Yes they are interesting, and I for one chalk some of that up to lack of understanding on the part of both doctors and women of the whole process. Too many doctors offer you one choice (here's your Premarin) and if you have problems, offer you Prozac or a referral to a shrink and deny it can possibly be hormone-related. Too many women fail to educate themselves about their body's needs (obviously, I'm not talking about any of the women who find their ways here ) and write off the whole concept of hrt based on a poorly-conceived scare story in the for-profit media. Sad, sad.

My favorite study of all times is "Efficacy and Tolerability of a Low-dose of Oesclim (25 mcg Daily) in the Management of Symptomatic Menopausal Women: A French Open-label Study" by D. Elia1, A. Tamborini, Y. Leocmach and H. Chadha-Boreham (Current Medical Research and Opinion 16(2):94-106, 2000 but also available at medscape.com). In it, the authors make the startlng discovery that women who begin hormones with a very low dose are much less likely to abandon HRT due to side effects than women who take a higher dose. They have even determined (drum roll, please) that signs of excess estrogen are more likely to result from higher doses than lower ones. Now, is that cutting-edge science or what?

Okay, taking my tongue back out of my cheek, let me just say that I feel a lot of sympathy for some of those women who do drop out or for various other reasons fail to benefit from some variety of hrt and resign themselves to putting up with, in some cases, quite debilitating symptoms as "just part of getting old." I don't think hrt is for everyone and I don't think hrt is a miracle cure for aging, but I hate to see such far-reaching decisions made (or not made) on the basis of lack of good informed personal evaluation.  

Or, to put it another way, I think those stats you reference reveal a really sad lack in the system, rather than a shortcoming of hrt itself (although goodness knows, hrt isn't perfect either).  Thanks goodness at least some of us manage to find our way to this and other online resources where we can learn from each other...which is also a thank you to you, Dearest, for this site and this forum.

Interesting statistics regarding HRT:

The Massachusetts Women's Health Study showed that forty percent of those on hormones continued to experience symptoms, and soon quit taking their medication, or took it intermittently; five percent experienced no relief at all, and twenty percent never filled their prescriptions. Previous studies found that half of all women on estrogen quit taking the hormone within one year after starting it.