Let's keep the momentum going. Please sign and share!
We have a lot of medical ignorance and prejudice to deal with, so please show how strongly you feel about this petition.
Today many of our Thyroid Patients Canada leaders attended a webinar hosted by the Thyroid Foundation of Canada.
- Topic: Hypothyroidism and Thyroid Replacement Therapy (T4 vs T3 and Desiccated Thyroid).
- Speaker: Dr. Hernan Franco Lopez, Endocrinology & Metabolism, Western University, an early-career specialist.
Overall, it appears Dr Franco Lopez presented his profession's outdated American Thyroid Association guidelines for the treatment of hypothyroidism, from 2012 and 2014. This indicates that hypothyroidism is being well managed and that we ought to be confident in his profession's consensus stance and policies.
That's a natural role for a professional to take, especially when speaking publicly and to patients, but it is not necessarily in the best interests of thyroid patients and their well being.
The overarching ideology of his profession is that a normalized TSH results in euthyroid status in every thyroid-disabled individual and every organ and tissue in the human body.
But that's not true, and good thyroid scientists know it. TSH represents the hypothalamus and pituitary's localized tissue response to circulating thyroid hormones, and not the response of the heart, liver, kidney, or any other organ or tissue. TSH reference ranges are statistical artifacts derived from populations, but they are far too wide to fit any healthy individual, much less a thyroid-disabled, hormone-dosing individual.
Nature did not give us TSH to regulate dosage in the absence of thyroid function, but to regulate a healthy thyroid gland without the interference of any dosing.
There's much more to thyroid therapy than trying to replace the statistical "average" secretions of a healthy thyroid gland and reproduce a statistically normal pituitary response.
This is one big reason why we aren't on the chronic diseases list -- endocrinology wants to give the impression that they have thyroid disease very much under control, and that thyroid treatment is simpler than it really is.
Who really benefits from thyroid disease being off the list? Who profits from ignorance of population-wide mortality rates and comorbidity rates during thyroid therapy?
Some people want to make thyroid disease seem resolved, while diabetes, with its longer list of pharmaceuticals, holds the status of an unresolved public health problem.
If our voices, and the voice of science, can't speak louder than endocrinologists, the true risk to health and longevity during partially effective treatment will continue to remain unassessed.