Articles
What the research actually says about women's hormonal health and longevity, and what to do about it.
Featured "My mother has Alzheimer's. Would estrogen have saved her?"
Some researchers think estrogen protects the aging brain, but only in a narrow window around menopause. My mother was inside that window in 2002. The evidence is still fiercely argued over. What nobody argues about is that she was never even offered the choice.
"What Rachel Rubin told the FDA: what your gynecologist still hasn't heard."
Vaginal estrogen is cheap, barely enters the bloodstream, and cuts UTIs and related mortality. Yet a misplaced black box warning still keeps doctors from prescribing it. Here is the data.
"Before the hot flashes come the years no one warned you about."
Perimenopause is a decade-long transition, and heavy bleeding can be one of its most frightening and least discussed symptoms. Here is what actually happens, and what I wish I had known.
Featured "18,000 to 91,000 women. Who died because of a bad study."
The 2002 WHI announcement set off a mass exodus from hormone therapy. A Yale team later calculated the human cost of that fear, and the peer-reviewed number is staggering.
"I found out I carry two copies of the Alzheimer's gene."
A consumer DNA test reads a tiny fraction of your genome, yet inside that fraction I found my APOE4/4 result. Here is what two copies of the Alzheimer's gene actually mean, and what the test got wrong.
"The $399 test that reads your entire genome."
Whole genome sequencing now costs less than a dental cleaning and reads every base pair, not a fraction. Here is what it actually covers, who owns the data, and what to do with the results.
"The book that took apart the study that scared a generation off estrogen."
Estrogen Matters, by oncologist Avrum Bluming and social psychologist Carol Tavris, argues the 2002 hormone scare was a misreading of a flawed study, and that the rule shaping menopause care for 23 years was never a finding at all. Here's what the book actually says, and where I pushed back.
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