All over the U.S., women in their 40s and 50s are going to doctors and demanding "the pills that will keep me from growing old." Women in their 60s and over are asking for "pills to make me young again." In each case, what they are really asking for are doses of hormones to slow down or reduce the ravages of age.
Such hormone therapy is not new (TIME, Oct. 16, 1964); the current excitement has been stimulated by recent magazine articles and especially by a book, Feminine Forever, by Brooklyn Gynecologist Robert A. Wilson (M. Evans & Co., Inc., $5.95). According to the ads, Feminine Forever is the answer to the Hokinson woman's prayers —it tells "how to avoid menopause completely in your life, and stay a romantic, desirable, vibrant woman as long as you live. It shows how women who already have gone through the anguish of menopause can . . . grow visibly younger day by day." The author himself does not go quite that far, although he says his work is "one of the greatest biological revolutions in the history of civilization."
Tart Suggestion. Revolution or not, the hormone replacement program that Dr. Wilson advocates is designed to deal with a process of nature. A woman's output of sex hormones, which come mainly from her ovaries, decreases with the menopause and nears zero as she nears 80. This would cause little distress if the only function of the hormones was to preserve her monthly cycle of ovulation and menstruation—it would simply mark the end of her fertility period. But some of the hormones, especially the estrogens, fill many other biological needs. They help to keep the breasts firm and the skin supple and relatively wrinkle-free; they help keep down the level of fats in the blood and thus reduce the risk of heart attacks, and they help to keep the bones strong and hard. They have other metabolic effects as well, and some subtle influences on the emotions.
Centuries ago, the effects of hormone decline were less conspicuous because so few women lived beyond the menopause. Now modern medicine has added 30 or more years to the female life span. And still, Dr. Wilson complains, physicians generally dismiss post-menopausal changes as part of the "natural" aging process. Their attitude, he suggests tartly, stems from the fact that "most doctors, being male, are themselves immune to the disease." As he sees it, the menopause is "castration," and he asks whether his colleagues would tolerate so casually a similar fate in themselves.
Dr. Wilson compares the menopause to diabetes, arguing that both are deficiency diseases. His own efforts to correct woman's menopausal deficiency began in the 1920s. At first he had only crude hormone extracts, which had to be injected. Now there is a plethora of estrogens and of the other sex hormones, progestins and androgens. Most of them are at least partly synthetic, and they can be taken easily by mouth. A couple of years ago, a patient who had kept on taking the birth-control pill Enovid after her menopause gave Dr. Wilson a new insight: the pill—which contains both a progestin and an estrogen-seemed adequate and acceptable for alleviating the "change of life."