In her 1995 book A New Prescription for Women’s Health: Getting the Best Medical Care in a Man’s World, Bernadine Healy, a cardiologist and the first (and thus far only) female director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), observed that many of the major risks that women face as they age—heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s disease—“are or may well be reduced by hormone replacement therapy.” As a result of that data, she wrote, when she hit menopause, she planned to begin HRT “without a blink”:
