Synchronicity, Oprah, Newsweek, and hormones: Part 2

Back to my main programme, hormones are popularly believed to make people, particularly women, crazy.  Teenagers are hormonal (i.e. difficult and crazy to deal with) with females often being considered the more difficult. How many times have you heard, “Boys are easier.” Then there’s PMS, that’s when a menstruating woman’s hormones make her crazy. Finally, we have menopause (when hormonal output changes again) is well known as a time when women get difficult or crazy.

Coincidentally, Oprah is at that age, the menopausal age. Having difficulty swallowing this? Take a look at p. 37, the page I mentioned in yesterday’s with the original or working title for the article. There’s an image there of Oprah in 1972 when she was crowned Miss Black Nashville. What possible reason is there to run an old beauty pageant picture? The only way it makes any sense within the context of the piece is as contrast. Had they gone with original title they would never have been able to justify using that image. Take a good look at the images they use with the article and ask yourself why they included a picture of Oprah seated in a back seat of a car with curlers in her hair.

The article itself is bookend by the hormone story. It starts with Suzanne Somers and the January 2009 hormone show and ends with a mention of Suzanne Somers lest we forget that this is really about the hormones and aging.

One last thing, there are 20 pages of advertising in the Newsweek issue. Two advertisers from the pharmaceutical sector purchased 10 pages of advertising. The other 10 pages are spread between a travel magazine, telecommunications company, beer, audio equipment, non profit, church, automotive, coffee, automobile software, and an insurance company. Oh, Newsweek itself also has a page.

I don’t think the pharamceutical companies dictated the cover story but the folks at Newsweek had to know that the attack on crazy, wackadoodle alternative therapies would not put any future advertising in jeopardy.

No one element puts the article over the top; it’s the combination of elements. Some of them deliberate and some of them serendipitous. Unfortunately, in the end we’re left with a peculiarly vicious attack on aging and being a woman. In Oprah’s case, a powerful and successful woman.

It’s not necessary to denigrate someone when you’re critcising them. For a more thoughtful critique of Oprah’s health programmes, you can check Dr. Rahul Parikh’s article on Salon.com, here.

Tomorrow, Susan Baxter, author of Estrogen Errors, on how the medical establishment (just like Oprah and Suzanne Somers) has had a longtime infatuation with estrogen.

I’m quite surprised, I just checked Rob Annan’s blog, Researcher Forum: Don’t Leave Canada Behind to find some major changes taking place with regard to the science ministry in the UK and science funding in Germany.

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