For years, women have been scared into thinking that HRT was linked to breast cancer because of a misleading study from 2002. Well, Dr. Marty McCary spoke with us about this back in Episode 881 before he became FDA Commissioner in 2002. He's done the same thing to his credit now as the big boss over at FDA so he can share his message with women across the country.
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00:00:30.860Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
00:00:42.520Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
00:00:45.960Earlier this week, the FDA hosted a panel on menopause and the benefits of hormone replacement therapy for women.
00:00:54.000For years, women have been scared into thinking that HRT was linked to breast cancer because of a misleading study from 2002.
00:01:04.340Well, Dr. Marty McCary spoke with us about this back in episode 881.
00:01:08.560That was before he became FDA commissioner and he was sounding the alarm on that study back then.
00:01:17.600He's done the same thing to his credit now as the big boss over at FDA so he can share his message with women across the country.
00:02:09.480Look, women have been confused for a good reason.
00:02:11.620The medical establishment has, doesn't even, they're not even all on the same page.
00:02:16.060And the misunderstanding around the studies has created a lot of dogma that you should not take hormone replacement therapy because of an increased risk of dying of breast cancer.
00:02:27.400Now, it turns out when you look under the hood, no clinical trial has ever shown that hormone replacement therapy for perimenopausal women increases the likelihood of dying of breast cancer.
00:02:39.180Now, there are importantly two different areas of benefit.
00:02:43.620And I should just point out that there are contraindications.
00:02:47.520Some women cannot take hormone replacement therapy.
00:02:49.940But the vast majority of women going through perimenopause can have not only short-term benefits, but long-term health benefits.
00:02:58.960And often when people talk about how it alleviates hot flashes and night sweats and helps with mood swings and better sleep quality and helps prevent some of the weight gain associated with perimenopause, they're really only talking about the short-term benefits.
00:03:16.480Now, I'm not here to say they're more important or less important than the long-term health benefits.
00:03:23.020But look at the studies on the long-term health benefits, cutting the risk of heart attacks in half in some studies or 25% to 50% reduction in other studies.
00:03:34.440That's the number one cause of death in women.
00:03:37.500And it may prevent Alzheimer's, reduces the risk of cognitive decline by up to 64%, reduces osteoporosis risk and the risk of bone fractures, cutting that risk in half.
00:03:49.720Those are some of the serious long-term risks that can take the life of an older woman is risks of bone fractures and hip fractures.
00:03:56.720So there may be no other medication in the history of modern medicine that can improve the health outcomes of women on a population level than hormone replacement therapy when started within 10 years from the onset of perimenopause.
00:04:11.480Maybe with some rare exceptions, I might cite antibiotics as one of those exceptions.
00:04:15.800But the incredible health benefits of hormone replacement therapy described by the experts at the FDA expert panel just recently have been in the bucket of things in modern medicine that have been underappreciated, underrecognized, and underfunded, probably because it deals with women's health and that it is something that needs to come to the surface.
00:04:39.460Every woman needs to know about the real data on this topic and not follow dogma for dogma's sake.
00:04:46.280The thing that's great about, I mean, preventing dementia, hello, everybody wants to prevent Alzheimer's or dementia.
00:04:51.940But the thing about HRT too is it's estrogen and progesterone and progesterone helps you sleep better in the short term even, which if you have terrible sleep, we've talked about this with a number of experts, that actually increases your risk of getting some form of dementia.
00:05:08.600So it's got like double protection there where you start to get better sleep immediately and then long-term it can have, I guess maybe for other reasons, the effect of helping prevent some forms of dementia.
00:05:19.800Yeah, it's pretty cool how the importance of good quality sleep is now being recognized as a central component to so many aspects of health.
00:05:30.280And poor sleep may help drive some of these chronic diseases, including dementia and perhaps even Alzheimer's in some studies, including one study I was a part of at Johns Hopkins in my previous career.
00:05:43.720So we're learning more and more that good quality sleep, a healthy microbiome, and what we eat is so central to health.
00:05:53.140We have had a healthcare system, Megan, entirely focused on drugs and operations.
00:05:58.540And we've got to ask, why is Alzheimer's going up every year?
00:06:02.720It's not just because we have older people in America.
00:06:05.280As I was taught in medical school, we have early onset Alzheimer's that has tripled in the last few decades.
00:06:17.740It turns out there may be an association with the hormonal access.
00:06:21.400When a woman takes estrogen, starting around the time of perimenopause, that risk of Alzheimer's goes down by up to 35% in some studies.
00:06:30.740So I'm not in the business of being someone's teledoctor or telling them what to do.
00:06:39.340But the data on this area of medicine has been so massively misunderstood and misrepresented.
00:06:48.080And you saw the fear machine come out 23 years ago talking about such a sensitive topic like breast cancer to women demonizing hormone replacement therapy.
00:07:52.200And women all across America said, I'm out.
00:07:54.880And threw away their hormones, the estrogen and the progesterone.
00:07:59.180But you actually went to him and found some remarkable, I mean, got some remarkable admissions.
00:08:04.960Well, the most amazing thing, Megan, was that he acknowledged to me that the little tiny bump in breast cancer cases that they observed in the study was not statistically significant.
00:08:17.700You have to run statistics in these large trials to know whether or not something is a random occurrence, whether or not it's noise in the data, or whether or not it's a true association.
00:08:27.920If you don't run statistics, then we don't have science.
00:08:31.640All of a sudden, snake oil works and cures cancer, and we don't have science anymore.
00:08:36.940So he actually acknowledged to me that the observation of breast cancer in one of the looks of the data was not a statistically significant finding.
00:08:46.520And by the way, subsequent studies have found no statistically significant increase in dying of breast cancer.
00:08:54.920It really is amazing because when that announcement hit, and, you know, he feels that the media got ahead of his results when I had talked to him.
00:09:03.740But when those headlines hit that hormone therapy causes breast cancer, man, women flushed their pills down the toilet.
00:09:10.600Doctors were calling and scaring all the patients in their practice saying, get off of this.
00:09:15.700And honestly, I don't even know if some of them had actually read the numbers in the study and noticed that there was no statistical significance.
00:09:43.400And based on this, people ran for the hills.
00:09:47.720And I know this is personal for you because you feel like your own mom could have benefited from this, but didn't.
00:09:54.440Look, my mom is one of the 50 million women over the last 23 years never offered hormone replacement therapy or the many potential health benefits associated with it because of this study.
00:10:07.100And it became dogma in the medical field.
00:10:09.360And, man, they pounded this message into primary care doctors and doctors all over the medical field.
00:10:14.560It just became this dogma that it causes breast cancer.
00:10:19.080And, by the way, medical schools never even taught about menopause because why teach about all the symptoms of menopause if there's nothing you can do to treat them so you don't even need to teach about menopause?
00:10:32.140So we got almost no educational menopause.
00:11:24.740And sometimes that sets up older Americans for a cascade of events that can result in their demise.
00:11:31.320So I didn't want to see her non-ambulatory.
00:11:33.640Well, the orthopedic surgeon said, it's really on the border as to whether or not these fractures require surgery.
00:11:40.720But in my opinion, I think she does need surgery.
00:11:45.000Well, if it was that much of a, you know, borderline call, certainly hormone replacement therapy would have helped her avoid that bone fracture.
00:11:54.640And all of the cost and pain and debilitation associated with that long, lengthy, lengthy physical therapy.
00:12:03.500And I'm putting these pieces together from what I've done for my research.
00:12:07.500Think about the 50 plus million women.
00:12:11.500An 80-year-old woman has a one in three chance of having a hip fracture.
00:12:16.040And a quarter of women die within a year of a hip fracture.
00:12:18.880So these are real issues that are never talked about, even if hormone replacement therapy slightly increased the risk of developing breast cancer, as was kind of conjectured.
00:12:32.600The other massive health benefits would far eclipse any harm from the breast cancer issue.
00:12:43.000I'll tell you another piece of this that I've noticed just as a woman.
00:12:46.180And there is, and of course, all my doctors are in New York City, where I've been living for the past 17 years.
00:12:51.280Now I've moved to Connecticut, but my docs are still back in New York.
00:12:56.420So it's not, this is not a political thing.
00:12:58.860But I will tell you, there's a political line that you may not even know about.
00:13:01.900But some of my top women's health care docs, I'm not going to say who, because I don't want to embarrass anybody.
00:13:06.640But some of my top women's health care docs have said to me, you know, menopause, it's not a disease.
00:13:14.760You know, there's no, it's nothing, it's not something to be cured.
00:13:17.260You don't have to go on drugs to solve menopause.
00:13:20.220And there was like a sort of a lefty woman's bias of like, these men who are trying to get us to tap into some fountain of youth so they can enjoy sex with us more.
00:13:30.080Don't understand that this is like a normal progression of a woman.
00:13:32.500And it's to me, I was like, wow, that's so crazy.
00:13:37.160This, you don't have to be looking for a fountain of youth to go on HRT.
00:13:42.220You can be looking for all these other benefits.
00:13:44.360But I have heard more than one doctor talk about it.
00:13:49.940Yeah, look, this issue is polarized in medicine, just like society is polarized around politics.
00:13:56.140And there's a lot of misunderstanding.
00:13:58.280Hormone replacement for perimenopausal women is exactly what it says.
00:14:03.080You're replacing your body's natural hormone production.
00:14:07.420And there are actually hormone replacement forms that are similar to the exact molecule that your body produces.
00:14:14.880And there was an observation at the Mayo Clinic in the 1950s that when a woman had their ovaries removed in their 20s, that is, young women had their ovaries removed, say, for cancer or some other reason, they were developing early heart disease.
00:14:29.660And that data showed, including one woman who developed, had a fatal heart attack at age 28.
00:14:38.640It suggests the profound cardioprotective effect of a woman's estrogen level.
00:14:45.500And so when you remove the ovaries, and basically this happens functionally in menopause, the body's natural production of estrogen goes way down.
00:14:56.860We're talking about continuing the body's natural levels.
00:15:00.740And progesterone is recommended to add to estrogen if a woman has a uterus.
00:15:06.440A third of adult women do not have a uterus.
00:15:45.060Getting your levels back up to just sort of normal, for lack of a better term, is helpful in that regard.
00:15:51.480So it can be, you know, it can lead to other good things, marital health and all that.
00:15:55.320I do want to play, speaking of the doctors who are at the panel, Dr. Joanne V. Pinkerton, she was there.
00:16:00.420And she's as frustrated as you are about the fact that if you get hormone replacement therapy, there's still what's called a black box warning on it right now, which will scare the bejesus out of most people.
00:16:22.760If you bleed, you need to be evaluated for that rare risk of endometrial cancer.
00:16:26.300If you've had an estrogen-sensitive cancer, please include your oncologist, and please stop harming women.
00:16:34.460Because you see that black box label on anything you're going to take, and you're like, it's a no.
00:16:39.380Yeah, look, when I came to the FDA as the commissioner just over 100 days ago, and we looked under the hood, I was shocked at some of the stuff we learned.
00:16:50.180There was still a black box warning on vaginal estrogen cream and systemic estrogen.
00:16:55.720We learned that the FDA had just approved Americans to have their cells gene-edited in China, literally cancer patients having their cells shipped to China, where they would manipulate the gene of those cells and then ship them back to be infused back into Americans.
00:17:11.780We put the halt on that, illegal Chinese vaping.
00:17:14.660I mean, there's all kinds of stuff we learned about.
00:17:16.680But this is something that I had heard about from many women, because the issues in women's health have long been ignored.
00:17:24.960Some say it's been a male-dominated medical establishment in a prior generation that resulted in this.
00:17:31.600And some say we've never really recognized what perimenopause is in the medical profession.
00:17:38.760I was kind of taught, well, some women go through it, and some women have, or sorry, all women go through it, but some have symptoms, and the symptoms are usually mild.
00:17:51.820Eighty percent of women go through it, and it can last five to eight years or longer.
00:17:57.420And for many women, those symptoms are severe, you know, things like dryness.
00:18:02.860Now, dryness can have a lot of implications.
00:18:07.360Vaginal dryness can make sex much more difficult.
00:18:09.640There have been divorces stemming from this issue in one's nasal mucosal cavities, eye dryness, skin dryness, hair thinning.
00:18:19.400So, I mean, things like that were ignored.
00:18:22.920And instead, when a woman came in with symptoms of perimenopause, be it the mood swings, weight gain, night sweats, or the dryness, whatever the symptoms were,
00:18:32.380a woman was more likely to be prescribed an antidepressant than hormone replacement therapy.
00:20:26.940Well, this is all very helpful information.
00:20:28.500Now, I want to ask you about something else that you guys are working on, which is equally important to a lot of women on the younger side, though.
00:20:34.680Now we're moving from, like, the 50 and 60 set down to the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
00:20:39.160And that is women who take antidepressants, SSRIs, while pregnant.
00:20:44.660You guys are about to have a panel on that.
00:26:46.740They lied to us about natural immunity, COVID boosters in young, healthy individuals, myocarditis, vaccine mandates in healthy subjects, about schools being closed for 18 months.
00:28:42.420And I think that'll be the best statement on that issue.
00:28:46.140You mentioned the wins you're racking up.
00:28:48.500What's, like, every company practically is rolling over on the food dyes.
00:28:52.900We just had an announcement from the ice cream industry, was it Turkey Hill, saying we're voluntarily pulling artificial food dyes out of our ice cream.
00:29:03.240Another win for our public health, including RFKJ.
00:29:18.120Yeah, Pepsi just made an announcement.
00:29:19.880We've got General Mills, Kraft Heinz, Turkey Hill is a brand I love because it's a Pennsylvania company and I grew up in central Pennsylvania.
00:29:45.960We saw titanium dioxide voluntarily removed from one of the largest candy makers in the United States from one of their products.
00:29:54.920We want to rewrite the food pyramid misinformation, that food dietary guideline information.
00:30:01.120We're rewriting it right now at FDA and USDA.
00:30:04.780It's not going to demonize natural saturated fat, which has been the dogma and bandwagon effect of the government and the medical establishment.
00:30:14.040It is going to be evidence-based and we are going to mention ultra-processed foods, which is now 70% of the diet of young kids.