Re: HRT's benefits are measured in profits



H

Herman Rubin

Guest
In article <[email protected]>,
(null) <[email protected]> wrote:
>>life-blood, delivering revenues of $US3 billion ($4.5 billion) a year.
>>For the women taking HRT, long-term use has delivered increased risks
>>of breast cancer, blood clots, heart attacks and strokes. And
>>according to new results released this morning, HRT also damages the
>>brain, doubling a woman's chances of developing dementia.


> Herman said it wasn't so bad: it did a lot of good. Come on
>Herman.


I never said it did not have any bad effects. One needs to
match the bad and the good.


>>In July last year the Journal of the American Medical Association
>>(JAMA) reported the results of a trial involving 16,000 healthy women
>>aged 50 and over. Almost entirely funded by the US Government, the
>>study was scheduled to run for eight years but was stopped after five
>>because it was found HRT was causing an increase in heart attacks,
>>strokes and breast cancer.


> Ask Oreck, Herman and our Florida ob about how minor these
>problems were compared to the benefits and profits.


HRT definitely helps with many female problems; I will have
to let women clarify this. It also helps raise bone
density, and raise it substantially; low bone density is
well-known to increase a fair number of risks. These were
seen immediately.

Long-term problems can only be found by long-term tests.
With enough cases, statistical significance is easy to
get; this does not say how important the effect is. If
we have 10 in the experimental group and 1 in the control
group, of equal size, getting a bad result, the usual
significance level does not change much if there are
100 or 1000 or 10000 or more in each group.





>>Now comes this morning's revelations. A Wyeth-funded study published
>>in today's JAMA finds that taking HRT doubles an older woman's risk of
>>dementia, including the well-known form, Alzheimer's disease.


> But as long as their bones are stronger, it ok, right Herman?




>>Again, in absolute terms the chances of developing dementia were not
>>high taking HRT for four years doubled a women's chances, from about 1
>>per cent to 2 per cent. But the researchers pointed out that the
>>dementia problem began to appear in the first year of the study,
>>concluding that "the risks outweigh the benefits".



> Herman will say 1% ain't much.



>>accumulating evidence that the drugs were causing heart disease.



>>As previously reported in The Australian Financial Review, it is not
>>surprising that the booklet was unbalanced and misleading: early
>>drafts came from Wyeth and its PR firm, Hill and Knowlton.



> That is the medical/industrial complex. Be careful: Oreck is
>going to say, "You hate doctors. Otherwise you would not post
>this article. You'd ignore it."




>>The belief that HRT held great benefits wasn't fabricated, it was
>>based on evidence from "observational" studies that found women taking
>>HRT were healthier. But as any medical scientist knows, this
>>lesser-quality evidence is often weak, and in this case it was grossly
>>misleading: the women in those "observational" studies who took HRT
>>were healthier anyway, it wasn't the HRT that made them healthier.


> Any researcher can talk about self-selection as the most
>powerful of all obsevations. And there is a terrific and
>on-going class bias in American medicine, where what you get is
>what you can afford. If you can afford more, you get more.
>But more is more harmful than doing nothing. One more example of
>overdiagnosis, overtreatment and over profits.



>>Top-quality randomised controlled trials testing the drug against a
>>placebo or other alternative are a much better way of getting to the
>>truth about risks and benefits, as has finally happened with HRT.


> Treatments come in before evaluation. Prostate cancer is next
>up for debunking, but the emotions are really bad on this one
>too.





>--
>George Conklin, Durham, NC: Medicare For All Ages
>If HMOs ran the post office, the AMA (American Mail Association)
>would declare that getting mail was a privilege, not a right
>and 43 million Americans would get no mail delivery.



--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Deptartment of Statistics, Purdue University
[email protected] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
 
In article <[email protected]>,
<[email protected]> wrote:


>--
>George Conklin
>Herman Rubin <[email protected]> wrote in message
>news:[email protected]...
>> In article <[email protected]>,
>> (null) <[email protected]> wrote:


...................

> Putting healthy people on a drug treatment plan in order to improve their
>health and then finding it hurts their health is the issue Herman. You
>always assume someone is sick. It is like calling life pre-death.


What is "healthy"? Is a woman with morning sickness, or
PMS, or the discomforts of menopause, healthy? Is someone
with thinning bones, which cause risks of fractures and
worse, healthy?

Should we vaccinate people? At the time we vaccinate them,
they are healthy, or at least not suffering from the disease
against which they are being vaccinated. Some people are
clearly hurt from the vaccinations, and for others, there is
no clear indication for the side effects, but it cannot be
ruled out.






--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Deptartment of Statistics, Purdue University
[email protected] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
 
--
George Conklin
Herman Rubin <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> In article <[email protected]>,
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> >--
> >George Conklin
> >Herman Rubin <[email protected]> wrote in message
> >news:[email protected]...
> >> In article <[email protected]>,
> >> (null) <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> ...................
>
> > Putting healthy people on a drug treatment plan in order to improve

their
> >health and then finding it hurts their health is the issue Herman. You
> >always assume someone is sick. It is like calling life pre-death.

>
> What is "healthy"? Is a woman with morning sickness, or
> PMS, or the discomforts of menopause, healthy? Is someone
> with thinning bones, which cause risks of fractures and
> worse, healthy?
>
> Should we vaccinate people? At the time we vaccinate them,
> they are healthy, or at least not suffering from the disease
> against which they are being vaccinated. Some people are
> clearly hurt from the vaccinations, and for others, there is
> no clear indication for the side effects, but it cannot be
> ruled out.
>
>

You always go to extremes Herman. I am not one of your crazy
anti-vaccination people who deny that the childhood diseases existed. Look
at Newsweek this week for an example of medical hysteria brought on the
medical/industrial complex. Demographers have long estimated that even
wiping out cancer would add only 2 years to the life expectancy of the
nation, yet we now have physicians with magic pills projecting that statins
and a few other drugs will add 11 years if everyone starts getting
maximally-medicated yesterday. It is all unethical behavior.