Special episode with Dr. Kelly Casperson on HRT
about the episode
Why Did Women Stop Taking HRT? Dr. Kelly Casperson Explains Hormones, Menopause & the WHI Study
Why do so few women use hormone therapy today and what actually happened after the Women’s Health Initiative changed the conversation around menopause care?
In this episode of Innovate & Elevate, Sharon Kedar speaks with Kelly Casperson, board-certified urologist, author, and host of the You Are Not Broken podcast, to discuss one of the most misunderstood topics in women’s health: hormone replacement therapy.
Together they break down what happened after the 2002 Women's Health Initiative study, how fear and misinformation changed care for a generation, and why estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone play important roles in long-term health. The conversation also explores longevity, medical education, and why women are increasingly demanding better menopause care.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
The 2002 Study That Changed Everything: How the Women’s Health Initiative was misinterpreted — and why a misleading press release reshaped women’s health for decades.
The Truth About Hormones: Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are made naturally by the body — and modern therapies are safer, smarter, and more personalized than ever before.
Longevity and Prevention: Hormones don’t just treat symptoms — they can protect your bones, brain, and heart, helping women live longer, healthier lives.
The Next Generation of Change: From Gen X to Millennials, women are demanding better care, better education, and better science.
About Dr. Kelly Casperson
Dr. Kelly Casperson is a board-certified urologist, speaker, author, and women's health advocate. After realizing the significant gap in women's sexual health and hormone education, even within the medical community, she dedicated herself to empowering women through her work. As the host of the popular podcast "You Are Not Broken," and author of books like You Are Not Broken and The Menopause Moment, she uses humor, candor, and science to demystify complex topics around sexuality, menopause, and hormonal health, helping women to advocate for themselves and live their best intimate lives.
Connect with Dr. Kelly Casperson on LinkedIn, Instagram or her website.
Episode Outline
(0:00) Introduction: Sharon welcomes Dr. Kelly Casperson — live from the FDA Menopause Panel
(3:00) The emotional power of restoring hormones — “I’m not angry anymore”
(8:00) Viagra vs. HRT: The gender gap in sexual medicine
(14:00) The WHI study: What really happened in 2002
(21:00) Fear, misinformation, and the black box warning
(28:00) How hormones affect every organ in the body
(33:00) Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone — the full picture
(40:00) The “Lost Generation” of women and rewriting the narrative
(46:00) Testosterone: The forgotten quarterback of women’s health
(53:00) Policy, training, and the future of menopause care
(59:00) The next generation: Why millennials won’t wait to suffer
(1:03:00) Closing thoughts: Every woman deserves the conversation
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For women to come in and just say, I'm sleeping now.
I'm not angry all the time. I changed a woman's life by giving her an estrogen patch for what I thought was hot flashes, right? 'cause she had some hot flashes. She came back and said, I'm not angry with my kids anymore. I'm not an angry person. I was just angry. I've been angry for four years and I don't know why I am angry. And you fix that with an estrogen patch. It's profoundly rewarding medicine.
Welcome back to Innovate and Elevate. I'm Sharon Kedar, your host.
Tonight we have someone who I was blown away by. I went to the FDA because they had their first ever menopause panel.
And my doctor Rachel Rubin was on the panel. Brilliant person after brilliant person. It's the truth about HRT and what we need to know.
What you said at the FDA blew me away.
Dr. Casperson talked about testosterone, about how it's so much more than what we think about. You talked about women's brains turning on, you compared it to the Wizard of Oz, and that a woman saw it in color versus not.
Thank you. Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for being there. There wasn't a lot of people in that room. People were telling me that they were listening 'cause it was live streamed.
people were pulling over crying, listening to that FDA panel. it's free on the FDA's YouTube. It's like a two hour master class. They said, come with heart, science and what the FDA can do to make a difference. And we delivered on the assignment.
You delivered, as you said, with receipts. And so Dr. Casperson has a book out too, if anyone hasn't seen it. It's called The Menopause Moment. And it follows her book called You Are Not Broken. You Are Not Broken is special because it's for women about a topic that we don't typically talk about.
Why is HRT so controversial and can you share what that really means?
I'm a urologist. So urologists commonly treat men. We give them testosterone at 10 times the female dose, and Viagra when they ask for help. And so we treat them like the biologic beings that have health issues. And then when women come in, whether it's low hormones, low sex drive, same thing that the guys are coming in for, right? We're like, oh, just try harder. Try harder and come back when you're suffering enough.
Viagra came out in 1998, and it was a failed blood pressure medication. They gave people placebo and Viagra, to see if it would lower blood pressure.
And they said, this is a crappy blood pressure medication. This isn't working. These men wouldn't give their study drugs back. At the time, people thought male erectile dysfunction was in their head. When you don't have a medication for it, you don't have a treatment.
It's not real. This was the first time we said, aha, there's actually a pill that changes your physiology enough. This is a biology problem, not just in your head. So let's repurpose this. To much fanfare Viagra came out. Within the first two years, it was the fastest selling pharmaceutical ever made. What is now a billion dollars back then? Now this many years later, we've destabilized their relationship because we've treated this person's sexual function, but never treated this person's sexual function.
And my power and voice in this conversation is, who's taking care of the people that I'm giving them medications to wanna be sleeping with, right? And it's a destabilized relationship. I had a woman crying in my office because of a sexless marriage.
I started getting into female sexual health and dysfunction. That's the podcast and the first book. But everybody kept saying, I don't know what happens to sex life with menopause. So I just kept peeling back, the curiosity layers to be like, what's the role of estrogen, testosterone, blood flow, tissue health, collagen? It decreases pain, improves orgasms,all of this.
But we're really afraid of this stuff. Where did that come from? I kept peeling back the layers and the book publishers were like, will you write another book about sex? And I'm like, I think I actually want to write a book about menopause.
They're like, great, write that. But the zeitgeist of the menopause movement was starting to take off. And just like female sexual health was starting to take off, menopause was starting to take off because Gen X is seeing how the boomers are aging.
Gen X is saying, what if there's a different way? And now what's happening, because of all the work Gen X has done, is the millennials are coming along saying, I'm watching Gen X. I see the boomers. Why should I suffer first? And this wave of millennial, why should I suffer
first, is rising up against the wave of the healthcare system, which says, are you suffering enough yet? Why don't you come back when you're more sick? And we actually have something to treat. So these two waves are happening right now. The millennials are gonna win 100%. The millennials are gonna win, right?
So that's where I sit in this intersection of female sexual health hormones, testosterone, and really saying, we can't treat half the population when relationships exist on everybody feeling well.
But isn't it also health? I think about bone health. I think about hormone replacement therapy.
Nobody escapes menopause. So if you are XX biology, there will be a period before menopause... and Dr. Casperson will clear this up if I say anything that needs to be medically corrected, but there's perimenopause, which nobody tells us about. I love all the doctors in the audience, but nobody told me about it.
And then there's menopause, which is defined as 12 months without your period. And in that time, your hormones, as our mutual friend Tamsen (Fadal) says, run out the door. And so you would think that we'd be like, okay, with all the brilliant doctors here, let's tell women that. Let's take care of them.
'Cause to me, when I think about what's causing women living in poor health in midlife?
It's not simply 'cause we live longer, it's during our peak years. How much of the health issue is hormone related?
Are we doing women dirty here? And therefore their families? This is not in the mainstream world talked about.
Yeah. I think health literacy is really low and then health literacy goes lower when the organs we're talking about are on the inside and you can't see 'em. Okay. And I think the great misnomer is menopause means no period for one year.
That's a symptom of actually the ovarian dysfunction lifespan... however you want to say that. No periods is what happens because of the ovarian loss of hormone production.
Ovaries make eggs, but they also make the hormones, right? And these hormones affect every single organ in our body, which is why we say this is not just an OBGYN problem. This is a human problem.
50% of humans... I would say 100% of humans... because the other 50% are affected by what's happening in this body.
For context, my goal is that people have the conversation with their doctor.
Not everybody can take hormone replacement therapy. It's not the answer for everything, but it's estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. Right now in America, 5% of women are on hormone replacement therapy. We can get into sort of the history of it. For many people, is this right, like health benefits, like bone protection? Totally. And for context on that 5%, 40% of women were on hormones in the 1990s.
So we've gone backwards?
Severely backwards. Yeah.For people who don't know, the WHI was a billion dollar NIH sponsored study that got a bad press release in 2002. The study itself, not bad.Lots of useful things actually. But it was the press release that spawned this zeitgeist of fear.
You ask an average woman, why are you afraid of hormones? She can't say, in 2002, the WHI and media... she doesn't know why; it's just in the zeitgeist now. But estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, all made in the ovaries. They act in the brain, the heart, the blood vessels.
They help in the creation of cholesterol. You actually make cholesterol to make those hormones, When hormones go down, the body's smart, it says, maybe I should pump out more cholesterol to try to make this. Rising cholesterol, insulin resistance, development of diabetes, and profound changes to the brain.
Number one thing that perimenopause. So there's no cliff that just happens on a Tuesday, right? Puberty? Takes about four to five years for those ovaries to come online and have regular periods. Perimenopause takes years for ovaries to wear out and us to live longer. And so that's the profound change 'cause often women will be like, my doctors told me I can't get treatment 'cause I'm still having a period. Period's a symptom of hormones changing. It's not the thing that which we walk around and say it's periods are your guiding light. Number one symptom that women complain of in perimenopause is not feeling like myself. In medicine it's very unsatisfying because I can't x-ray that.
I don't have a lab to be like, does Sharon feel like Sharon today? I have to know, oh, there's reasons for not feeling like yourself. Your brain is changing because your hormones are changing.
When you talk about all that, what we started with is really important. But when we're talking about basic human functions that get impacted in perimenopause and menopause.
My mom, with her doctor, went back on estrogen at age 77 last, month and she's one of, what I call, the lost generation of women. So the history
is the 2002 government study that you're talking about was calledthe Women's Health Initiative. So WHI stands for Women's Health Initiative, which is why I don't use the words women's health.
I think this is human health. What's crazy about that study isthere was a press conference called on July 9th, 2002, before the actual study had been released.
It was alerted to the press that estrogen caused breast cancer. And what happened is the HRT plummeted in terms of use and it got pulled out of medical textbooks. So now we not only have to align on what is accurate, but also to understand that this entire well-meaning medical system has not been trained on this issue.
So does HRT cause breast cancer? Were those headlines misleading? This is like a whole gap. Women had to flush their estrogen down the toilet because they were scared and the doctors weren't gonna prescribe it. So this is like the 23 years ago history of maybe we're rewriting it.
Yeah, I think we are rewriting it. I think we're on the next elevator ride up in women's health. The first thing to know is that study used, for layman's terms, that study used oranges. What we use commonly in clinic now is apples. What I mean by that is, this was oral synthetic one dose of medication.
What we use now is a different route and it's what your ovaries naturally make. So when people say estrogen and when people say hormones, we all think we're saying the exact same thing, but there's actually many different types of medications and formulations and routes and dosing and what they used in the WHI did not increase the risk of breast cancer, the estrogen-alone arm, and they used a oral synthetic progestin.
It's a little bit inflammatory. Slightly higher risk, but still not anywhere near alarming of estrogen causes cancer. 'Cause when I say estrogen causes cancer, you think that means all estrogen causes all cancer 100% of the time. You also think something my ovary naturally makes is trying to kill me, right?
When you say those words. Instead, what's more accurate is, a synthetic medication that your body never made in the first place that had nothing to do really with what our ovaries are making, had some little statistical blips. Remember, this study was never created to look at breast cancer in the first place.
It was a secondary endpoint. These people weren't randomized for their risk. And when you pulled the placebo group out, that was previously on hormones, 'cause hormones actually decrease the risk of estrogen cancer, nobody's saying that yet.
Then there was no increased risk in the oral synthetic.
When I was at the FDA,
the FDA Commissioner, if you all haven't read the current FDA Commissioner's book Blind Spots from 2024,talks about all these sort of what medicine has gotten wrong. And chapter two is a whole study of this topic tonight, called OMG HRT, and it's all about actually how it was false. The readout when it came to breast cancer, obviously. It's a sensitive topic. But it also talked about some of the data that is emerging now about, which is important to discuss, but related to dementia.
It talked about the number one killer of women being, just like it is for men, for all genders, heart, and how HRT can actually prolong your life and be cardioprotective. This is all data that was talked about in our current FDA Commissioner's book. And so what's so surprising to me,
as Marty Makary calls it, outdated medical dogma, but it's still this standard that people are afraid. We're at 5% treatment and that well-meaning doctors don't have this information because of a study that was poorly run... Have we ever heard of a time when, okay, I'm gonna call a press release, but I'm not gonna give you... here's a doctor, here's a doctor, medical practitioner... I'm not gonna give you the information to have information parody. I'm gonna hold it back for eight days and scare the crap outta you. Breast cancer is terrifying.
It's a huge deal. We're living now three to four decades past our ovarian lifespan. We've never aged that much on a societal global level before.
The boomers are the great experiment, from a big standpoint. They're breaking hips, they have dementia, devastating loss to self-worth, let alone family resources. And so Gen X is like, how do we do that different? And then the millennials are like, we don't wanna suffer.
It's not so much that frailty is inevitable; it's what can we do now? Because hormones prevent disease. Hormones don't treat disease well. So you actually have to get on this, if you're gonna get on it, as soon as your ovaries start going down. That's what the data says. If we wanna prevent the dementia on the, I say, on the horrible day, on that horrible Tuesday that you or a loved one are diagnosed with dementia. It started 20 years earlier.
That gave me chills. That's the whole PSA, folks. 'Cause that to me is shocking and unacceptable. You know what I mean? Do you all think people deserve better?
When our mutual friend, Vonda Wright, said at the FDA,
if you're born a woman, it's either gonna be you or me. Meaning one in two women will have an osteoporotic fracture in their life. She's an orthopedic surgeon.
She talked about Miriam, one of her patients. If you break your hip, one in three women will die that year.
When do we actually talk to women and girls about this?
When are we supposed to go and see a urologist?
Do we see an OBGYN? Do we see our GP? What do we do?
Yeah, so this is a human issue. 51% of the population. There's 40,000 OBGYNs in the nation for 80 million women over the age of 40. Math doesn't math. And those gynecologists are busy delivering babies, doing hysterectomies.
They are very busy already. It is damaging to say 51% of the population needs to be taken care of by 40,000 people. We can't do it. This is all hands on deck. Your skin gets affected, your health after surgery gets affected, your brain gets affected. This is everywhere in our body. It's natural, but we shouldn't need to suffer.
So puberty's natural, but I don't want you to suffer through it. I'm gonna help you through puberty. Let's talk about the issues that might come up in puberty. Pregnancy's natural, but I'm gonna help you through issues with pregnancy. We're gonna treat complications of pregnancy. And you're gonna know about it. And living longer than your ovarian function is natural, but you shouldn't have to suffer from it.
There's consequences that happen from it. You should know about it and there's options. What we're doing now, because of the role of social media, podcasts, Instagram... Women are smart, you give 'em good information, they make good decisions.
We know that. So we are changing this big ship of medicine from the ground up and we tell women, we're like, I'm sorry, but right now you might go to your doctor knowing more than them about what's going on.
And it's because after the WHI doctors stopped being trained. Interesting statistic that 40% of women were on hormones prior to the WHI. 40%. Top five bestselling pharmaceuticals in the country in the 1990s. 10 years after the WHI, 10% of American women were on hormones.
Now 20 years after the WHI, 5% of women are on hormones.
It was a study, when interpreted well, you realized, this wasn't that bad of a study. Media made it bad. The study itself was not that bad. Interestingly, that study is free online for anybody who wants to read it and interpret it. And yet here we are with the zeitgeist of fear.
So those doctors like, this isn't a, it's a blip, but this is not that bad of a study. My patients are benefiting. I know this is safe, I'm gonna continue doing it. But at some point those doctors retired. And that's why we had 10 years after 10% were on now, 20 years after, 5% were on 'cause we have two decades of clinicians that didn't get trained.
I didn't get trained. I had patients crying in my office, and I was like, what's the truth? How can I help? And then became so infuriated by it to be like, you're telling me we're afraid of something that will actually make you live longer? That's why we're taking the time tonight. So you're saying that the data shows that, and it's not for everybody, but by and large, for a woman in midlife, hormone therapy will have a woman live longer, but she's afraid to take it?
Yeah. So two things. Number 1, 2022 menopause guidelines. The guidelines say benefit outweighs the risk within 10 years.
Benefit outweighs the risk is a very strong statement in medicine. Medicine doesn't say that about many things. And the other thing I say is if a man could take medication between 50 and 60 that made him live on average two to three years longer, do you think every man would be on that medication?
People are like, yes. And it would be vending machines, right? That medication is called estrogen. And what we've done is we've upplayed the fear and we've downplayed the benefit. People are starting to figure that out. We do lots of things in medicine that have risks, that have benefits.
That's what medicine is. It's a discussion of risks and benefits and everybody deserves that discussion.
That's what I think is, people deserve the discussion. JAMA ( Journal of American Medicine) says that it takes 17 years for updated protocols to reach patients currently. And Dr. Makary did say changes are coming. But currently estrogen has a black box warning.
The protocol that our mutual friend Dr. Rubin talks about is five things to talk about with a woman. Five different medicines. So you've got a 10 minute doctor visit, five medicines: estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, vaginal estrogen, and then an extra cream that you all talk about.
So how are we supposed to do right by American families? How are we supposed to fix this if it takes 17 years on average when guidelines are updated to reach patients?
This is a culture change, right?
Big culture issues. Believe women when they tell you, are you suffering enough?
The average woman in America has to see five doctors to get her menopause symptoms treated.
And at the same time, women utilize too many healthcare resources. You're too expensive to take care of. You have too many problems. If you don't take care of her problems and she has to see multiple people, then yes, that's true. And what if it's not eight different problems that you have?
What if it's one problem that you have? Because hormones affect all the things. It's not a shoulder issue, a brain fog issue, a bladder issue, a heart palpitations issue. That's all hormones.
How many women do you think are
receiving antidepressants and sleeping medicines when they might be starting the wrong place.
We know they are.
25% of American women are on an SSRI. 80% sexual dysfunction. There goes that destabilizing. Meanwhile her partner's getting testosterone and Viagra...
Wait, 80% of women have...?
80% sexual dysfunction rate with SSRIs.
Oh, okay.
That women are not properly consented about.
Independent association with bone fracture with SSRIs 'cause it works in serotonin. Serotonin receptors are in the bone. I didn't know that, I'm a urologist. So I called my orthopedic surgeon friend. I'm like, you know, the SSRIs are independently associated with bone fracture? And this has been so well studied, there's multiple meta-analyses on this. And the orthopedic surgeon says, I didn't know that. And I called my primary care doctor who prescribed this, do you know that SSRIs of an independent association with bone fracture, independent to osteoporosis? And she says, I didn't know that.
25% of American women are on SSRIs. And women will tell you, I know I'm not depressed. I know that's not what this is.
But that's what they're given?
That's what they're given. So 25% are on SSRIs, 5% are on hormones. We hear this all the time. The amount of women who are able to then come off of their SSRIs when their menopause is properly treated.
So how do we catch up the system? Is this like continuing medical education? At HLTH [conference] in Vegas, there's a really smart Harvard doctor who was saying that when we had the opioid crisis, we actually trained doctors and required for their licensing that they learn about pain management.
She was basically saying that we taught doctors how to prescribe. Should this be table stakes for having a medical license? What's even realistic? 17 states now, this year alone, have menopause legislature in the state houses.
Doctors don't like being told how to do our job by people who aren't physicians. Nobody does. The lawyers like being told how to practice law by people who aren't lawyers, right? It's a common thing. But when we fail so greatly and the change is slow,
I think that the legislation is like, but these women are suffering.
They're dropping out of the workforce. Bad things are happening. There is this legislation to try to move it. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but I know why it's happening. The 10 minute patient visit with the doctor is strapped for time.
There is no time to be curious to continue learning. So right now we have 1 million physicians in this country.
Every single one of them works with a woman who will hopefully outlive her ovaries because that means she's living long. We all need to know. So how do we change this? So that's the top down legislating.Bottom up, educate the women. Because nothing will motivate a doctor to change than five women coming in that week saying, I've heard about vaginal estrogen, can I give it a try? I'll follow up in two months and we'll adjust the doses needed. 'Cause we're teaching the women how to talk to the doctors. So we've got bottom up going, top down coming. The medical schools are getting better this way. We've got the FDA doing great things with making sure labeling is correct.
Preserve the sanctity of a box warning. Box warning should be significant threat to life or limb. That's what a box warning means. If your product doesn't actually have that, don't have a box warning. So we've got those changes coming...
And that box warning came a year after the WHI...
...because of the WHI.
Because of the media Societal change. When a woman says something's wrong, believe her. Offer her treatment. So we've got all these different fluxes happening and where do I see this going?
Where do I see us in five years? We're going to treat perimenopause a lot better than we are now. We're gonna start taking care of the boomers.
It really is a wave of the medical system and a wave of people saying, why should I suffer to an nth degree before I'm offered treatments?
And Dr. Casperson is a world expert in testosterone. And in July she talked about how there was not an FDA approved testosterone. Women on testosterone either needed to use a compounding pharmacy or 1/10th of the male dose. So it's, can you just talk to the benefits that you think testosterone have for women?
And chapter four of your new book,
The Menopause Moment calls it The Forgotten Quarterback.What do you want folks to know about testosterone? Things I didn't learn in medical school, right?
Ovaries make testosterone. Through testosterone conversion, we get estradiol. You cannot have estradiol in your body without your ovary making testosterone. Female bodies just make about 1/10th the amount of male bodies. And by the way, male bodies make estrogen, right? So this whole like binary one is one, this one's this one is no.
Just different parts rearranged in different ways. All of our bodies make these things.
I've been giving testosterone for six or seven years and nobody comes back and says, just my libido's better. There is not a one centimeter box on the left side. That's the libido box, right?
Testosterone works in the nervous system by making glial cells healthy. Glial cells are neuron support systems. We've got the support cells being healthier. We've got the mitochondria of the neurons being better. We've got the myelin sheaths of the neurons being better.
Testosterone is a nerve neuron drug. It helps the brain. And when people say it's only for libido, I'm like, but what's libido? Libido is motivation. Motivation towards something, right? Also, the dopamine pathway. Dopamine is released on the pursuit of something rewarding, right?
So we've got testosterone and estrogen working in the dopamine pathway, and then testosterone specifically works in the motivation pathway. That's why when women come back, they don't just say, my libido's better. They say, I actually feel like getting stuff done. I know personally about eight women who started businesses after they got on testosterone.
I just feel like doing stuff. Men say the exact same thing, right? This is a motivation hormone. But again, in medicine, I can't x-ray how your motivation level is. I can't measure your motivation level, right? So it gets stereotyped as this libido drug.
So when I went to the FDA, I said, please, when you approve a female dose testosterone, do not approve it for libido 'cause insurance doesn't cover sexual health. Men have it approved for low hormones. Women have low testosterone 'cause of low hormones.
We should have a quality in our labeling, because if we make this a sex drug, then women will have to lie to their doctors to get it. Or they'll have to pay out of pocket 'cause insurance won't cover it.
Now, there was a patch that went up in 2004 to be FDA approved in this country.
Excellent safety data, excellent efficacy data. Why did it not get approved? ' Cause it happened right after the WHI. It wasn't 'cause there was too many side effects and it wasn't 'cause it didn't work. It was just a very unpopular time for hormones.
There are now four countries in the world that have a female dose testosterone. We have Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK. I hope America is next because women's quality of life should be treated as well as a man's quality of life.
Yeah, if we're talking about like stamina, energy, mental clarity, these are all things that you talk about in the book that are tied to testosterone.
The dose might be different, but it's incredibly hard for a woman to access it, let alone pay for it. As a leading doctor globally for women, how does one titrate the dose?
So if you're lucky enough, and I imagine the 5% of women in this country who have HRT, that is mostly estrogen and progesterone. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's probably like a fraction of them are on testosterone. Is that right?
Yeah. The data's really hard to measure because there's no FDA approved product that we can just check insurance databases.
I can't tell you how many people are on it 'cause we can't study it 'cause there isn't a product. But it only helps with mental clarity, stamina, and details like that.
And it also can lower your blood pressure and it also helps with muscle mass and it also helps with bones.
Sounds super insignificant.
Yes. So the best data that we have, which is trying to measure pellets and compounded and off-label male doses, to the best data that we have, as many women in this country are on testosterone as men. Men have about 10 products. Women have zero. A New York Times article just got published.
I was quoted in it. I think they did a fair job because they validated the women's experiences.
The things that these hormones help you with are in the medical world, vague.
Feeling like yourself, motivation to get stuff done, not hitting a wall at 3:00 PM. I can't x-ray that. I can't lab test that. I can't ICD 10 (International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision) that. But at the end of the day, you feeling like you is the single most important thing that a healthcare professional can help you with.
Yeah. And this is like a minor detail, but I think that for all of the women that birth the entire population, we might wanna do what you said.
Thank you to Dr. Casperson. I feel optimistic tonight. We're all behind you in driving the change.
It's not that HRT is for everybody, but everybody deserves the conversation. American families deserve the conversation and we've already heard that we're going to have some changes to some of the black box.
Maybe that'll be part of the catalyst. Dr. Casperson is part of a really fascinating group who give hope. It's not gonna be one person, It's gonna be all of us.
Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming today.
Additional Resources
The 2002 Women’s Health Initiative (JAMA)
FDA Menopause Panel Discussion (YouTube)
Dr. Casperson’s book: You Are Not Broken
Dr. Kelly Casperson Speaking at the FDA’s Announcement for Removing “Black Box” Warnings
About Your Host
Sharon Kedar, CFA, is Co-Founder of Northpond Ventures. Northpond is a multi-billion-dollar science-driven venture capital firm with a portfolio of 60+ companies, along with key academic partnerships at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, MIT’s School of Engineering, and Stanford School of Medicine. Prior to Northpond, Sharon spent 15 years at Sands Capital, where she became their first Chief Financial Officer. Assets under management grew from $1.5 billion to $50 billion over her tenure, achieving more than 30x growth. Sharon is the co-author of two personal finance books for women. Sharon has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a B.A. in Economics from Rice University, and is a CFA charterholder. She lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband, Greg, and their three kids.
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FAQs
Why did so many women stop taking hormone replacement therapy?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Kelly Casperson explains that hormone therapy use declined dramatically after interpretations of the 2002 Women's Health Initiative study created widespread fear around HRT and breast cancer risk. The conversation explores how media messaging and misunderstanding shaped menopause care for decades.
What happened in the Women's Health Initiative study?
In this Innovate & Elevate conversation, Dr. Kelly Casperson explains how the Women's Health Initiative study and its accompanying press coverage reshaped public perception of hormone therapy. She discusses how later analysis led to a more nuanced understanding of risks and benefits.
What do estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone do in women?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Kelly Casperson explains that estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are naturally occurring hormones involved in many systems throughout the body. The discussion explores their roles in brain health, bone health, motivation, sexual health, and long-term wellbeing.
Is testosterone important for women?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Kelly Casperson refers to testosterone as "the forgotten quarterback" of women’s health and explains its potential role in energy, motivation, sexual wellbeing, and quality of life.
Can hormone therapy support long-term health and longevity?
In this Innovate & Elevate conversation, Dr. Kelly Casperson discusses how hormone therapy conversations often extend beyond symptom relief and into broader topics including bone health, brain health, cardiovascular health, and healthy aging.
Why do many women feel confused about hormone therapy?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Kelly Casperson explains that decades of conflicting messaging, fear, and limited medical education created widespread confusion around menopause and hormones. The conversation explores why many women are now seeking updated information.
Why are Millennials and Gen X changing menopause conversations?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Kelly Casperson discusses why younger generations are increasingly asking questions about menopause, advocating for evidence-based care, and demanding better education around hormones and women’s health.
Why is menopause education still limited in medicine?
In this Innovate & Elevate discussion, Dr. Kelly Casperson explains that menopause and women’s sexual health historically received limited attention in medical training. She discusses why improving education may help close gaps in care.
What should women know before discussing hormone therapy with a doctor?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Kelly Casperson encourages women to understand their symptoms, ask questions, and seek evidence-based information. The discussion highlights the importance of individualized care and informed conversations around menopause treatment.