History of hypothyroidism treatment

[bikebabe]

Is anyone on the forum aware of a robustly researched resume about the history of treatment of hypothyroidism from 1600s onwards?

[Jazzw]

Well, if hypothyroidism was profound, you just died in 1600. No one started using animal thyroid products until the late 19th century. And synthetic T4 became available from the 1950s.

Not sure that anyone’s going to have anything particular robust dating that far back. Your best bet is to look at what happened from the 1890s onwards.

[bikebabe in reply to Jazzw]

In Europe, some areas with high incidence of limestone geology, there was a high incidence of goitres due to lack of iodine. At the time ie, herbalists /healers would have used ‘like for like’ to heal and in so doing, may have extracted thyroid gland from (hopefully) dead animals. Wasn’t sure if this had been historically researched- maybe in china/India too. Always interested to know the origins of our treatments. When I travelled in Irian jaya (west papua) I became aware of the binary nature of some plants the value of which is lost when pharmacy comes along and takes only one part of it - not holistic.

[humanbean]

I have these links :

thyroid.org/about-american-...

jameslindlibrary.org/articl...

hindawi.com/journals/jtr/20...

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

Edit : I'm sure none of these links go back as far as the 1600s - I'm fairly certain that, as Jazzw said, in that era people would just have died very slowly and painfully, and probably went completely insane in the process.

I have this figure stuck in my head (and I don't remember where it came from) that it takes about 12 years to die from untreated severe hypothyroidism.

You might find this article from the BMJ in 1949 of interest too :

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

[bikebabe in reply to humanbean]

Fab - thanks to all of you for the links

[helvella Administrator]

One consideration is that, had earlier treatments been successful, there would have been very much less reason to press ahead with controversial, experimental techniques.

There were many claimed treatments. But important that we realise the link between the physical thyroid and thyroid hormone was far from understood - if it is now!

humanbean is quite right that 12 years has been quoted several times as a typical time between someone becoming ill and finally dying.

A PubMed search can take us back to 1806. But searches of older documents tend to be more difficult - partly due to multiple changes of language and understanding.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?te...

Some general information as to how thyroid treatments developed (mostly in the UK):

helvella - Historical Context of Thyroid Treatment in the UK

Extracts of possible interest mostly from The Chemist and Druggist. These documents are currently still being developed.

Pre-1900 document

From Dropbox:

dropbox.com/s/h9mul6hdfqfew...

From Google Drive:

drive.google.com/file/d/1I4...

1900-1949 document

From Dropbox:

dropbox.com/s/a2wd7agpfcrcj...

From Google Drive:

drive.google.com/file/d/1iE...

1950-1999 document

From Dropbox:

dropbox.com/s/barcg7h4uj2nm...

From Google Drive:

drive.google.com/file/d/1ZO...

2000 onwards

From Dropbox:

dropbox.com/s/dwgrmoxqj24el...

From Google Drive:

drive.google.com/file/d/1gG...

AND

helvella - History of Thyroid Hormone Medicines in the UK

A collection of (hopefully) quite interesting information about thyroid hormone medicines, companies, brand names/trade marks, and much else.

From Dropbox:

dropbox.com/s/cag4qidukqeb8...

From Google Drive:

drive.google.com/file/d/1p3...

[bikebabe in reply to helvella]

thank you

[Jazzw]

I think they might have tried to do something about hyperthyroidism—it was more obvious after all. But they didn’t really even understand what the thyroid was much before the 1600s, and certainly wouldn’t have been able to figure out much about its function.

[bikebabe in reply to Jazzw]

thank you