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Suzanne Somers
New York, NY: Crown; 2006
This is a tough book to review for someone who has been a researcher, clinician, and teacher in this area of medicine for 40 years. It took me several years of solid research to get my PhD. Suzanne Somers acknowledges that “writing this book was like getting my PhD with the world’s greatest professors.”
These “professors” are thanked as “these amazing people doing the most incredible work to thwart the onslaught of the environment and the devastating and misunderstood passage of hormone loss.” A Library of Congress search of these “16 cutting-edge doctors” revealed the most amazing findings -- no published original research papers in the medical literature by any of them.
Not surprisingly then, Ageless is a tribute to pseudoscience, to safe and wishful thinking against facts, to claims of safety without proof.
There are, indeed, facts in this book that are true and would represent validated medical science. Unfortunately, the facts get strung together with the fallacies; the uninformed reader is misled to believe the fallacies rather than the truth.
The result is a book with overwhelming misinformation. The dangers are to women who may be misled into “buying into” the products, thereby putting themselves potentially at greater risk than protection.
This is truly a book I found hard to pick up once I had put it down.
Review written by:
Wulf H. Utian, MD, PhD
Arthur H. Bill Professor Emeritus of Reproductive Biology
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Consultant in Women's Health
The Cleveland Clinic Foundation
Executive Director
The North American Menopause Society
Cleveland, OH
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The North American Menopause Society (NAMS) is pleased to offer reviews from medical experts of popular menopause-related books for consumers. Unless specifically stated otherwise, the comments contained in this review are opinions of the author, not necessarily those of The North American Menopause Society, its officers, agents, or trustees.
Copyright © 2006 The North American Menopause Society. All rights reserved. |