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# Can A Pill Really Make You Sexy?
- URL: https://www.foodconsumer.org/pill_sexy_0312150937/
- Published: 2015-03-12T10:36:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T16:24:59.000Z
- Description: The author argues that hormone replacement therapy was marketed to women as a way to stay youthful until it was tied to heart attacks and cancer, and that the same pitch now sells “Low T” to men while grief, ordinary life problems and children's behaviour get medicated.
- Author: Food Consumer
- Tags: Drug, Health News, #vivvo-import

From the 1940s until ten years ago, millions of women took hormone replacement therapy to retain their youth. While HRT was officially marketed to stop hot flashes and keep bones strong, unofficially it was marketed as a way of staying attractive and sexy. Early HRT ads told women they had “outlived their ovaries” and not kept up with their husbands who wanted younger looking women. When HRT was found to increase the risk of heart attacks and cancer (sorry about that), bone drugs took up Pharma’s “don’t get old” message to women, pushed by former Today show host Meredith Vieira, former Charlie’s Angel Cheryl Ladd and actress Sally Field.

In the last five years, men have been told they also need hormone replacement therapy for their “Low T” and to retain their sexiness and youth. But male HRT looks no safer than women’s and may similarly activate pre-existing cancers. Clearly people do not get old because they lose their hormones; they lose their hormones because they get old.

Pills that promise to make you sexy are not the only drugs that are mismarketed, sometimes unethically. Increasingly, Big Pharma tells people they have mental illnesses like depression and need to be on antidepressants when they may just have real life problems in their marriage, on their job or with their checkbook. There is even now a medication for the grief and sadness of losing a loved one which has been elevated into a “disease.”

And how about all the pills that make kids who have “attention deficits” and behavioral disorders “behave”? Who remembers recess? ADHD, once called MBD, does exist but it has become a catch-all category which drug companies market to make money.

And American take other pills that they probably don’t need and which may even make them worse. Once upon a time people with heartburn took Tums, Alka Seltzer, Bromo Seltzer or Maalox and vowed not to eat so much. Now they worry that they really have Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and are developing cancer of the esophagus which is a risk for only a small fraction of the population. The “purple pill” style proton pump inhibitors people take regularly out of such fears are not harmless. In addition to their cost, they increase the risk of thinning bones (osteoporosis) and of a potentially dangerous intestinal infection called c. difficile.

Today’s online “symptom checkers,” quizzes to see if you have a certain disease and exhortations to see your doctor even though you feel fine have create a nation of pill heads. Once Pharma discovered that health fears and even hypochondria sell drugs, there seems to be no end to the new diseases, symptoms and risks people are told to worry about. Drug companies actually "sell" diseases to people who may not have them to build demand for expensive drugs. Worse, the drugs, which may not even be needed, creating side effects which then people use more drugs to treat.

Before the Internet and direct-to-consumer advertising, the medical profession tried to reassure people about their health concerns. Remember “take two aspirins and call me in the morning”? Now the message, courtesy of Big Pharma, is to hurry and see your doctor about your symptoms—before they go away. (Martha Rosenberg)