Setting the Record Straight on Hormone Therapy In the summer of 2002, a headline changed the course of women’s health for a generation. The Women’s Health Initiative — a large, federally funded study — announced that it was stopping one of its arms early. The news: hormone therapy increased the risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, and blood clots. The message that spread, rapidly and loudly, was simple: hormone therapy is dangerous. Women should stop taking it. Providers should...

WOMEN’S HEALTH SERIES • POST 5 OF 6 She sits with her provider and tries to explain it. The anxiety that arrives without warning. The irritability that flares over small things and then leaves her feeling guilty and confused. The depression that settled in quietly, like fog, and won’t quite lift. The sense that she has become someone she doesn’t fully recognize. And the response she gets, far too often, is a gentle suggestion to try therapy, get more sleep, reduce stress. Maybe a prescription...

And Why You Should WOMEN’S HEALTH SERIES • POST 2 OF 6 Let me be honest with you for a moment. There are women writing about menopause from a clinical distance — reviewing the literature, summarizing the guidelines, presenting the data. That work is valuable. But this post is being written with something more personal underneath it: the frustration of knowing that millions of women are walking through one of the most significant health transitions of their lives without the information they...