[derektank]

The damage the Women’s Health Initiative did to women’s health by conducting the flawed research that got HRT black boxed for twenty years really cannot be overstated. We went from a quarter of women being on estrogen replacement therapy post-menopause at the turn of the millennium to ~5% in 2020. A real case study in institutional failure.

[sandworm101]

At the time, there was also real concern about what that estrogen was doing to other people too, people around women who were on supplements. I used to be a competitive swimmer. There was a real debate in the 90s/2000s about how much of that estrogen was ending up in pool water. The question was whether it was healthy for children, boys and girls, to be literately swimming in a not-insignificant amount of supplemental estrogen. Testosterone patches were also an issue in pools, but they were much less common. With the change in treatment the debate is now largely moot.

The exposure for lap swimmers was significant. A competitive kid would regularly spend 10+ hours a week in that water (at my peak it was closer to 20+) not to mention the amount of water swallowed and inhaled as vapor/droplets.

There is a line in a Doctor Who episode (Torchwood?) where a character comments that he could recognize 20th century earth because he could taste estrogen in the rain. In real life, it was detected in rainwater.

[jhoechtl]

Is there any line between your statement, women's contraceptive pill and an ongoing decline in human intelligence?

[bethekidyouwant]

The institution of science?

[leoqa]

If I remember correctly they linked it to breast cancer, causing all research and prescribing to basically disappear over night. It took 20 years before the study was revisited and the link dismissed.