Ladies, Pick Your Cancer
Many women receiving menopausal treatments today are too young to remember the old American folk tune, There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly even though the song could be written about them.
The old lady, swallows a spider to catch the fly--then a bird to catch the spider, then a cat to catch the bird ad infinitum--until she is a walking Noah's Ark and iatrogenic casualty.
For forty years women obligingly swallowed the "fly" of Premarin, a horse urine menopause drug manufactured by Wyeth (now Pfizer) until it was revealed to increase endometrial cancer in the 1970s.
But not to worry. Wyeth had a better drug, the notorious Prempro ("spider") which, by adding a progestin to the estrogen, reduced endometrial cancer while increasing the risk of breast, ovarian and lung cancers. Oops. Nor did the original endometrial cancer risk completely go away.
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