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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Dan Saelinger / Trunk ArchiveIf I were a middle-aged man suffering from erectile dysfunction, I could walk into my neighborhood pharmacy and buy a 30-day supply of Sildenafil (the generic for Viagra) for $8.67 out of pocket, and, no, that’s not the insurance copay. That’s the basic cash cost, with a coupon. A menopausal woman in search of affordable estrogen, however—a requirement not just for her sexual health but for her overall health and well-being—is both a victim of decades of medical ignorance and a cog caught in the wheel of a deliberately confusing grift foisted on her by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Not only will many of our doctors be completely ignorant of the benefits of estrogen to alleviate our symptoms, but we will spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on it per year. And that is if we can even procure a prescription. Urologist Kelly Casperson, MD, author of You Are Not Broken, finds the whole estrogen racket both infuriating and confusing to her, too. Though she is a well-informed doctor with excellent health insurance, her local pharmacy recently tried to charge her a $265 copay for generic estradiol cream, a local vaginal estrogen. “I know enough,” she said, “because I prescribe this every day, that I pulled up my GoodRx app, typed in the pharmacy, and it was $28. I showed them that and said, ‘I wanna pay the $28 cash price.’ They said, ‘Yep, no problem.’ So number one, my insurance wanted me to pay $265! Number two, the pharmacy isn’t helping me out, right? But I had to know that.”Before we get into the wheres and hows of procuring affordable estrogen, let’s first define our terms. There are two types of estrogen therapy: Systemic estrogen: Systemic hormone therapy goes through the whole body and requires progesterone as well, if you have a uterus. (If you do not have a uterus, then you do not need progesterone.)Local vaginal estrogen: This estrogen stays locally in the vagina and does not require progesterone, whether or not you have a uterus.“It’s really important that we understand the
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