Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book: Making Informed Choices About Menopause

This book presents a comprehensive discussion of hormones and alternatives to dealing with premenopause, menopause, and long-term prevention. Details are provided which include alternative approaches, including diet, exercise, etc. It even includes a final helpful chapter on making your own decisions. The only negative thing is that it was written in 1997, and there may be more current information available now. Wish she would release an updated edition.

If you're female, you either have gone -- or will go -- through menopause. You may sometimes have symptoms (hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings) ... or questions. Should you take hormones, or not? Do the benefits of trying to prevent heart disease and osteoporosis outweigh the risk of contracting breast cancer? The answers are neither clear nor universal.

In preparing to write a book about menopause I reviewed well over 50 menopause books. Without question, this is the most authoritative, most exhaustively researched, most comprehensive, and one of the most accessible menopause book available. The book is also amazingly even handed. If you can have only one menopause book in your library, this should be the one.

This is a must read for both males and females as Dr. Love handles the issues related to menopause in an unbiased and clear dialogue. Menopause was a hidden passage of life and this book has brought the subject into the open with humor and good taste

I write on January 27, 2000, two days after the embargo was lifted on the National Cancer Institutes new findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, on the role of estrogens alone, and estrpogen -progestin combinations, in breast and uterine cancer. If you have a uterus and take estrogens without progestins you invite endometrial cancer. If you add progestins to the estrogen you avoid the cancer "down there" but substantially increase your chances of getting it "up top" in your breast. The longer you stay on hormones the more your chances of uterine and breast cancer keep rising...and rising.. There's much to consider and under some circumstances taking hormones, especially for the short run might make sense. - See if you can look the article in the Journal of the American Medical Association -- and check out the accompanying editorial by scientists from Harvard's School of Public Health, titled "Postmenopausal Estrogens- Opposed, Unopposed or None of the Above" which concludes that "it is time to reasses...the commonly held belief that aging rountinely requires pharmcological management..." In 1997,Susan Love was excorriated for presenting exactly this reasonably cautious and honest viewpoint in her splendid HORMONE BOOK Meantime, 12 million US women continue to take estrogen alone, while 8.6 take it with progestin. I wish every one of them would read this excellent work., and reconsider. And I personally am exceedingly proud to present a 1999 interview with our heroic Dr. Love in my own new book (with Gary Null) FOR WOMEN ONLY; YOUR GUIDE TO HEALTH EMPOWERMENT.