500 signatures reached
To: Jeremy Hunt MP
Sort Out Thyroid Treatment
Revise the testing, parameters of 'normality', diagnosis & treatment protocol of thyroid disorders.
Why is this important?
I find it very strange that on the NICE website the only guidance available regarding thyroid treatment is the removal of them. There is far more to thyroid treatment than removal.
A friend of mine has just had her TSH tested and it came back at 12.4, a figure I felt sure would be treated by her doctor, as the parameters of 'normal' were always 0.5 to 4.5, and yet 12.4 was not deemed sufficiently 'abnormal' to merit treatment, even with useless thyroxine. Would they ignore other conditions with such little concern?
When is the training of doctors in the country going to be updated and not paid for by pharmaceutical companies with the only objective of promoting their drugs. Doctors & endocrinologists should know that the TSH reading is actually a PITUITARY GLAND measure, not a thyroid measure at all. The important readings for thyroid health are free T3, free T4, reverse T3 (which I had to educate my doctor about as she didn't know, it is what the body produces during either a famine or after too many diets to slow the metabolism and conserve energy) and thyroid antibodies.
Treatment with thyroxine alone is woefully inadequate for many thousands of thyroid patients whose bodies are incapable of converting the T4 STORAGE HORMONE thyroxine to T3, the ACTIVE HORMONE, which actually gives patients some energy, stops them feeling cold, stops their hair falling out, helps with conception and helps prevent miscarriage, stops vertigo, need I go on?
Very often patients don't get enough of the necessary vitamins and minerals from their diets and they are short of the very nourishment the thyroid needs to convert T4 to T3: iodine, selenium, zinc, copper, L-tyrosine, B6 and B12 methylcobalamin and B9 folate. And thanks to Wolff & Chaikoff wrongly interpreting data in 1948, doctors are terrified of iodine which is vital for thyroid health among other valuable uses in the body like preventing breast cancer.
Why are doctors not taught about this PROPERLY in medical school and if they haven't learnt it already, why are they so lacking in curiosity that they fail to learn anything new after they have qualified?
The Institute of Functional Medicine in the US has doctors with Harvard degrees who know this, but it seems that the medical fraternity in the UK (and most of the time in the US) are bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry, who care not one jot about the health of the patient as long as their moneyspinner thyroxine continues to be prescribed.
With correct diagnosis of thyroid problems (the way they used to be before the TSH test was invented by the Mayo clinic for a pharmaceutical company) by knowing the symptoms of hypothyroid as well as relying on blood tests (and not just the inadequate TSH test), doctors could actually return these patients to good health with natural desiccated thyroid, which actually contains ALL the thyroid hormones T1, T2, T3 and T4 plus calcitonin instead of thyroxine which only replaces ONE of these hormones.
This would actually SAVE the NHS money on wasted prescriptions for drugs which try to address the many individual symptoms created by an underactive thyroid, instead of prescribing just ONE drug which would sort them all out.
A friend of mine has just had her TSH tested and it came back at 12.4, a figure I felt sure would be treated by her doctor, as the parameters of 'normal' were always 0.5 to 4.5, and yet 12.4 was not deemed sufficiently 'abnormal' to merit treatment, even with useless thyroxine. Would they ignore other conditions with such little concern?
When is the training of doctors in the country going to be updated and not paid for by pharmaceutical companies with the only objective of promoting their drugs. Doctors & endocrinologists should know that the TSH reading is actually a PITUITARY GLAND measure, not a thyroid measure at all. The important readings for thyroid health are free T3, free T4, reverse T3 (which I had to educate my doctor about as she didn't know, it is what the body produces during either a famine or after too many diets to slow the metabolism and conserve energy) and thyroid antibodies.
Treatment with thyroxine alone is woefully inadequate for many thousands of thyroid patients whose bodies are incapable of converting the T4 STORAGE HORMONE thyroxine to T3, the ACTIVE HORMONE, which actually gives patients some energy, stops them feeling cold, stops their hair falling out, helps with conception and helps prevent miscarriage, stops vertigo, need I go on?
Very often patients don't get enough of the necessary vitamins and minerals from their diets and they are short of the very nourishment the thyroid needs to convert T4 to T3: iodine, selenium, zinc, copper, L-tyrosine, B6 and B12 methylcobalamin and B9 folate. And thanks to Wolff & Chaikoff wrongly interpreting data in 1948, doctors are terrified of iodine which is vital for thyroid health among other valuable uses in the body like preventing breast cancer.
Why are doctors not taught about this PROPERLY in medical school and if they haven't learnt it already, why are they so lacking in curiosity that they fail to learn anything new after they have qualified?
The Institute of Functional Medicine in the US has doctors with Harvard degrees who know this, but it seems that the medical fraternity in the UK (and most of the time in the US) are bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry, who care not one jot about the health of the patient as long as their moneyspinner thyroxine continues to be prescribed.
With correct diagnosis of thyroid problems (the way they used to be before the TSH test was invented by the Mayo clinic for a pharmaceutical company) by knowing the symptoms of hypothyroid as well as relying on blood tests (and not just the inadequate TSH test), doctors could actually return these patients to good health with natural desiccated thyroid, which actually contains ALL the thyroid hormones T1, T2, T3 and T4 plus calcitonin instead of thyroxine which only replaces ONE of these hormones.
This would actually SAVE the NHS money on wasted prescriptions for drugs which try to address the many individual symptoms created by an underactive thyroid, instead of prescribing just ONE drug which would sort them all out.
