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

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In an empowering and demystifying book about menopause, Dr. Susan Love, a noted breast surgeon and women's health advocate, tells it straight about hormones. "Hormone therapy is neither a fountain of youth nor an 'evil empire,'" Love writes with her coauthor, Karen Lindsey. "I can't tell you in this book whether or not you should take hormones, but I can spell out the pros and cons, examining the various promises that have been made for menopausal hormone therapy, and letting you know what the side effects and dangers can be."

But even before she gets into the promises and the pros and cons, Love lets the reader know what menopause is biologically, and how its symptoms can vary widely. Particularly fascinating is the second chapter, titled "The Medicalization of Menopause." Love's examination of how women in other cultures actually look forward to menopause, and of how the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry have a vested interested in making menopause a disease, is a convincing one. It puts menopause and hormone therapy into a whole new light.

Chapter by chapter, Love reviews the scientific evidence for the promised benefits of hormone therapy--protection from osteoporosis and heart disease--and for the potential risks--increased chance of breast and endometrial cancer. And she answers almost every imaginable question about alternatives to hormones, from dietary changes to exercise to acupuncture to herbs.

While Love and Lindsey, who worked together previously on Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, are up-front about their perspective on hormone therapy, they also give women the information they need about the various hormones on the market and provide a questionnaire to help them assess their values, so that readers can make their own informed choice about hormones during menopause.

From Library Journal

Love, director of the Revlon/UCLA Breast Center, is a leading world expert in breast cancer research and author of what has been called the bible of breast care, Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book (LJ 6/1/95. 2d ed.). Here, Love provides an intimate insider's look at menopause. At the core of this well-organized and clearly written book is an in-depth discussion of the risk factors associated with hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Love explores therapy options with a three-tiered system?lifestyle, alternatives, and drugs and surgery?and helps readers clarify their choices with a series of self-surveys. This well-referenced resource includes five appendixes on practitioners, product sources, patient education materials, publications, and lists of support organizations. Highly recommended for all consumer health collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/96; Love is profiled in Karen Stabiner's To Dance with the Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer, forthcoming from Delacorte in May.?Ed.]?Rebecca Cress-Ingebo, Wright State Univ. Lib., Dayton, Ohi.
-?Rebecca Cress-Ingebo, Wright State Univ. Lib., Dayton, Ohio
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (April 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081296392X
• ISBN-13: 978-0812963922
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #845,437 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one true voice, January 28, 2000

By	Barbara Seaman (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the best menopause book available, September 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book: Making Informed Choices About Menopause (Hardcover)

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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive Resource, July 8, 2002

By	Lisa (Toronto Canada) - See all my reviews

This book covers all the bases you'll want to consider when facing menopause. The author discusses many aspects of menopause, including symptoms, treatments (both conventional and alternative), and long-term risk of breast cancer, osteoporosis, and heart disease.

Some of the things I really like about this book: The author dispels several myths (like taking estrogen leads to youthful-looking skin) and pulls the curtain back on the cozy relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical research. The reason all the "gold standard" studies on menopause have been done using Premarin, which contains horse estrogens not found in humans, is because researchers get that drug free from Wyeth-Ayerst (the Premarin manufacturer and patent-holder). As the author acknowledges, the collecting the urine that goes into Premarin causes hardship to countless horses and their offspring, and women ingesting the drug get all sorts of serious medical complications. It will be great for women everywhere when medical researchers give equal study to the hormones that are found naturally in human women (which so far seem to be much more benign than Premarin, but being non-patentable hold less potential for financial profit).

Some things I didn't like about the book: The author cites a lot of evidence gleaned from nonhuman studies (done on monkeys, rats, and mice) even though common wisdom holds that animals are a very poor model for humans. (About 80% of the drugs that pass animal tests are later found to be harmful to humans.) She does mention the importance of vitamins and minerals beyond calcium and Vitamin D, but I'd like to see more emphasis given. (See books like The Bone Density Diet or Preventing and Reversing Osteoporosis for more on that.) Finally, she doesn't acknowledge that women without a uterus can also benefit from taking progesterone; in fact she often muddles the (important) difference between progesterone and progestin and falsely implies at times that the harmful effects of taking progestin apply to progesterone as well. (Note: progesterone is natural to a human woman's body; progestin is a molecularly altered compound which can be patented but which acts differently from progesterone in the body.)

Overall, there is a ton of helpful information in this book and the good certainly outweighs the bad. This is a great primer for women who plan to live for a very long time!