We’re diving head first into a necessary and energetic discussion about a topic that has stirred the medical world: hormone replacement therapy (HRT). HRT is both a medical and feminist issue and we’re creating a call to action for all women to educate ourselves in order to advocate for ourselves.
As with many of the experts we’ve connected with in our menopause community, Avrum Bluming and Carol Tavris didn’t set out to be activists. These leaders were compelled by the shift in culture around treating women with symptoms of perimenopause as a result of the groundbreaking research done by the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI). Overnight the perception of HRT transformed dramatically, and stopped being prescribed.
Bluming and Tavris are joining us to address the exaggerated claims made by the Women's Health Initiative and shed light on the overlooked benefits of HRT, all while ensuring that the specter of breast cancer risk remains low.
AVRUM BLUMING, MD
Avrum Bluming received his MD from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He spent four years as a senior investigator for the National Cancer Institute and for two of those years was director of the Lymphoma Treatment Center in Kampala, Uganda. He organized the first study of lumpectomy for the treatment of breast cancer in Southern California in 1978, and for more than two decades he has been studying the benefits and risks of hormone replacement therapy administered to women with a history of breast cancer. Dr. Bluming has served as a clinical professor of medicine at USC and has been an invited speaker at the Royal College of Physicians in London and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He was elected to mastership in the American College of Physicians, an honor accorded to only five hundred of the over one hundred thousand board-certified internists in this country.
CAROL TAVRIS, PhD
Carol Tavris received her PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan. Her books include Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), with Elliot Aronson; Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, and The Mismeasure of Woman. She has written articles, op-eds, and book reviews on topics in psychological science for a wide array of publications — including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, and the TLS — and a column for Skeptic magazine. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and has received numerous awards for her efforts to promote gender equality, science, and skepticism.
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