This is a controversial topic and taking it must be an individual’s choice. The rule we follow is ‘nature knows best’. Any interference with the natural law can have adverse consequences which some women experience.
The use of hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women’s symptoms should be questioned. All the alternative therapies have answers which can be used to dispel menopausal problems. Hormone level imbalances are effectively treated using acupuncture and homoeopathy to relieve hot flushes and calm emotional distress. It is natural to cease having menses when child bearing time has passed, yet one of my patients, a sixty-five-year-old woman taking HRT, was still experiencing monthly periods!
Medical practitioners, who are prescribing HRT for prevention of osteoporosis and heart disease, say that if a woman, genetically predisposed to cancer, discovers it within months of starting this therapy, she would have developed cancer eventually anyway, and that it’s just as well they identified it now while they are observing the patient!
We are all genetically individual and so should investigate our family background first to discover whether or not we have a family weakness that requires HRT. Are soft bones and fractures in your family? Read Germaine Greer’s book The Change. Make choices but let them be informed ones! Be responsible for making your choice.
Moira’s story-It is now three years since I discovered the lump. The lump that every woman dreads – the lump that turned out to be breast cancer requiring a full mastectomy of my left breast.
Born with sloping shoulders, I have had a constant battle with bra
straps that slip. It was one of those times when I unobtrusively slid my hand inside my shirt to pull up the wretched thing that I felt a slight thickening about the size of a ten cent coin.
I prodded and poked a bit more. And again in the shower the next morning and the next. If it hasn’t gone in a week I’ll go to the doctor. It hadn’t and I went.
My local GP wasn’t too worried at the time and neither was I. It had only been about six weeks since I had visited my gynaecologist for my regular breast examination and found nothing unusual at all. ‘Menopausal thickening’, said my GP. ‘Of course’, said I. ‘Better have a mammogram and make sure though.’ Yes, indeed.
The result shocked us both. These things happen to other people, don’t they? Not to me. No, no, no. There had been a mistake. No mistake. The diagnosis was confirmed. I cried. My husband cried with me.
I ranted and raved at that gynaecologist. Not for missing the lump with his fingers — but for not sending me for a mammogram earlier. I had been visiting him and prior to that two of his colleagues since I was twenty five. Every six months without fail.
I had had regular pap smears, but no mammogram. This despite the fact that I was what is generally considered a high risk. I had taken the contraceptive pill almost from the day it hit the marketplace and continued to do so for something like twelve years. My mother had died of cancer. I had never been pregnant and I had been on oestrogen replacement therapy for five years.
Admittedly, these fatherly, charming, rather patronising gentlemen had chopped and changed brands and dosage to find the one that best suited me, but not once had any of them even discussed the relationship of my history to breast cancer.
Why didn’t I know and why didn’t I ask?
I really believed it would never happen to me. Like thousands of women I trusted the doctors to look after me. That they didn’t is unforgivable. But I now know we are all responsible for our own lives. And it is quite unrealistic to expect anyone else to take on that responsibility. So I will never quite forgive myself either.
As of today I have had no recurrence of the cancer, although the worry is always there. Post mastectomy trauma is very real and frightening. Like a lot of women I suffer from lymphoedema (swelling) of the arm on the affected side. My medical advisors have suggested ‘putting up with it’, sleeping with my arm tied up to a standard lamp, or the permanent wearing of an elastic sleeve from shoulder to fingers to reduce the swelling. My natural therapist reduces it when necessary by acupuncture and massage. I bless the day I found her.
Scars resulting from mastectomy operations are acupunctured to release the energy interference then the swelling in the arm drains. General vitality is also restored.
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