For nearly as long as women have been around, they have been going through
menopause. It is a bodily process as old as human birth, death, and of course,
menstruation. Like many normal biological events, menopause was gradually
medicalized, and with the rise of pharmaceutical medicine, women and their
doctors were convinced that it was an "estrogen deficiency disease" that could
be treated by supplementing the body's declining estrogen levels with hormones.
By 2002 hormone treatment had been on the market for more than fifty years when
doctors and women alike were shocked by the results of a massive clinical trial,
the Women's Health Initiative: women taking