Tracy Dawson's adventures at the health food store began with a disastrous trip to New York. "I was totally out of control," Dawson says. "Just raging with PMS. My boyfriend said to me, 'You really have to do something about this. It's just getting worse.' " Instead of going to see a doctor about her problem, however, the 29-year-old Dawson did what more and more women are doing about their reproductive health -- she researched natural alternatives on-line and then went shopping.

"I knew that if I went to see a doctor, they would just want to put me on the pill, or on Prozac," Dawson says. "But I'm not depressed. When I'm not PMS-ing, I'm perfectly fine. And with everything that has come out lately about synthetic hormones, there was no way that I was going to go on the pill."

Decades after the introduction of the birth control pill and hormone replacement therapy, women's health is still a minefield. And increasingly the medical profession is looking as credible as the Princess of Wales in minesweeping garb. In May, a U.S. study of the effects of HRT for menopausal women being conducted by the Women's Health Initiative was brought to a screeching halt two years ahead of schedule. Researchers concluded that instead of protecting against heart disease, long-term use of a popular HRT formulation of estrogen and synthetic progesterone increased a postmenopausal woman's risk of heart attacks, stroke and breast cancer.

For the 15 million North American women who are on HRT -- some of them for decades now -- the news that they would have been better off dressing only in blue or soaking their feet in vinegar than taking a prescription from their doctor came as a big fat ugly bombshell.

Judith Fiore is a Toronto-based doctor of naturopathic medicine whose three-year-old practice is devoted to alternative treatment for women's health issues. In the past few months, her phone has been ringing off the hook. "Seventy per cent of the women that I see are experiencing symptoms like water retention, mood swings, inability to focus and headaches, which are common with PMS, perimenopause and menopause," Fiore says. "Women are delaying or preventing pregnancy and this is creating a host of different symptoms. The medical community is doing their best, but the truth is that they don't have much in their arsenal except synthetic hormones like the birth control pill, and that may actually exacerbate the problem."

In Fiore's view, and in the view of other alternative-minded health-care professionals, many of the problems women are experiencing may be traced back to synthetic estrogen itself. "These problems out there are also signs of what we are starting to call 'estrogen dominance,' ", Fiore says. "There are estrogens everywhere, from the meat we eat, which has been injected with synthetic hormones, to the water we drink, which bears traces of hormone from women who are on HRT and the pill urinating into our water system. A lot of what I do to counterbalance these symptoms is essentially anti-estrogenic protocol."

This protocol enlists the services of the health food store in the struggle to find remedies for hormonal imbalances that don't cause more harm than good. In the middle aisle of my neighbourhood health food store, a cluster of strung-out women, some in their late 20s, others clearly on the hunt for help with menopause, peruse shelves of herbs, tinctures, supplements, creams and gels that they've learned about by themselves, on-line, or heard about from a friend.

According to the shop's owner, who is busily restocking the shelves in this new growth area, the newest and most in vogue meno-herbs are black cohosh, an indigenous American herb the natives called squaw root, which is rumoured to reverse the miseries of an aging menstrual cycle, soy isoflavones, which are purported to act like natural hormones, and wild yam gels one rubs into the soft parts of the body for all-natural anti-estrogenic support.

"I fully support the kind of experimentation that's going on out there," says Sara Rosenthal, a medical journalist and associate with the University of Toronto's Centre for Health Promotion, whose newest book, Managing PMS Naturally (Prentice-Hall), sits with a raft of newly minted self-help treatises crowding the health section at Indigo.

"It's not like PMS discomforts or the symptoms associated with menopause are diseases or medical emergencies," Rosenthal says. "Whether women are adjusting their diet, trying herbs or smearing on cream, at least these natural remedies aren't going to be harmful, and they may even help."

Unfortunately, just as with the kind of half-science the medical profession has devoted to women's health issues until now, the unregulated natural-remedy industry also offers little more than the hope of symptomatic relief with a potential for risk that remains, at this point, unknown. With no real answers out there for us, in our doctors' offices or at the pharmacy, we are junior endocrinologists, researching the effects of progestins on serotonin inhibitors and devising our own herbal prescription. Here we are in the 21st century, yet it would appear that it's still up to us, experimenting with roots of plants like medieval witches, to heal ourselves.

Dawson's self-prescribed remedy is a cream made from 12 per cent wild yam and soy. "When I found this cream at my health food store, and it said right on it, natural progesterone support for PMS and menopause, I almost cried, I was so happy," she says. "It's a bit of a regime -- you have to use it every day and massage it in. But I have to keep telling myself I don't want to go crazy this month. And since I have been using it, I have definitely noticed a difference."

A dear friend, who has just started using a similar cream to combat her monthly hormonal rages, told of storming into her doctor's office begging for something that might stop her from killing somebody. "In the old days, at least your doctor might have given you Valium," my friend says. "Now that Mother's Little Helper is out, we have nowhere to go to but the health food store."