At 09:07 AM 3/25/01 -0500, ardeith l carter wrote:
>Yes, thank you, that is what I was aiming at....I realize that
>some women must accept the risks of taking HRT due to
>other medical problems.....but I object to HRT being
>presented to otherwise healthy women to treat a condition
>that is not a disease.......But then I also object to this whole
>culture's fixation on "eternal youth".....I think we lost
>something important when we lost our respect for the
>elders in our communities and worshipped at the foot
>of "Youth at any cost".......aging is not something
>shameful, to be hidden away........I adored my Granny
>and learned much about living from her.....but our
>current culture would hide such as her in nursing homes
>and "retirement communities" where wrinkles and
>white hair can be hidden away.......

Agreed.  Life stages aren't diseases to be treated.  It's one thing to give
a 25 yo hormones so she doesn't look and feel like a 65 yo... it's quite
another to give a 65 yo hormones so she can look and feel like a 25 yo
(yeah, extreme--you get what I mean, though :).  But I can imagine that in
a lot of the more harried practises, the allure of a quick-fix pill must be
very strong...

Anyway, I've been thinking:  given my own grandparents and their friends
ate a diet with much fewer grains, more vegetables, fat, and protein than
is currently the fad...  I suspect that being relegated to "unnecessary" to
"inconvenient" has had much more to do with health problems than their diet!

Dianne