British Medical Journal Article: Thyroid problems are being overdiagnosed!!!

[Smily]

Read the article and try not to get too upset: Copy and paste on Google:

thyroid.about.com/b/2012/12...

[helvella Administrator Thyroid UK]

That is a link to Mary Shomon's About.com site where she posted a copy of her reply.

But the actual article and a link all replies on the BMJ itself were blogged about by RedApple here:

thyroiduk.healthunlocked.co...

[helvella Administrator Thyroid UK in reply to helvella]

OH YES! And the really good thing about going to the BMJ site is that you can click on "Like" against those responses that you agree with.

There were 19 responses when last I looked - and I agreed with MOST but NOT ALL of them. So do read through the two pages of responses and click on the ones you do really agree with/like.

[vajra]

Given the tendency of both patients and medicine to fixate on specific treatments, and for these scenarios to lead to over prescribing (with the issue of excessive antibiotic use being a prominent and rather serious example) it seems unlikely that there is not at least some degree of over prescription of thyroid hormone.

The other side of this coin though (based on my own experience, and that reported every day all over the world) is that the minimal ability and preparedness of it seems very many (most?) medical doctors to properly troubleshoot, diagnose and treat what seems clearly to be a steadily increasing incidence of thyroid and wider metabolic illness and fatigue is at the root of this, and is leaving very many people unwell.

In a significant number of cases very seriously so.

Many of us have seen our health and previous lives collapse and worse as a result not only of an original problem that manifested first as fatigue, but also of the cumulative effects of the many secondary conditions that tend to follow and/or be associated with it.

How could it be otherwise? Based on personal experience and the anecdotal reports we read every day the stock blood tests used almost exclusively to diagnose hypothyroidism while helpful are clearly not reliable. Certainly not when fixated on by practitioners to the the point of ignoring symptoms and other modes of treatment.

It's equally clear that most practitioners are anyway incapable of moving much beyond a diagnosis of primary hypothyroidism (i.e. simple underproduction of hormone) using these blood tests.

One major problem is that hypothyroidism increasingly seems to entail downstream issues that interfere with proper conversion and use of hormone that these tests do not detect. The whole complex left untreated frequently leads to inter related, mutually reinforcing and bewilderingly complex secondary conditions that are typically very hard to treat.

Under pressure many doctors resort to knee jerk 'catch all' diagnoses like the often quoted 'depression' which while often present with hypothyroidism is typically only a symptom.

The tragedy in all of this (and the downside of it becoming an 'us and them' or a confrontational sort of issue) is that the resulting skirmishing in the trenches inevitably takes the eye off the big picture.

Our focus should instead be to encourage the development and widespread adoption of better and more enlightened modes of treatment for 'metabolic' illness. (this word too is probably also too narrow in scope to properly describe what's required)

It seems pretty clear that the increasing incidence of metabolic illness we're experiencing is telling us in letters writ a mile high that (a) something is wrong with our modern lifestyle, and very probably also with the living environments and lifestyles we have created through indiscriminate (profit and other unwise short term self interest driven) use of technologies and the environment, and (b) that something is seriously wrong with the simplistic Newtownian/'the body as a machine' based understanding of what a living being is.

It's time to wake up....

ian