stop the thyroid madness tags

Oh the heels of my last blog post (see right below this if you are reading right on the site) comes something VERY interesting, and which thyroid-patients-in-the-know have already known about for a good ten years!

Namely, Dr. Ian Carroll, MD, MS, and Dr. Jarred Younger, PhD of the Stanford Systems Neuroscience and Pain Lab are currently enrolling patients for a clinical trial investigating T3 for the treatment of fibromyalgia. (Fibromyalgia is a chronic syndrome which causes widespread musculoskeletal pain and debilitating fatigue, also aching, twitching, burn sensation, joint issues).

Of course, patients who switched to desiccated thyroid the past ten years (or have used synthetic T3 in their treatment) already KNOW the truth from experience (which is usually always pooh-poohed by clinical-trial-worshipping, clinical-presentation-ignoring, medical professionals.).

Namely, fibromyalgia is usually the result of undiagnosed hypothyroidism (due to the inane TSH lab test) and undertreated hypothyroidism (due to the worst medication ever thrust on patients, aka T4-only, or Synthroid, Levoxyl, levothyroxine, Eltroxin, Oroxine, etc.) i.e. you need direct T3, the most powerful thyroid hormone, to adequately treated hypothyroidism.

i.e. we’re all kinda going duhhhhhhhh here.

But, if a clinical trial is needed to prove what we already know (and so has Dr. John C. Lowe known it for many years), it’ll be just one more underscore of the truth. Go to the following to read more and/or enroll:  http://snapl.stanford.edu/t3/

P.S. the Bobbsey Twins of the failure of the TSH labs test and treating with T4-only:  Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

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Does your inner ear itch?? Got an email from a gal who was on Synthroid for 7 years, and for the last 5, had torturous deep inner ear itching. And guess what?? It went away just two days after switching to desiccated thyroid. Yup, another long and pathetic symptom of a poor treatment. (If you still have it on desiccated thyroid, see what mistakes in your treatment you need to identify and change, which is also Chapter 11 in the STTM book with a little more details added.)

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Yippee!! Direct Labs is the third lab facility to partner with STTM in offering the kind of labs that patients who frequent STTM know are important in their quest to feel better and educate their doctors.  Unfortunately, they don’t offer saliva like the other two, which are Healthcheck USA and MyMedLab, but they have all the other labs you may be interested in. You can view them by going to STTM’s Recommended Labwork page.

Just within the last few weeks, I’ve been informed by patients that their doctor has outright recommended the patient-to-patient Stop the Thyroid Madness website or book in their newsletter, and agreed with what patients have learned. That is huge!

This also underscores the difference YOU can make in your doctors office, even when you’re not sure you did.  You wouldn’t have even seen these kind of newsletters two years ago, and it means we’ve come a long way, baby. Though many doctors still lag behind, the following two doctors deserve our praise for LISTENING:

1. Allan Lieberman, M.D. Dr. Lieberman is the Medical Director of The Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine in North Charleston, South Carolina. He has practiced medicine for 51 years, specializing for the last 33 years in Environmental Medicine and Toxicology.

He wrote about and recommended the STTM book in his August 19th newsletter and after a patient had given him the STTM book. You can read what he wrote here.

2. David Edelberg, M. D. is board certified in Internal Medicine and founder of Whole Health Chicago in Illinois. He is nationally recognized as one of the pioneers of integrative medicine which combines conventional medicine with alternative therapies.

He wrote about STTM in his Sept. 14th newsletter, and it was written after a particular patient spoke “loud and clear” against a bias she felt he had, and strongly recommended STTM to him. You can read what he wrote here.

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DO YOU QUALIFY TO BE IN THIS DOCUMENTARY??

I have been notified by a production company that they are working on a documentary about people who have reversed symptoms of Alzheimer’s and dementia such as memory loss and cognition problems through natural means.

But they are also interested in interviewing thyroid patients who have had severe memory and cognitive issues before their thyroid was corrected, and which went away afterwards. The key here is “severe”, then the use of natural desiccated thyroid.

i.e. If you are someone who had severe brain fog which went away with natural desiccated thyroid, you can contact them at ddvideoproductions@gmail.com or call either Patricia Tamowski at 914-582-3194 or Alan Scott Douglas at 914-482-8208.  They will then email you full details of the documentary to see if they would like to participate. This would be a good place to mention your patient site Stop the Thyroid Madness.

Reading and responding to my daily emails is a huge job that takes a lot of time. My 92 year old mother-in-law thinks I’m obsessed with my computer. ha!  If only she knew.  But some of those emails stand out in my mind.

As a recent example, one gal wrote to tell me she had suffered from depression for so many years due to her poorly diagnosed and inadequately treated thyroid condition. And because her use of desiccated thyroid had hugely improved her mood, she was inspired by and had purchased the STTM bumper sticker about depression. You can see it here.

And unbeknown to her innocent husband, the bumper sticker went on HIS car.

And just two days later, she explains what happened:  My husband was coming from his cardiac rehab exercises to the shopping center locally, and when he got out of his car,  another car pulled behind him, blocking the lane.

Turns out that the other driver, a man, jumped out and wanted to know what the bumper sticker means.

She continued: My husband figured the guy meant his Marine Corps stickers but no, he meant the thyroid sticker. So my husband says, bewildered ‘What Thyroid sticker’?

After realizing it was there, the other man explains how his wife has been diagnosed with thyroid disease and her dr. wants her on antidepressants.

She said: “My poor hubby only knew that I feel so much better on Natural hormones and I am not as depressed as I was before. All he could tell him was “she got it off the internet”.

I’ll bet he saw the URL on the sticker, and his wife is going to get some life-changing information from Stop the Thyroid Madness.  So we can never underestimate how little things we say, or show, or do are going to make a difference in someone’s life.

I hope each and every one of you are being “thyroid patient advocates” and spreading the word to others. If you like using bumper stickers or t-shirts, go here.

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ABOUT PROBLEMS WITH THE STTM SITE: There have been numerous problems with folks getting on STTM the last few weeks. The first problem was due to a software installed by my web designer to prevent attacks by spam bots. That was fixed. But if you visited during that time and use IE, just clear your caches. Others may need to use a different browser.  You then may be able to go back to your original browser.

But since then, more problems have creeped up. It’s called GROWING PAINS. i.e. STTM has become so popular that more problems pop up. And since we have limited resources, we just have to deal with them, one at a time. So please announce on all your groups that STTM has not gone away, that we are working to fix problems related to growing pains,  and to try again if they at first can’t get on. If you want to contribute to the hosting fees, go here:  http://www.dreamhost.com/donate.cgi?id=8074

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TWO SITES YOU NEED TO REGISTER WITH:

1)  http://www.tpa-uk.org.uk/register_of_counterexamples.php A Register of Counterexamples to levothyroxine-only-therapy, set up by Sheila of TPA-UK.  ”Counterexamples” means all those symptoms which proved that T4-only meds do NOT work.  She will be using this to get the attention of doctors and authorities in order to re-examine the use of T4-only for all forms and degrees of hypothyroidism.

PLEASE NOTE: This questionnaire is only for those prescribed levothyroxine (T4-only) and who failed to get relief for the elimination of their symptoms, and who then started using a T3 containing hormone (either synthetic or natural). It’s also for those who were denied a diagnosis and treatment, and tried a T3 hormone containing product and found your symptoms became less.

2) http://www.worldthyroidregister.com/ A site established by Dr Gorder Skinner to gather as many signatures as possible to establish a Worldwide standard treatment for thyroid sufferers.

I always know that when I get an email from Dr. John C. Lowe, it’s going to contain excellent information. And he didn’t let me down.

Dr. Lowe is Editor-in-Chief of Thyroid Science, an “open-access journal for truth in thyroid science and and thyroid clinical practice”.  And in the recent issue, there is a remarkable and precise TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) hypothesis by none other than a brilliant UK  electrical and electronics engineer, Mr. Peter Warmingham.  In fact, his hypothesis about the TSH lab result when treating one’s hypothyroidism exactly corresponds to the successful experience of thyroid patients all over the world.

To quote Dr. Lowe in his introduction about Warmingham’s paper (FYI: “exogenous” refers to the thyroid hormone you give yourself;  ”endogenous” refers to what happens naturally in your body):

Mr. Warmingham’s hypothesis is straightforward: When a hypothyroid patient (whose circulating pool of thyroid hormone is too low) begins taking exogenous thyroid hormone, a negative feedback system reduces the pituitary gland’s output of TSH. This decreases the thyroid gland’s output of endogenous thyroid hormone, and despite the patient’s exogenous thyroid hormone’s contribution to his or her total circulating thyroid pool, that pool does not increase—not until the TSH is suppressed and the thyroid gland is contributing no more thyroid hormone to the total circulating pool. At that point, adding more exogenous thyroid hormone will finally increase the circulating pool of thyroid hormone. The increase must occur for thyroid hormone therapy to be effective. The patient’s suppressed TSH, then, does not indicate that the patient is over-treated with thyroid hormone; instead, it indicates that the patient’s low total thyroid hormone pool will finally rise to potentially adequate levels.

In other words, when your doctor says no to an increase in your desiccated thyroid simply because your TSH lab result is, or would become, below the so-called normal range (and in the presence of continuing symptoms or a low temperature), he will usually end up keeping you hypothyroid! i.e. making an ink spot on a piece of paper more important than clinical presentation is just one reason why the current thyroid patient revolution represented by Stop the Thyroid Madness exists!

You can read Warmington’s entire paper here on Dr. Lowe’s site. For further information on the fallacy of the TSH lab test, go here or read Chapter 4, aka Thyroid Stimulating Hooey, in your copy of the STTM book for more detail.

P.S. Dr. Lowe is probably right on when he says he expects criticism to flow for the fact that Warmington is not an Endocrinologist and “how in the world can anybody but an Endo make a logical hypothesis about the TSH lab test”. Read more on Lowe’s thoughts about this here.   But enlightened thyroid patients around the world are collectively shouting “GOD BLESS AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER!”

They both GET IT.

Jeffrey Dach, MD, who is founder of  TrueMedMD clinic in Hollywood, Florida, has recently written just one more brilliant article titled Why Natural Thyroid is Better than Synthetic on OpEdNews. And patients can only derisively agree when Dach says “This nonsense really makes my blood boil and my eyes pop out of head” in response to articles on medical websites which still purport that synthetic T4 is a better treatment  than natural desiccated thyroid.

John O. Wycoff DO graciously had me on his radio program a week ago, called Health and Wellness Solutions radio, which runs each and every Saturday morning in Michigan or live streamed. And I couldn’t help but be impressed by this warm, friendly, and caring doctor who runs the Wycoff Wellness Center in East Lansing, Michigan. He definitely seemed to understand the use of desiccated thyroid and adrenals. Michigan patients are lucky to have this man.

And frankly, there seems to be a growing body of doctors who are GETTING IT, making the large body who still don’t look like medical cavemen and health ostriches.  Natural desiccated thyroid is a FAR better treatment, and millions of changed lives prove this over and over.

Both Dach and Wycoff will go down in history as being part of the founding members of doctors who really GOT IT in the first decade of the 21st century and have played a huge role to STOP THE THYROID MADNESS!!

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UPCOMING PROGRAM with Janie: You will be able to listen to me on Jimmy’s Moore’s Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb program on Thursday July 22nd, 2010 for what Jimmy has dubbed “The Truth About Thyroid Week.” As I see it, each time I’m on a variety of radio and internet podcasts like this, it’s going to mean reaching MORE folks about why they have depression, rising cholesterol or blood pressure, fatigue, hair loss, dry skin or hair, osteoporosis and more as a result of either the TSH lab test, or being on T4 meds like Synthroid!  I’ll announce this closer to the event, as well.

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MORE ABOUT MAGNESIUM: As I wrote about recently here, I found myself very low in my RBC Magnesium levels–the very bottom of the range. I am even lower than a friend who has Celiac disease, which affects digestion!!  No wonder I’ve had issues with muscle cramps for so long, as well as what I saw as a worsening of my MVP (mitral valve prolapse).   Since then, I’ve been on Magnesium Oil and a particular brand of buffered Vit. C which contains a good amount of magnesium. And lo and behold, I have found out that taking magnesium when you are deficient is like drinking water when you are dying of thirst–your body TAKES IT IN faster than you can give it to yourself.  So it’s important to take as high a dose as you can take in, and be patient for it all to level out.  And by the way, I’m already noticing an improvement in my huffin’ and puffin’ when I go out walking.  I do it less!!