Sometimes "cold turkey" is the only option for going off the
drugs - it was in my case, seven years ago when I found out that
I had endometrial cancer (which happened even though I _was_
taking progesterone along with premarin).  Since EC growth is
stimulated by estrogen,  I stopped taking it immediately.

And there are some women for whom weaning doesn't prevent a
recurrence of symptoms, although it may lessen their severity.
(If you think about it, perimenopause is Nature's way of weaning
us off estrogen.)

Everyone needs to assess the risks she is willing to take, for
hormonal therapy as for any other drug.  The history of HRT,
sadly, is strewn with glowing but highly inaccurate reports of
its wonders (e.g., the book "Feminine Forever").

These reports were only slowly contradicted by evidence of the
risks that it entails.  One was the discovery that unopposed
estrogen could significantly increase the risk of endometrial
cancer in women with uteri intact - and that was only finally
acknowledged around 20 years after the onset of widespread use of
estrogen to "treat" menopause.  (Wyeth took it as an opportunity
to sell an additional drug.)  More recently, the WHI studies have
illuminated more of the risks and countered some of the claims of
benefits of estrogen and estrogen/progesterone.

http://www.cohenandmalad.com/News/default.asp?is=yes&nid=23
contains a concise history of the use of estrogen and
progesterone treatments for menopausal changes.

What is important is that women are informed and presented with
_all_ of the available information, incomplete though it may be.

Now *that* is Cold Turkey!

FurPaw

Estrogen and menopause

Each year, more than 600,000 women have hysterectomies in the U.S. Now,
for this large group of women, there's some potentially good news about
using hormones to treat the symptoms of menopause.
The women who took the estrogen only, or "active" pills got breast
cancer at about the same rate as those women in the study who took
placebo, or sugar pills. "There were fewer breast cancers diagnosed for
women on the active study pills. However, when we looked at those
tumors, those tumors were actually significantly larger, and there was
a tendency for them to have spread to more lymph nodes," Stefanik said.

For  complete news:-
http://www.medical-health-care-information.com/health-news/4-12health2.htm