Ah yes, bioidentical hormones are all natural and safe!Another possibility presents itself. As we know from her previous books and appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Somers takes boatloads of “bioidentical” hormones. She promotes them as a fountain of youth for women. One wonders if any of her various supplements or bioidentical hormones were somehow adulterated with corticosteroids, which suppressed her immune system, one does. Or at least I do.
One need wonder no more. Right there, in Chapter 1 of her book, is a highly plausible, highly likely explanation for why Somers became as ill as she did from coccidioidomycosis:
Day 5. Dr. Oncologist comes into my room. Now, you would think he’d say, “Well, sometimes it’s good to be wrong.” Or “Isn’t it great that you don’t have cancer?” But no. He walks in, doesn’t sit down, just looks at me and says angrily, “Well, you should have told me you were on steroids.”
I am flabbergasted. I don’t know what to say to him; I am so stunned by his lack of compassion that I just stare at him. I am not on steroids. I would never take steroids. But because he is stuck in old thinking and so out of touch with new medicine, he has no clue and doesn’t understand cortisol replacement as part of the menopausal experience.
I don’t know where to begin with him. He’s too arrogant to listen to a “stupid actress,” anyway. So much of his attitude with me has been the unsaid but definite “So you think all your ‘alternatives’ are going to help you now, missy?”
Why steroids would have anything to do with being misdiagnosed with full-body cancer, I can’t guess. But we still don’t know what has gone wrong in my body. We still have to find out what caused me to end up in the ER.
(Emphasis mine.)
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.
This story cracked me up because whenever I dilute hydrocort, there's this big "POISON" and the international symbol for poison on the label covering 60% of the bottle. Its the only medicine I routinely use that has that label other than this fungal antibiotic.
