AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ANALYSIS OF THE HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY SAGA

In this issue we publish an unusual, albeit very much needed, approach to the HRT debate. An international and interdisciplinary team have put together their expertise from the historical, epidemiological, biological, clinical, and advocacy perspectives. Nancy Krieger and her colleagues ask in their paper an undoubtedly crucial question: why, since the mid-1960s, were millions of women prescribed powerful pharmacological agents that had already been shown, three decades earlier, to be carcinogenic?

To understand the eventual answer to this question, they identify in the HRT process a series of missing elements, like for example the invisible industrialist, regulatory agencies and public compared with private interests, …