Happily:
... a transcript has been made of the talk by Dr John Midgley about the history of thyroid testing which is extremely interesting!
There is a link on this page of the main Thyroid UK site:
thyroiduk.org.uk/tuk/confer...
...to the document itself:
thyroiduk.org.uk/tuk/confer...
I confirm it is interesting. I had picked up quite a bit over the years but this is so much more complete and coherent and explains a lot.
Rod
So is diogenes, aka Dr John Midgeley? I wish I had known.
Sorry! Thought everyone knew! 
xx
very interesting, Personally I think hypothyroidism is probably several diseases not just one - which would explain the enormous variety of responses to the one pill fits all regime.
As the article says we are not all the same so why would one pill cure all of us?
Maybe as hypothyroidism is due to a reduced output of thyroid hormones which are needed by the billions of receptor cells in our bodies, and which contains more than T4 (thyroxine) we are denied a full range of replacement hormones by the authorities which may eventually cause us to develop other more serious diseases. We are also provided, nowadays, with a dose of levothyroxine which may not be sufficient to eradicate all our clinical symptoms which is the main aim although, again, the authorities only take notice of the TSH level and ignore clinical symptoms but are willing to prescribe 'additional' medication for the symptom(s) which doesn't improve our hormone levels.
Thanks to Dr Midgeley and his team over the years trying to put right a wrong. I think it is amazing that scientific doctors cannot recognise when they may have taken a wrong turning and don't want to acknowledge that someone else maybe on the right track. So the patients are still fodder at present because of the wrong reliance put on the TSH alone. Most probably hypothyroid but undiagnosed or undertreated.
Thank you Dr Midgeley and your Team.
Few doctors are scientific. And few seem to understand how unscientific medicine can be.
Maybe I should have used the word 'scientists' as I thought (mistakenly) that they would co-operate in studies.
Sorry if my comment came across as pedantic - I really did think that you meant "medical doctors working in science" rather than "scientists with PhDs or higher".
shaws and Rod, I came across a wonderful quote by Dr. Abram Hoffer last week.
“Doctors are not trained as scientists. They operate as a guild to protect their group interests. They don’t work for their patients.”
As for medical science Dr. Malcolm Kendrick's latest blog certainly puts things in perspective.
This is the link to Richard Smith's blog, former editor BMJ, mentioned in Kendrick's piece. PR
blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2014/01/3...
You can read study after study, case report after case report, and end up questioning absolute basics.
It sometimes feels as if we have gone from "our anecdotal reports are important and need to be reported but those of patients are not even worth listening to" to "our reports have loads of statistical stuff at the end and so are important and nothing else matters". Even when those statistical methods are mis-applied.
Ooh, Helvella, just stumbled over this comment by accident (2 years too late), but have to comment to say that is beautifully put, 110% accurate and my experience every time I have to discuss something a bit 'out there' with a GP. Sometimes their illogic is breathtaking. Kudos.
As to be expected from Diogenes, that is the clearest account of the history of testing and many of it's problems that I have read. PR
I have nearly finished reading the first link above but it is fascinating. It is another 'them against us' sort of situation where we are forced to take medication which may probably make us worse instead of better. Yet the people in 'Authority' demand that only their views are right when the patients (the users) are complaining they are worse and are not considered whatsoever as we are the 'end of line'. There should definitely be no monies or incentives received from pharmaceutical companies whatsoever for using their products.
It's a good job we have 'mavericks' who can see what's going wrong and try to do something about it, even though they put their own careers on the line. Like the phrase used in one of the papers about Dr Skinner i.e. 'rogue doctor'. Dr Peatfield, resigning his licence so he could still see patients holistically. etc. and quotes are made that he was 'struck off'.
When I was first diagnosed about 30 years ago my then GP was an Oxford graduate who also spent some of his time in the Medical School helping with teaching. He did however admit to not being conversant with complex working of the thyroid gland. He asked my husband to explain it to him in great detail. It was at that point part of my husbands research as a scientist. My husband in his tutorials to medical students made sure they understood how it could go wrong and how devastating that is for patients! Sadly years later and just before they qualify they meet the clinicians who I suspect from the moans about Endos up and down the country are clueless about optimum treatment and till these two work together I feel it will be difficult to change attitudes etc. if nothing else the article shows how much more important it is to treat on clinical presentations and not lab values.
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