When the Food and Drug Administration announced that the agency would be removing the black-box warning from hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, women everywhere threw their hands up in celebration. And rightly so. America’s health agencies are finally acknowledging that women are not simply “little men,” and that research and clinical care must account for a woman’s unique biology and hormonal fluctuations across every stage of life. But amid the cheering, some important nuance is being overlooked. The FDA’s decision to remove the black-box warning from HRT is just one example of how recommendations offered without adequate context or distinction may do more harm than good. The idea that estrogen supplementation is a cure-all for the symptoms women commonly experience during perimenopause and menopause — hot flashes, disrupted sleep, fatigue, muscle aches, inflammation, weight gain, bloating, and mood swings — is a myth. Often, women are not suffering from a lack of estrogen, but from what Kitty Martone, a holistic health educator who works with women to navigate perimenopause and menopause, refers to as estrogen dominance — a state in which estrogen outweighs progesterone, producing symptoms that look identical to low estrogen. Estrogen does not act in isolation, but the details are rarely explained to women. To be tolerated well, estrogen must be balanced by adequate progesterone and supported by a healthy metabolic rate. For many women, progesterone is the first hormone to decline — often years before estrogen meaningfully drops — due to chronic stress, under-eating, thyroid suppression, and blood sugar instability. This creates a common paradox: estrogen may appear “normal,” or even low, on a lab test, yet functionally feel excessive in the body because there is not enough progesterone to counterbalance its effects. Women are then told they are estrogen-deficient and prescribed more estrogen, while symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia, migraines, heavy or irregular bleeding, bloating, and inflammation intensify rather than improve. In these cases, simply prescribing more estrogen does not resolve symptoms. In fact, it can make them worse. These mechanisms were not understood properly during the Women’s Health Initiative study, which was abruptly halted in the early 2000s upon a suggested correlation between HRT and breast cancer as well as heart disease. In an effort to recover from the fallout of the highly flawed study, which caused millions of women to abandon hormone therapy altogether, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Cue the pharmaceutical ads: dancing women in sunflower meadows, singing about how wonderful life is with the latest HRT option. The fine print instructs women to “ask your doctor if it’s right for you,” but many doctors may not be properly equipped to offer nuanced guidance. Over the past few decades, medical visits have been reduced to 15–20 minute symptom reviews that are translated into billing codes entered into a computer. While this system serves insurance and data collection, it fails to treat women as whole individuals. It leaves little room to explore how diet, stress, thyroid function, gut health, or metabolic status influence hormonal symptoms — particularly in perimenopausal women. Martone argues that this system has created an environment where estrogen is prescribed casually, without sufficient context. “Doctors now essentially have carte blanche to prescribe estrogen for any hormone complaint — without evaluating detox pathways, metabolism, liver function, or estrogen clearance.” Some clinicians have been cautioning against this oversimplification for decades. Dr. Ray Peat, who studied hormones, metabolism, and stress physiology extensively, wrote about how estrogen tends to accumulate under conditions of chronic stress and low thyroid function, while progesterone plays a stabilizing, protective role for both the nervous system and bodily tissues. In plain terms, how a woman feels on hormones can have less to do with hormone levels and more to do with improper functioning of the liver, metabolism, and stress load at the time therapy is introduced. Two women can take the same prescription and have completely different outcomes — not because one is “doing it wrong,” but because their internal terrain is different. This helps explain why so many women feel dismissed when HRT is presented as a simple solution. When symptoms worsen, they are often told to increase the dose or switch brands, rather than step back and ask whether the body is prepared to handle additional estrogen. Martone emphasizes that women often need to experiment with hormones to discover individualized therapies that are right for them. Even low doses may require careful adjustment, alternative delivery methods, and significant trial and error — an experience that can be costly, frustrating, and far from straightforward. Meanwhile, big pharmaceutical companies are circling middle-aged women like sharks around blood. With the FDA’s decision, they’ve gained an expanded customer base — one encouraged to start hormone therapy earlier and remain on it for decades. The truth is no one — not even a doctor — can predict exactly how a woman will respond to HRT. Hormones are powerful biological signals, not cosmetic fixes. Their effects depend heavily on the body’s metabolic health, stress physiology, and ability to process and clear them. The renewed interest in hormone therapy reflects a real and valid desire for relief for women. But before removing warning labels and declaring HRT a universal solution, it’s worth asking why those cautions existed in the first place. Hormone replacement therapy is not a magic bullet. Women deserve care that honors complexity, not just convenience. * * * Jennifer Galardi is a Senior Policy Analyst for Restoring American Wellness in Heritage’s DeVos Center. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

'tearing the CCP apart'

'Target billionaires'

Wild American chestnut trees, deemed “functionally extinct” decades ago, may already be quietly mounting an unexpected comeback in the northern forests of the US. Thousands of naturally thriving, wild trees in Maine contradict decades of assumptions about the species’ extinction—and how genetic engineering is the only solution. Ever since the accidental importation of an Asian […] The post Once Wiped Out by Blight, Thousands of American Chestnut Trees are Thriving on Biologist’s Land in Maine appeared first on Good News Network.

On Tuesday, the full, 17-judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit heard consolidated oral arguments in a crucial case that is all but guaranteed to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The predictable controversy surrounding the litigation, which involves similar but distinct mandatory Ten Commandments display laws arising out of Texas and Louisiana, is revealing as to just how far America has fallen from its Founders’ vision. In 2024, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a bill requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom—from kindergarten through the university level—throughout the state. As Landry explained at the time, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you gotta start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.” Last year, the Lone Star State followed by passing a nearly identical statute. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who as Texas attorney general in 2005 successfully defended a Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds before the Supreme Court, echoed Landry in signing Texas’ bill: “Faith and freedom are the foundation of our nation.” Aggrieved liberals and secularists immediately filed First Amendment lawsuits, and district court judges promptly enjoined enforcement in both states. The question now pending before the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit, where I once served as a law clerk, is whether the Ten Commandments laws may once again be enforced so that the Decalogue can hang on all classroom walls throughout Texas and Louisiana. Let’s start with first principles. The first clause of the First Amendment, widely known as the establishment clause, reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The two relevant words in the Establishment Clause are “Congress” and “establishment.” The word “Congress” is relevant because the establishment clause was unambiguously intended only to apply to Congress—and, by extension, the federal government at large. As Justice Clarence Thomas and others have persuasively argued, the original understanding of the clause was to prohibit Congress from establishing a national religion so that the states may do so themselves—consistent, of course, with prevailing free exercise protections and the No Religious Test Clause of Article VI of the Constitution. From the Founders’ perspective, the Establishment Clause was a necessary federalism provision for a fledgling, religiously pluralistic republic. The word “establishment” is relevant because it can only mean what the Founders meant: a literal national established church, such as the Church of England. Generations of Americans have been taught that the First Amendment secures the “separation of church and state,” but that pernicious phrase is nowhere to be found in the amendment’s actual text. Instead, the notion of a “wall of separation between Church & State” has its origins in a pithy 1802 letter Thomas Jefferson sent to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. As Justice William Rehnquist explained in his dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), “Thomas Jefferson was … in France at the time … the Bill of Rights were passed by Congress and ratified by the States. His letter to the Danbury Baptist Association was a short note of courtesy, written 14 years after the Amendments were passed by Congress. He would seem to any detached observer as a less than ideal source of contemporary history as to the meaning of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment.” In reality, Jefferson’s “separation” language didn’t take hold until a terrible 1947 Supreme Court decision called Everson v. Board of Education, which for the first time undermined both “Congress” and “establishment” by adopting Jefferson’s insidious language and then “incorporating” it to the states as well. The result has been nearly eight decades of destructive constitutional inversion and a prolonged moral assault on America’s biblical inheritance throughout our public squares. In a law review article published last summer, my coauthors and I called for the court to formally overturn Everson and end our failed national experiment in “separationism.” None of this is even necessary to decide the 5th Circuit case. The United States was founded on ecumenical biblical principles, and the Ten Commandments—the wellspring of so much of Western morality—embody that ecumenicism. Introduced to the world by Judaism and spread throughout the world by Christianity, the Ten Commandments are the shared inheritance of Jews and Christians of all stripes—Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox alike. The Supreme Court itself famously features a frieze of Moses carrying the Ten Commandments tablets. It would be the height of hypocrisy for the court to deny to Texas and Louisiana the ability to do that which it does itself. Sectarian public displays perhaps raise other concerns, but the Ten Commandments simply do not. On the very same day in 2005 that Abbott and then-Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz successfully defended the Texas State Capitol grounds Ten Commandments monument, the court decided a very similar case out of Kentucky that inexplicably went the other way. For decades, the court has made a muddled hash of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. It’s been trending in the right direction in recent years, and the justices should eventually have an opportunity here for a landmark, clarifying ruling. But for now, the 5th Circuit must do the right thing and side with Texas and Louisiana. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.  The post Who’s Afraid of the Ten Commandments? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

BREAKING: Another Shooting in Minneapolis at ICE Arrest

Police Theft