Barbara Seaman’s Books

I’m going though an uncluttering phase and getting rid of a number of books I haven’t really picked up in some years.

At the back of a shelf I found an old favourite from Barbara Seaman, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, in which she stated the potentially life-threatening side effects of the birth control pills being offered to women at the time.

Those pills contained very high levels of estrogen — 10 times the amount of hormones necessary to prevent conception, according to Seaman — which could cause such serious complications as heart attacks, strokes and even cancer.

Seaman argued that the pharmaceutical companies and some doctors were aware of these risks, but weren’t informing their patients.

The book was unpopular in the medical community, but it spurred US congressional hearings in 1970 that led to the introduction of the first warning labels on prescription medication, as well as mandating that patient information packets be given out with medications. Birth control pills today contain significantly lower doses of estrogen.

Seaman challenged the prolonged use of HRT for menopause

She also published Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones. This was nearly three decades before a Womens’ Health Initiative report confirmed that HRT increases rates of heart attacks, stroke, breast cancer and dementia.

In her 2003 book The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth she wrote

“Medical policy on estrogens has been to ‘shoot first and apologize later’ — to prescribe the drugs for a certain health problem and then see if there is a positive result. Over the years, hundreds of millions, possibly billions of women, have been lab animals in this unofficial trial. They were not volunteers. They were given no consent forms. And they were put at serious, often devastating risk.”

We lost Barbara in February of 2008 yet almost every day we benefit from her work.