A Little Bit of History on Hypothyroidism

[shaws]

I found this 'history' fascinating and awful as well. Thank Goodnes in this day and age we have thyroid hormone replacements.

Excerpt:

Then, in 1877, William Miller Ord, read his paper before the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London and proposed the term ‘myxoedema’ for the adult condition (Ord 1878). He described the non-pitting, ‘mucous oedema’. He also described how the hands of one of his patients went ‘dead’ when she attempted to sew. This was possibly due to carpal tunnel syndrome, a potential complication of hypothyroidism, but then an unknown entity. Ord ended his paper carefully, stating that: ‘… the name [myxoedema] is only intended to represent the condition, and does not profess to involve an explanation of its causes.’ However, he described the ‘practical annihilation’ of the thyroid gland he found at autopsy, and went on to discuss the possible relevance of this, attempting a synthesis of the earlier reports by Curling (1850) and Fagge (1871).

jameslindlibrary.org/articl...

[Rapunzel]

Fascinating, shaws, not least because it is a reminder that things were ever this way...

scottberkun.com/essays/40-w...

😞

[shaws in reply to Rapunzel]

Quite Brilliant and even more fascinating. I think a copy has to be sent to all Endocrinology Depts. How can they insist the TSH is the be all and end all when they don't appear to know the most important thyroid hormone.

This is from Dr L:-

Dr. Lowe: I began working with patients who were hypothyroid in the late 1980s. To learn about the treatment of hypothyroid patients, I spent a lot of time talking with other doctors about thyroid hormone therapy. I soon learned that most doctors tenaciously held two beliefs that had been shrewdly planted in their minds by the corporation that marketed Synthroid. The beliefs were: (1) the potency of Synthroid tablets was perfectly reliable, and (2) the potency of the tablets or capsules of other products—especially Armour Thyroid—was highly unreliable.

Based on these two beliefs, the doctors dogmatically pronounced that all hypothyroid patients should be treated with Synthroid. The doctors’ pronouncement was thoughtless parroting of a sound bite from the corporation’s marketing campaign—a campaign so effective that Synthroid eventually became the third most-prescribed drug in the U.S.

and

In my view, the doctors who parroted the Synthroid marketing hype should feel shame; they allowed themselves to be duped by a sales campaign for a product that was—and still is!—no more reliable than any other thyroid hormone product. In previous publications, I have cited the FDA evidence for Synthroid’s lack of reliability.

web.archive.org/web/2010103...

[Rapunzel in reply to shaws]

It took Barry Marshall en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry... 25 years to have his hypothesis that H Pylori was the cause of most peptic ulcers and gastric cancers given the nod of a Nobel prize - doubtless because the scientific community continued to posit that they were conditions caused by stress long after he had proven them wrong.

If Abbott Laboratories was Philip Morris we'd all still be smoking