For the longest time, I've warned female patients to stay away from synthetic hormone replacement therapy (HRT), as it can affect them in a multitude of health-harming ways. After all these years, conventional medicine has finally begun to get a clue: Breast cancer rates are dropping, based on a report by researchers at Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Breast cancer rates fell 7 percent in 2003, the year after bombshell studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association warning women synthetic HRT added to their risks of stroke, blood clots and heart attack as well as breast cancer, meaning some 14,000 fewer women sidestepped them. The drop is amazing on its own, researchers say, considering breast cancer rates over the last quarter of the 20th century had risen 30 percent in the United States.

The other amazing and telling number: The steepest decline in breast cancer rates (12 percent) was seen in women ages 50-69, the typical period in which women use hormones or estrogen to relieve menopausal symptoms.

As necessary, most women really need estradiol, which is bioidentical to the primary human female hormone. Additionally, lifestyle changes can balance a woman's hormones at any time of her life.