Hormone replacement therapy

doi:10.1136/bmj.325.7374.1243

From trainee to consultant, BMJ Group offers doctors around the world tailored information, special events, learning resources and recruitment services at every step along their career path.

... by doctors, for doctors, for patients
We are open for entries!

Online learning

BMJ Learning

High-quality CME / CPD for doctors and other healthcare professionals. BMJ Learning features hundreds of accredited, peer-reviewed learning modules in text, video, and audio formats. Find out more

Courses and Qualifications

BMJ Masterclasses

BMJ Masterclasses, led by experts, help clinicians to use the latest evidence and recent guidelines in practice and meet their CPD/CME requirements. Find out more

Exam Preparation

The leading provider of online exam preparation, helping over 167,000 healthcare professionals to pass their exams. Find out more

onExamination

Search all BMJ comment articles:

From

Limit by

Access to the full text of this article requires a subscription or payment. Please log in or subscribe below.

Logically, long term hormone replacement therapy cannot be recommended

Kishore Shetty, general practitioner (kishore_shetty@hotmail.com)

Pallion Health Centre, Sunderland SR4 7XF
Bremen State Cancer Registry
Bremen Institute for Prevention Research and Social Medicine, Centre for Public Health, University of Bremen, Linzer Strasse 8-10, D-28359 Bremen, Germany

EDITOR—Stevenson and Whitehead are unable or unwilling to draw the logical conclusion from the women's health initiative study. 1 2 Long term hormone replacement therapy cannot be recommended as the risks associated with it are more than the benefits.

The editorial shows the difficulty we have in telling women the truth. Hormone replacement has been recommended to women more on promises and is based on very poor evidence of benefits. Even the recommendation for prevention of fracture is based on weak evidence.3 Stevenson and Whitehead urge the use of non-medroxyprogesterone based preparations and lower doses of equine oestrogen on a theoretical basis. I hope that general practitioners won't get into the farce of changing treatment on the basis of this advice and giving the patients the impression that they know what they are doing.

The authors point out that the …