Trump's pick for new CDC Head is known for peddling anti-aging

>Turns out that she was, which is pretty surprising for someone tapped to lead a federal agency that takes pride in its "culture of scientific integrity."

>A CDC spokeswoman declined to provide a comment about Fitzgerald's anti-aging medicine practice. But thanks to the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine,” I was able to learn a little more about it. The Wayback Machine had captured the website for Fitzgerald's Carrollton, Ga., gynecology practice as it appeared on Aug. 23, 2010, about a year before she became Georgia's public health commissioner.

>“In addition to seeing traditional gynecologic patients, we see both men and women for hormonal, nutritional and other anti-aging concerns,” the homepage states.

>Among her credentials listed on the website: board certification in "Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine" by the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. However, the American Board of Medical Specialties, made up of the specialty boards that certify physicians, doesn’t recognize the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M), which promotes the use of "intravenous nutritional therapy," "bioidentical hormone replacement therapy" (BHRT) and "pellet therapy," in which tiny pellets that contain hormones are placed under the skin.

>A 2011 document on the A4M website notes that, thanks to the aging of the population, "the opportunities in the anti-aging market are vast, with the global market estimated to be worth $292 billion by 2015."

>You might be familiar with the highest-profile proselytizer of what has come to be called the "anti-aging medicine movement": actress Suzanne Somers, best-known for her role in the sitcom Three's Company, which debuted 40 years ago. Besides the Thighmaster, Somers attributes her youthful looks to BHRT. Bioidentical hormones typically are compounded, or formulated, by a pharmacist for individual patients, contributing to their cachet of being more "natural" than mass-produced hormone medications.

>The Food and Drug Administration, which, like the CDC, is part of HHS, warns against assuming that bio-identical hormones are any better than hormones manufactured by a drug company. "The FDA does not have evidence that 'bioidentical hormones' are safer or more effective than other hormone products," according to the agency's website. "FDA believes that the benefits and risks are likely to be the same."

>But compounded hormones in creams, injections and pellets are, for some strange reason, considered to be dietary supplements, for the most part exempt from FDA regulation. So they don't have to carry the boxed warning about an increased risk for heart attack, stroke, invasive breast cancer and blood clots that the FDA requires for medications containing estrogen or estrogen plus progestin, prescribed for short-term use to relieve menopausal symptoms, not turn back the hands of time.

>"Not only is evidence lacking to support superiority claims of compounded bioidentical hormones over conventional menopausal hormone therapy, but these claims also pose the additional risks of variable purity and potency and lack efficacy and safety data," according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the professional organization for OB/GYNs such as Fitzgerald.

>I asked a couple of women's health advocates what they thought about having an anti-aging medicine doctor lead the CDC.

“I’m so disappointed that the first female OB/GYN picked to head the CDC is someone who embraces the unproven and anti-scientific claims of the so-called anti-aging movement,” Cindy Pearson, executive director of the National Women’s Health Network, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., told me.

>“The public needs someone who supports public health recommendations that are based on science,” Pearson said, “not someone who tries to scare her patients by talking about ‘the hormone-depleted state of menopause’ and recommending unproven and potentially dangerous bio-identical hormones.”

>Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., noted that some skeptics have questioned Fitzgerald’s qualifications to head the CDC because she doesn't have a background in scientific research.

>“Her pitch as a physician suggests that, in addition to not being a researcher, she was providing treatments to patients that were not based on credible science,” Zuckerman told me after looking at the archived website for Fitzgerald's former medical practice. “If a patient wants to try such treatments, and a doctor wants to prescribe them—preferably giving informed consent that the benefits are unproven—that’s up to them.

>“But putting that doctor in charge of the CDC, a crucial public health agency, doesn’t make sense.”

UPDATE

A4M contacted Forbes after publication of this article to dispute the characterization of treatments it promotes as "controversial." "In its 25-year history, A4M has never been the subject of any adverse legal ruling, nor ever been the target of any regulatory procedure or penalty," the organization said in a prepared statement.