I'm not sure what you mean about expecting "one magic bullet for every side of a single issue?" Could you please explain....

Clearly this Newsweek article will appeal to you and others who hate Oprah and who are already convinced, it will do nothing to convince women who like Oprah and who are open to woo - in fact, it may do just the opposite. Hey, I'm a woman who doesn't buy into woo (medical or CAM in source) and I find going after Oprah for HRT lame (as lame as her having Suzanne Somers on to promote quackery and not really that much unlike her blame laying to deflect responsibility). A great deal of the article deals with "bio-identical" HRT and the medicalizing of menopause but, conveniently, forgets that it is the mainstream medical establishment who were the ones who initially contextualized menopause as a disease that needed to be fixed with HRT. Then, as is so often the case when it comes to women, disease and medicine, the (generally unnecessary) mainstream medical treatment ended up being dangerous. So, it was mainstream medicine selling women the idea that HRT was necessary - this is never addressed in the article properly and all the responsibility is shifted to the shoulders of Oprah and Suzanne Somers. The reality is that mainstream medicine created this NOT CAM, CAM just took what was there and ran with it (as is often the case).

No, I'm not just being a contrarian. I'm apply skepticism equally and am aware of the actual history of women's health and medical science. You seem unaware of the politics and history of medicine in general, to be unaware of the true roots of the idea that menopause is a disease, and to not understand the medical establishments long history of pathologizing being a woman (that is not completely gone yet and there are many, many women living who've had unnecessary surgeries and treatments that diminished their quality of life...this is stuff that happened within living memory and not some far far away time in the history of medicine). You also seem to be attributing the medical establishment the kind of trust that you give to "science" (which is an abstract ideal more than a reality).

The particular issue of HRT and women's health is a very inflammatory area for the reasons noted above and also because the mainstream medical establishment has a long and very sordid history of doing horrible things to women and pathologising our natural cycles and normal biology. Mainstream medicine has shown itself NOT to be trustworthy when it comes to women's (and aboriginal and Black people's) health over and over again. Now, some of that has changed now that there are more women in medicine but, as the HRT case shows, not really that much. Combine the fact that academic and mainstream medical research in the US is largely as compromised by the for-profit medical system and philosophy as medical practice in the US is and there are good reasons for women not to just trust mainstream medicine.

I get that you like the article because it affirms your beliefs and makes it into a black and white issue with someone to hate and blame (kinda like how CAM does that with medicine). I'm not saying the article shouldn't call Oprah to task, what I'm saying is that scapegoating her and ignoring mainstream medicine's role is bullshit and the grandstanding by the magazine is to pump up readership rather than honestly and openly dealing with the real causes and results. You may want to apply a bit more skepticism to the mainstream media and mainstream medicine - after all, one sided skepticism is not much more than protecting one's beliefs and projecting all wrong onto the other.