osteoporosis

   The softening of bone mass and the widening of the bone canals. This occurs with both age and diminished physical activity.

   Since women live longer, they are more likely to show such signs. (WARNING! Tirade Ahead!) There is little doubt that the condition is increasing among American women, and is starting to show itself at an earlier age. This is called "improved diagnostic methods" (harumph). The statistics that show the rise to be strongest in women that have used steroid hormone therapies in their earlier years seems to have escaped the notice of current Medical Conventional Wisdom. This states that ALL women need medical care against osteoporosis going into menopause, and the primary treatment is...steroid hormones (this year, at least). I know this may sound smarmy, coming from some long-in-the-tooth hippy male, but I would be far more impressed if SERIOUS attention was given to carefully defining the parameters of a woman's risks. The road of medicine is strewn with four decades of well-intended universal hormone approaches to women's health...embarrassedly forgotten. The idea of universal HRT for a whole generation of menopausal women seems like a frightening experiment in medical fascism and band-wagon hubris. There is no attention given as to WHY our future elders are suddenly stricken with a medical problem. Were birth-control pills, made up of synthetic digestion-proof steroid analogues, a major cause? Has our food become simply inadequate and over-processed? Have the decades of exposure by women to xeno-estrogens that are derived from degraded insecticides had more effect than even those claimed by environmental watch-dog groups, i.e. the rise in breast and prostate cancer, the halving of the sperm count in Caucasian males and the little-dicked alligators reported from Florida? Is the synthetic flavor in that pink bubble gum to blame? Perhaps its the fumes released from the early Barbies? FDS? There must be some reason, but the present medical answer is only HRT and (if politics allow) Jane Fonda tapes.