced those symptoms. For medical reasons I won't go into here, I had other preoccupations about the time I went into menopause, so I think I went through much of it in sheer denial of the symptoms I had, which were less severe than many women face anyway.

But as Zoot and Michelle have said above, I have wondered how to talk to friends and family who became HRT enthusiasts, sometimes evangelists. I had, eg, the oddest conversation with a friend in her eighties this weekend (that's the good news: she's 88, and she's still around and very sharp ) who took Premarin for thirty years! and is still appalled that I'm not taking it. "But your skin, my dear!" No logic seemed to penetrate that faith -- well, she was lucky, and at 88 she's allowed.

I didn't take anything. A couple of reasons. I feel that menopause is a natural phenomena and the less we fuck around with Mother nature the better. The second pure laziness, knowing I would probably forget to take the bloody pill or pills which happened when I tried birth control pills for 3 months and kept forgetting to take them. Freaky time.

What I can't get over is that so many women of my mother's generation (now in their 70s-80s), and many of my cohort (now in their 50s-60s), have happily abandoned the very stiff-upper-lip attitudes that the old girls taught and us kids soaked up. A lot of the old ladies, their knuckles and knees swollen from all those years scrubbing floors by hand, their lips thin from pursing in disapproval at frivolous young people for so many years, suddenly all those old ladies are frolicking in delight among the full array of cosmeceuticals!

So far she has maintained her weight. Looks good. She told me about the diet. Not really a diet except smaller servings and snacks would be fruit. No dessert(she said that is what she missed the most) I believe she said it was weight watchers.

Did you know that in the traditional Asian culture, hot flashes and night sweats are unknown? There are no words for them. But studies show that when Asian women adopt western culture; eating western food, drinking, perhaps smoking, convenience foods, etc. they develop these symptoms? Some say its because of the soy in their diet, which has natural estrogen. Also, it may be that the traditional lifestyle is less toxic. Probably a combination.

I don't remember my mother talking about hot flashes. I don't remember seeing her hot and sweaty. But in those days, respectable folk did not discuss women's bodily functions so many women suffered silently, I bet.

quote:

---

It is not a disease - it's a transition just like when you first start menstruating.

---

Heh. I know parents of teenagers going through puberty who are of the opinion that the beginning of the teen years IS a disease...hee hee. But I digress.

I'm not sure what I'll do when I reach menopause. Judging from my mother and grandmother's symptoms, I don't think mine will be terribly severe. I hope not. I'm not sure what I would do if my symptoms were really severe. I have a real aversion to taking drugs, even things like Tylenol and stuff.

[ July 14, 2002: Message edited by: clersal ]

My theory about this phenomena is that on a very primordial-species-survivor level, hormones assist young people to "hate" their parents (and in turn, their behaviour will help the parents dislike their kids) so they will leave the nest and go out and propagate the species.

As "civilized" evolved human beings, we continue to nurture, guide and help our kids through this "difficult" time and will nurture them way past what nature really intended.

When kids act hatefully, they are just helping to make it easier for the parents to kick them out of the nest.

Should we look at this phenomena a little more philosophically/anthropologically/biologically?

quote:

---

My theory about this phenomena is that on a very primordial-species-survivor level, hormones assist young people to "hate" their parents (and in turn, their behaviour will help the parents dislike their kids) so they will leave the nest and go out and propagate the species.

---

I might buy this... but I'm reluctant. Some rambling thoughts:

The evolutionary-biology, or evolutionary-psychology, model of human behaviour is working its way into absolutely everything, and it disturbs me. It risks becoming what Richard Lewontin calls a series of "just-so" stories, meaning that to the extent it's not testable, it's not science, but just speculation.

Furthermore, it would seem to universalize what may be a very particular, culturally-bound, and historically-anomalous sort of experience. Laugh if you like, but you can argue that teenagers were invented in Western countries in the 1950s.

Of course, there were always people between 12 and 20; but certainly they weren't necessarily thought of as a separate age cohort with their own special needs before this, that is before the beginning of "teen culture." (I've even read an argument that Franklin D. Roosevelt bears some responsibility for "teen culture." In the US, prior to the 1930s, most people left school at 15 or earlier. Well, many people still farmed. Still, part of his New Deal involved keeping teenagers in school longer, so that adults could have a better crack at the available jobs

Traditional school-leaving age, for certain classes in Britain, stayed at 15 or so for longer than in North America. Orwell observed somewhere that an 18-year-old man from a working-class family was a man, as prepared as he'd be to take on adult responsibilities: he had to be. On the other hand, an 18-year-old from the upper classes, fresh out of Eton and off to Oxbridge, was still little more than a child: he could be.

Things like this make me skeptical about explaining teenager-parent conflict as some kind of evolutionary device.

Your points about teen culture well taken. I fogot about that. I believe that it was Margaret Mead who said that this is the first time in history that youth are teaching their parents rather than the other way around. She was referring to the civil-rights, women's rights, anti-vietnam movement, etc. of the 60's which was mainly driven by youth.

quote:

---

Then when the sixties hit, that was the last thing we wanted - to be identified with that group of people. I guess that's why you still see baby boomers in their 40's, 50's and even 60's still dressing like their subculture of the 60's.

---

quote:

---

For that matter, I've known some folks in their late 30s and 40s, and seen a good many more, who still dressed like punks

---

quote:

---

That would be me, though I've really toned it down in the past few years.

---

quote:

---

What I can't get over is that so many women of my mother's generation (now in their 70s-80s), and many of my cohort (now in their 50s-60s), have happily abandoned the very stiff-upper-lip attitudes that the old girls taught and us kids soaked up.

---

quote:

---

No offense meant, by the way -- I wasn't taking a shot. Just making that point that in any era, there are those who like to mark themselves off from the mainstream. Good for them, really. I was a pretty lame-ass punk, partly out of laziness I suppose

---

Perhaps someone should be taking my temperature, but on-topic again, here's a Slate article about long-time skeptics of HRT, particularly Dr. Susan Love.

quote:

---

Love turned out to be right, because she pointed out an essential flaw in the many studies that had found that HRT protects the heart. One of the best known was the Nurses' Health Study, a huge investigation done at Harvard. The study tracked women's behavior—did they or did they not decide to take hormones?—and correlated it with their likelihood of contracting subsequent disease. This observational study found that hormone users had about a 50 percent reduction in fatal heart disease (and an increased risk of breast cancer that was, as noted, deemed worth the heart benefits).

But it turns out—and Love called this—finding that taking HRT tends to result in women getting less heart disease is like finding that dating Donald Trump tends to result in women's hair turning blond. All that was really "proved" in this study was that generally healthy women chose to take hormones in the first place. If you were the type of woman who went to the doctor to get the hormones and faithfully took them, you were also likely to be the type of woman who ate nutritiously, exercised, watched your blood pressure and cholesterol. And it showed that healthy women generally stay healthier than unhealthy ones.

---

Repeat after me, you quacks: correlation is not causation. Correlation is not causation...

[ July 15, 2002: Message edited by: 'lance ]