It’s incredibly hard at this point not to go even beyond Mark Crislip-grade acid sarcasm at the
arrogance of ignorance on display. Here we have a woman who is apparently taking cortisol as part of her “bioidentical hormone” cocktail, and this woman
does not know that each and every one of those estrogens she is taking is a steroid hormone. More importantly, Somers apparently does not know that cortisol is a
corticosteroid (”cortico,” get it?), the very same kind of steroid that is routinely used by us evil reductionist practitioners of “Western medicine” as an anti-inflammatory and immunsuppressant. When used that way by us evil pharma shills, cortisol is known as
hydrocortisone, which is–gasp!–a
pharmaceutical concoction! It’s also “bioidentical,” too, proving once more that “bioidentical” does not mean “risk-free.” Indeed, hydrocortisone is often included as one of the drugs in immunusuppressive protocols used to prevent the rejection of organ transplants. Given that Somers has said that she takes enough “bioidentical” estrogens to recreate the hormonal milieu of a woman in her 20s (in other words, far more estrogens than a 63 year old woman would ever have or need), it’s not beyond the pale to wonder whether she similarly takes a significant dose of hydrocortisone (sorry,
cortisol) as part of her brew of “bioidenticals,” particularly in light of her having fallen seriously ill due to an organism that usually causes mild disease in immunocompetent hosts. Yes, valley fever can sometimes be a bad disease in immunocompetent hosts, but being immunocompromised for whatever reason is still a significant risk factor for disseminated disease or the reactivation of quiescent disease.
After reading Somers’ story in Chapter 1, I shook my head in disbelief that Random House apparently didn’t have better editors who could have told Somers that she had just written something incredibly contradictory and just plain dumb when she wrote that didn’t take steroids in the context of writing how she castigated her oncologist for “not understanding” the role of cortisol in her menopause treatments.
