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Book Reviews
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SEX, LIES, AND MENOPAUSE:
The Shocking Truth About Synthetic Hormones
and the Benefits of Natural Alternatives
by T. S. Wiley (Author), Julie Taguchi (Author), Bent Formby
(William Morrow; 2003)
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T.S. Wiley’s remarkably informative new book, Sex, Lies, and Menopause: The Shocking Truth About Synthetic Hormones and the Benefits of Natural Alternatives, does indeed shock us with the truth about synthetic hormones while thoroughly explaining the benefits of natural alternatives as the sub-title promises; but as a bonus, this richly researched book also gives us a really good history lesson in our evolution as hormonal beings. Wiley is, after all an anthropologist and cultural theorist as well as a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and a guest researcher at Samsun Medical Clinic in Santa Barbara. With her two co-authors, oncologist Julie Taguchi, MD and Brent Formby, PhD in biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology, she has been involved with a number of studies, research papers and textbooks on breast cancer and other critical issues of women’s health.
She knows her stuff and communicates it with authority, humor (all of the sub-titles are rock-and-roll tunes) and an irreverent, lyrical style you won’t find in the standard treatment of a such serious subject. And she’s willing to take the flack dished out by conventional (AMA) medicine, in order to bring her revolutionary hormone replacement protocol to the attention of millions of women struggling with hormonal related symptoms – and, of course, questions.
After the Women’s Health Initiative Study using the standard HRT drugs (synthetic estrogens and progestins) was discredited, women were pretty much left on their own to figure it out. As it turns out, Premarin, PremPro, etc. not only don’t prevent the most dreaded post mid-life diseases: breast cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s, they have, in fact, been shown to contribute to them. According to Wiley, Wyeth-Ayerst knows all this, but refuses to pull their product off the market. You know – it’s the money.
Wiley wants to give women the knowledge and tools to make informed decisions about their well-being now rather than waiting decades for the approved standard of care to catch up to what her research has shown. Her solution, based on extensive documentation (the book contains 89 pages of footnotes) is to use bio-identical hormones from plants, which she tells us, have a molecular structure identical to that in the human body. Wiley proposes delivering these plant derived hormones in a cycle replicating a woman’s natural rhythm of estrogen and progesterone peaks at different times of the month rather than in the static combination doses traditionally prescribed.
She believes that bio-identical hormones mimicking nature’s rhythms will persuade the body it is still young and healthy and it will respond accordingly, protecting women from the traditional diseases of aging as well as all the less serious, but annoying side effects of menopause such as fatigue, brain fog, libido loss, depression, etc. Judging by the logic of her theory and the early results coming out of cancer data, she is definitely onto something.
Wiley makes a strong case against birth control pills (a type of synthetic hormone replacement), mammograms, postponing pregnancies and breast feeding, as well as the surgery-chemo-radiation triumvirate of cancer. Her premise is, as a species, we’ve evolved at a rather slow pace staying tuned to our environment until about the 1850s when technology began to outrun our ability to adjust. She discusses how our significantly longer life span, the advent of artificial light and the consumption of too much food generally, along with the year-round access to carbohydrates, has changed our chemistry - and behavior. She theorizes how this change in our prenatal chemistry may have an effect on sexual orientation.
This book is not only an engaging read and a good education, it has an undeniable logic, with the research to back it up.
For more information on ther speaking engagement in SLO county, please see the ad in this issue.
Elaine Watson
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