According to the American Thyroid Association, approximately 20 million Americans have some form of thyroid disease, a large percentage of whom are not even aware of their condition. Women are affected five to eight times more often than men. One in eight women will develop a thyroid disorder during her lifetime. Thyroid disease is at once a hot-button issue and one of the most misunderstood illnesses facing us today. A 2013 study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism indicating that low or high thyroid levels present risks for pregnant women and their babies is just one example of the effects of thyroid conditions on overall health and well-being.
The thyroid gland, a critical component of the immune system, is a small, butterfly-shaped organ at the base of the neck. It produces thyroid hormone, which basically controls the metabolism of all the cells in the body—from our hair follicles to our toenails and everything in between. The thyroid can be implicated in just about any condition involving any part of the body, including the liver, brain, heart, kidneys, gut, reproductive system, and more.
Thyroid disease is called the great masquerader because it can deceive both doctors and patients alike. “It has such a wide range of effects that it can literally imitate or mimic so many diseases,” says Dr. Raphael Kellman, author of Gut Reactions and Matrix Healing. “And that’s one of the reasons why it’s so terribly often overlooked.”
Among the types of thyroid disease are hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid), thyroiditis (inflammation of the thyroid), and thyroid cancer.
In Solve the Riddle of Illness, Dr. Stephen Langer, a preventive medicine specialist in Berkeley, California, says that more than 40 percent of the population may have subclinical hypothyroidism that is not detected by the traditional blood chemistry done at their general practitioner’s office. The symptoms of low thyroid include tiredness; lethargy; weakness; slow speech; dry, coarse skin; coarse hair; hair loss;weight gain; difficulty breathing; problems with menstruation; nervousness; heart palpitations; brittle nails; and severe chronic fatigue and depression. “A patient with a constellation of symptoms like that is going to be sick and tired of feeling sick and tired,” Dr. Langer says. “Plus they’re going to feel depressed all the time because they’re going from one doctor to another, sometimes with two or three or four pages’ worth of complaints, and the doctors tell them it’s all in their head, or that they should go home and learn to live with it.”
According to an article in the online magazine Alternative Medicine (www.alternativemedicine.com), hypothyroidism can also aggravate many female problems, including miscarriage, fibrocystic breast disease, ovarian fibroids, cystic ovaries, endometriosis, PMS, and menopausal symptoms.
Hypothyroidism is linked to hormonal imbalances, particularly an excess of estrogen over the other female hormone, progesterone. Normally, a woman’s ratio of progesterone to estrogen is ten to one. If she has too much estrogen, this is bad for the thyroid, since estrogen inhibits thyroid production while progesterone promotes it. The connection between thyroid production and female hormones indicates that a disruption in one sphere will affect the other.
Dr. Mark Lader, from the Natural Wellness Center in New York, believes that nutritional deficiencies and stress are the two major keys to hypothyroidism. He says that although iodine deficiency or excess has been fully documented as a causal factor, it is not significant in the United States because most of the salt consumed here is iodized.
Micronutrient deficiencies are important. Some of the major nutrients involved in thyroid metabolism are selenium, glutathione, and zinc, which are known to be required for proper conversion of T4 into T3, the form of thyroid hormone that is active in the tissues. Dr. Lader says that we also should examine protein, fat, and carbohydrate consumption to really get an idea of what’s happening with the thyroid gland. With hypothyroidism, as with so many other chronic illnesses, excess carbohydrate intake can be a major contributing factor. Too much carbohydrate can push blood sugar up and stimulate cortisol production, leading to hypoglycemia, and this increases thyroid production.
Dr. Lader also notes that suboptimal intake of calories, especially in women, may contribute to hypothyroidism. Diets high in caffeine may also adversely affect thyroid function. In addition, Dr. Lader notes, “Food allergies affect our thyroid glands, and that is why we see so many people with allergies who commonly have other systemic endocrine problems in their bodies. You also have to stop and look at chemical and medical toxicity. People whose cholesterol rises year after year may have hypothyroidism.”
The gut is another place where problems can start. Our bodies detoxify and eliminate thyroid hormones through the gut, where certain enzymes in a healthy intestine help to break apart the soluble thyroid hormones so that we can reabsorb them through our intestines. Many people have had a lot of antibiotic therapy, and poor diet or intestinal problems have led to imbalances in microflora. This imbalance decreases the body’s ability to reuptake active thyroid hormone. It’s very important to establish a healthy environment in the intestines in order to maintain normal levels of thyroid hormones.
“We also have to look at the liver,” Dr. Lader continues, “which is probably the most abused, overworked, and stressed organ in the body. Our liver is exposed to a number of toxins, which we have to make soluble so that we can excrete them out of our bodies. The same enzymes that break down many environmental toxins also break down thyroid chemicals. If our livers are overworked due to exposure to toxins, and those enzymes speed up, we are also going to be moving lots of thyroid hormone out of the body. This is really the X factor in thyroid illness.”
Dr. Lader says that many drugs that people take also interfere with thyroid function. These include antidepressants and interferon, which is taken to treat hepatitis C but can affect thyroid function.
In conventional medicine, hypothyroidism is diagnosed by serum testing of the hormones thyroxine (T4), triiodothyronine (T3), and thyrotropin or thyroidstimulating hormone (TSH). The textbook explanation is that low T4 and T3 levels along with high TSH indicate hypothyroidism. Dr. Lader comments, “On the face of it, hypothyroidism seems to be a real simple illness. The symptoms and blood values seem to correlate very well to a hypothyroid case, and then when we give levothyroxin, the symptoms seem to go away.”
However, these tests are not as accurate as they might seem. An Alternative Medicine article points out that “most of the standard thyroid tests (for T3, T4, and TSH levels) often fail to pinpoint an underfunctioning thyroid, leading physicians to make erroneous diagnoses.” The article goes on to say that doctors diagnose by symptoms, even while they remain unaware of the medical cause. So a patient with depression gets Prozac; one with weight gain is prescribed a weight loss drug; and one who is continually tired is said to suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome and gets no treatment.
In Dr. Lader’s opinion, the standard blood tests do little to pinpoint the actual cause of the thyroid problem. Instead, he looks at the patient’s overall environment to locate key problem sectors. The first step is ascertaining the patient’s body temperature.
“For my own diagnosis, I ask the women about their symptoms and also use something called a basal temperature test, which is a very simple way to learn if the body is running cold. [Basal body temperature is a person’s resting temperature upon waking up in the morning.] We ask the woman to use an oral thermometer. She shakes it down before she goes to sleep at night. First thing upon arising in the morning, she puts it under her armpit for about seven minutes.
“The temperature should be above 97.8. If it’s below that level, many doctors will say that is diagnostic for hypothyroidism. However, we must remember that some people have a lower body temperature than others. They tend to run a little cool but don’t have the hypothyroid symptoms. Some people’s underarm temperature doesn’t even rise after they have a significant improvement in their symptoms.”
Dr. Lader looks at the whole body and a person’s whole environment. In his experience, most of the symptoms that people with hypothyroidism come in with are lethargy, weakness, dryness, and cold intolerance. By studying both the temperature and the patient’s whole history, he is able to assess the patient’s condition. Among the other symptoms of hypothyroidism are insomnia, anxiety, forgetfulness, muscle and joint pain, reflux, constipation, and hair loss including thinning of the eyebrow.
Dr. Raphael Kellman tells about other useful tests. He has used the TRH stimulation test in the diagnosis of thousands of his patients. “It’s a challenge test that can really help us when we suspect hypothyroidism and yet the routine blood tests come out normal,” he says. TRH (thyrotropin-releasing hormone), which is the hormone that stimulates the pituitary gland to release TSH, is injected into the body, and the blood is tested twenty-five minutes later. “If the thyroid is low,” Dr. Kellman says, “the pituitary is going to start producing a lot of TSH, and it’s going to start building up in the pituitary gland.”
In addition, Dr. Kellman suggests testing for heavy metal toxicity, as well as vitamin and mineral levels. “Very few people know that there are blood tests that we can do that can assess your vitamin levels: your vitamin C level, your vitamin E level, your beta-carotene level, your vitamin A and vitamin D, etc., and we can see which vitamins and nutrients one might be deficient in. A selenium deficiency can adversely affect the thyroid. You need selenium to produce an adequate amount of thyroid hormone. Amino acid deficiencies can also impact on the thyroid. You can also do an amino acid profile and see which amino acids one might be deficient in.”
Conventional treatment relies on prescription thyroid hormone replacement drugs. They include levothyroxine (Synthroid), a synthetic form of the T4 thyroid hormone, the most common drug; liothyronine, a synthetic form of the T3 hormone, sometimes used with levothyroxine; and liotrix, a synthetic combination of T3 and T4. There are also natural thyroid hormone replacement drugs, which are made from the desiccated thyroid glands of pigs.
According to Dr. Lader, on the surface, it would seem reasonable to treat the symptoms of hypothyroidism with hormone replacement drugs. “These drugs make the symptoms disappear in a high percentage of cases,” he says. “But, are we really getting to the true causes of the problem?”
Dr. Lader tells about the drawbacks to these medicines. “We know that in conventional treatment the patient will be on the medication for her whole life. Natural doctors believe we don’t need to medicate people that long. Moreover, the increasingly larger doses these people are getting over the course of a lifetime cause more and more adverse symptoms.”
It’s important to treat the whole body, Dr. Lader says. “One of the true hallmarks of an alternative, natural practitioner is that she or he believes that eliminating symptoms is not really enough to determine if a successful therapy has been carried out.” He adds, “Probably most readers realize that we have a medical tradition in this country of relegating hypothyroidism to the idiopathic trash heap. Idiopathic is a term used when traditional medicine does not know what the cause is. In my opinion, though, it means we are not asking the right questions. Saying that this problem has unknown causes or ones that cannot be addressed nutritionally is really a cop-out. At the same time, many doctors just whip out the hormone replacement therapy prescription pad in order to treat the symptoms while ignoring the cause. To me this is sad, a sad commentary on our whole health care system in this country.”
Dr. Lader notes that there are many different agents in our environment that decrease thyroid function, ranging from stress to food. And, he says, treating environmentally induced hypothyroidism by using hormones or drugs is an excuse for those who are not willing to do the right work to get people well. He argues that to treat hypothyroidism, we have to use a natural approach to make the body stronger and healthier. “To really give optimal treatment for hypothyroidism, we have to treat the ultimate cause of the illness. So we will have to deal with diet, nutrition, and all the environmental factors that can affect our thyroid gland.”
There are several dietary recommendations for hypothyroidism. A healthy, balanced diet is important. Among the foods to include are fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein. “One thing I urge my patients to try to avoid is the Brassica family foods—cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower,” Dr. Lader says. He acknowledges that these foods have many health benefits, but says that they are considered goitrogenic (goiter-causing), especially in their raw form. Other foods in this category that should be avoided or limited include kale, spinach, brussels sprouts, peaches, pears, and strawberries.
Another aspect of alternative treatment is nutritional supplementation. The creation of a supplement program has to be handled carefully, Dr. Lader explains. “It comes down to the fact that every hypothyroid patient is different and requires a different approach. Supplemental programs need to be customized so that they address all the factors that have been ascertained during the diagnosis and workup. In general, we have to make sure people are taking in adequate amounts of selenium, glutathione, and zinc.”
Stress management is also important. One of the major problems of hypothyroidism, as noted, is inadequate conversion of inactive thyroid (thyroxine) into active thyroid (triiodothyronine). Stress elevates cortisol, which inhibits this con-version process. Heavy activity, exercise, and different stress-reduction methods are needed.
Dr. Langer describes his treatment approach using case examples. “Recently I treated a patient who was the wife of a doctor and the mother of two young children. She basically came in and told me that she didn’t want to go on living. She was so tired all the time and so depressed that she couldn’t keep her head off the pillow after two in the afternoon. If she didn’t go to bed, she would just fall apart. I did a history and physical on her and we made some dietary changes, but basically this woman was profoundly hypothyroid. We put her on a quarter of a grain of thyroid, which is what I start my patients with before building them up very gradually. A quarter of a grain is the smallest dose available. It’s such a small quantity that most pharmacies don’t even carry it, because when doctors order thyroid they don’t even think to order so small a dose. But a quarter of a grain of thyroid was enough. Within a three-week period, this woman not only regained her mental health, but she was out taking tennis lessons, which was shocking even to me because although the treatment usually works it usually takes a longer period of time. So, just that amount of metabolic support was enough to turn this person’s life around.
“Another person I treated was a sixty-two-year-old woman who was a member of the Catholic clergy. She had been a nun for at least thirty years when I met her and I will never forget this woman. She came in bloated, profoundly depressed and fatigued. The only thing that kept her going was basically overworking her adrenal glands. She came in and told me that when she was twelve years old, she went under a dark cloud. When I saw her it was fifty years later, and by that time she had been through thirty or forty different doctors, including internists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists of various sorts.
“One of the first things that showed up in her—which I thought was a very positive sign—was that she was freezing all the time. When we did a basal body temperature, it never went above ninety-five degrees. Basal body temperature is a person’s resting temperature when she wakes up in the morning. However, when I did a blood work-up on her, all her thyroid hormone levels were within normal limits. I empirically placed her on a dose of thyroid that we gradually built up to about four grains a day, which is quite a high dosage. She’s one of the few people I’ve treated who has needed that high an amount. Within three months her depression of fifty years’ duration was totally gone. Now, obviously she was bitter and angry that she had been suffering for all that time. But the organic feeling that she had of overwhelming fatigue totally disappeared within a three-month period of time, and I’ve seen that response in thousands of patients over the years. A small dose of thyroid, combined with things like nutritional support and eliminating food allergies, can really turn a person’s life around.”
Dr. Kellman, who outlines his approach to natural treatment in The Microbiome Diet, says that “first and foremost, you have to heal the gut... We have to rethink the overuse of antibiotics. We have to clean up our diet. We have to eat healthier foods, no processed foods, no trans fats. Eat more organic foods and say no to genetically modified foods. Take probiotics and prebiotics.” There are many herbs that can improve thyroid function, including ashwagandha and gugulipid. Selenium may also be used.
Hyperthyroidism is a condition in which there is overactivity of the thyroid gland in producing thyroid hormone. It is about ten times more common in women than men.
Dr. Saralyn Mark, an endocrinologist and women’s health specialist, describes some of the most common symptoms. “Women who have overactive thyroid glands may feel very restless. They may feel like they’re having hot flashes. They feel warm. They might find that they can’t keep weight on. In fact, I’ve had some patients say please don’t treat my thyroid problem. I like it because it allows me to keep my weight down and have all this energy. Well, unfortunately, too much thyroid hormone in the body can be very toxic to many cells, including the heart as well as your bones. So we really want people to be what we call euthyroid thyroid in a normal thyroid state.”
Some people with hyperthyroidism have thyroid enlargement caused by nodules or masses in their thyroid gland. “That can be part of the thyroid gland that is overactive, and fortunately we can treat that,” Dr. Mark says. “We can take these nodules out. We can also give medications that can suppress the thyroid glands so that your body is in a normal state.”
Causes of hyperthyroidism include Graves’ disease, excessive intake of thyroid hormones, abnormal secretion of thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), and thyroiditis. Diagnosis typically involves physical examination and blood tests. Conventional treatment includes drugs to inhibit the production of thyroid hormones; beta-blockers to reduce symptoms such as heart palpitations, tremor, and anxiety; surgery to remove all or part of the thyroid; and radioactive iodine to destroy the thyroid.
Natural approaches to hyperthyroidism emphasize diet, exercise, and alternative therapies. Diet should consist of nutritious foods including papaya, mango, green leafy vegetables, and fish. Vitamins A, B-complex, C, calcium, and phosphorus should be increased via food or supplements. Omega-3 and L-carnitine may help in regulation of the thyroid. Among the herbs that have been found to decrease thyroid activity are bugleweed, motherwort, and turmeric. Homeopathy, acupuncture, and massage also are beneficial.
Thyroiditis is inflammation of the thyroid gland. The most common type of thyroiditis is Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, or autoimmune thyroiditis. Thyroiditis is a root cause of a variety of emotional and physical problems. According to Dr. Hyla Cass, a holistic psychiatrist, “When the thyroid isn’t working properly, the immune system is impaired, and this sets up a vicious cycle. You have a person whose immune system is depleted and who is anxious; they’re told by regular doctors that the problem is all in their head, that there’s nothing physically wrong with them. So then they feel worse.”
What triggers the autoimmune response associated with the most common type of thyroiditis? Dr. Stephen Langer explains: “Imagine autoimmune thyroiditis to be like rheumatoid arthritis of the thyroid gland. A person can have rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune condition where the body puts out antibodies to the joints. Frequently people with rheumatoid arthritis can experience long periods of remission. When they are under a great deal of stress, the body puts out antibodies to the joints and all their joints swell up. A similar thing happens with thyroiditis; if a person gets stressed out for any reason whatsoever, the body can start pumping out antibodies to the thyroid gland. The thyroid becomes acutely inflamed, and thyroid hormone, which under normal circumstances would not be released, starts escaping. It’s almost like pumping speed into your system.”
Dr. Langer notes, “There is a very precise blood test that any doctor can order called the autoimmune thyroid antibody test, and most of the people who I suspect have thyroid conditions and have normal thyroid hormone levels will have an elevation in their antithyroid antibodies. If they have an elevated antithyroid antibody level, they have the symptoms that go along with low thyroid, which can be any one of 125 symptoms that we enumerate in Solve the Riddle of Illness.”
Like hypothyroidism, thyroiditis can cause a number of psychological symptoms. Dr. Langer explains: “With thyroiditis people get anxiety attacks and panic attacks for no apparent reason. They could be sitting and reading a book. All of a sudden they will develop a cascade of heart palpitations and fearfulness.
“I’ve had a number of patients who have been rushed, almost on a monthly basis, to the emergency room to be worked up by cardiologists because their heart was pounding over 200 beats a minute. Cardiologists would do EKGs and echocardiograms and then tell them to go see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist would work them up, not find anything, and then put them on an antidepressant or a tranquilizer, and actually make the condition worse. When you have an undiscovered organic basis for a psychological problem, being put on psychotropic medication is like sitting on a thumbtack and being put on pain pills for the rest of your life. It has about the same effect. It wears the system down, and as a result the patient’s condition not only does not improve but will in fact deteriorate, because the underlying cause is not being treated.”
A large number of Dr. Hyla Cass’s patients also have thyroiditis. “I really can’t emphasize the importance of this problem enough,” she says, “because thyroiditis often accompanies the mixed infection syndrome, which can consist of any combination of the following: parasites, candidiasis, and the viral syndromes, including Epstein-Barr virus and cytomegalovirus. Psychological components include depression, anxiety, and even panic attacks.
“To treat thyroiditis, I’ve done nutritional consults on people who were under the care of other physicians. When I suggested that they had thyroiditis and that it was to be treated with low doses of thyroid hormones, I was met with skepticism from the other doctors.”
Depression is common in these patients. “When people have these longstanding chronic conditions, they can become extremely depressed,” Dr. Cass says. “They feel like they can’t go on anymore, particularly when their body has been so racked by the continuing illness. Also, some of the mixed infection of thyroiditis and the parasites or other viruses can actually affect the brain directly. Thyroiditis and its accompanying infections affect the central nervous system along with every other organ of the body. So people come in extremely depressed, both as a reaction to their prolonged illness and as a primary symptom of the illness, and this is usually totally overlooked. That’s why it’s crucial to do a good medical workup on a patient whose disorder may at first appear purely psychological in origin.”
“There is one more connection to be drawn between depression and thyroid dysfunction,” Dr. Langer adds. “Poor libido. One of the classic symptoms of depression is a loss of interest in sex. Those people who in the past were sexually active but who all of a sudden or gradually started to lose interest in sex will be diagnosed as being depressed right away. Men come into my office by the score— many of them young—who have potency problems, and they can’t figure it out because they have no apparent organic illness. As a result, they get performance anxiety, and if that continues long enough, they wind up getting severely depressed. But I have found that if you go to the root cause of their depression, very often it’s the thyroid that’s malfunctioning.
“If a person develops an acute depression that leads to a sexual dysfunction— which it frequently does—a doctor would be remiss if he or she didn’t look for an imbalance in the thyroid. Patients have got to start taking their health destinies into their own hands and demanding that doctors do thyroid testing and look for autoimmune thyroid disorders and nutritional imbalances, which are frequently the underlying causes of sexual dysfunction and depression.”
Dr. Langer describes his approach to treatment. “The question for holistic clinicians to ask themselves regarding each individual patient is where they’re going to intervene,” he says. “Different physicians will intervene at different places, depending upon their background and interests. I try, to the best of my ability, to get to the root cause of what’s going on. If I am having difficulty figuring out the cause, then I try to intervene at a point in a person’s imbalance that will cause the least disruption to their lifestyle and give them the best results for the least amount of money in the quickest period of time. Frequently, that turns out to be treating with small doses of thyroid and altering eating habits. In my clinical experience, I have found that with the thyroid and nutritional support, very often a person will get better. The thyroid is not a lifetime treatment and can be removed after the person’s condition has been stabilized. Thyroid treatment is inexpensive, works rapidly, and when done properly is absolutely nontoxic.”
Dr. Allan Spreen, a general practitioner who specializes in nutrition-based medicine, reminds us that while thyroid supplementation is an important modality, it is not fail-safe. “I’d love to say that correcting thyroid function is a panacea. While it doesn’t work 100 percent of the time, if a patient comes in complaining of fatigue and depression that is linked with the physical findings of foods not digesting well, and cold extremities, then an underactive thyroid may be the root cause. People come and say, ‘Oh, my husband says, ‘Don’t touch me with your feet at night because they’re just ice cold.’ These are the same people who are comfortable in a room when everybody else is boiling and who are freezing in a room when everybody else is comfortable. Their thinking seems to have slowed down. They just don’t seem to be able to concentrate like they used to, and they don’t remember lists the way they used to.”
Dr. Spreen says that when a patient’s blood levels of thyroid are normal, he then keeps track of body temperature. “I go back to the old school of Broda Barnes, who, 40 or 50 years ago, did axillary temperature testing. I ask my patients to keep a record of their early-morning basal body temperature. If their basal metabolic rate based on early-morning body temperatures is really low, then I consider them to be candidates for thyroid supplementation. In axillary testing, Broda Barnes talked about temperature ranges between 97.8 and 98.2 degrees Fahrenheit, which is lower than the 98.6 people think of as normal. But the axillary temperature is taken in the armpit first thing in the morning, using a mercury thermometer that stays there for ten minutes before they get up. If their temperature is, much of the time, down in the 96.8, 96.7, 96.5 range, I at least consider the possibility that the person needs low doses of natural thyroid, which is still available.
“Thyroid is a prescription drug. Some doctors who use this type of testing use synthetic thyroid. I prefer to prescribe natural thyroid in very low doses. If a person responds—either their temperature rises or their symptoms lift—then I retest them to see if their blood levels of thyroid have changed. Many times a person with this profile of symptoms who takes thyroid begins to feel better, but their blood tests remain unchanged, including levels of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) and actual thyroid hormone. This means that the blood testing has missed the diagnosis, and yet the person feels well with the increased, but undetectable, dose of thyroid hormone.”
I came to be treated by Dr. Spreen only after first following the conventional route in medical treatment. I was in my fifth year of infertility treatments, had taken multiple infertility drugs, and wound up severely depressed, which caused me to lose thirty-five pounds in two months. I couldn’t sleep, I had panic attacks, the whole horrible group of symptoms associated with depression. The doctors put me on the conventional Xanax treatment for three years before I met Dr. Spreen, who was helping me with some other related medical problems. I had hair loss, skin problems, nail-biting problems. I had aches all over my body, especially in my legs. Dr. Spreen got me on a vitamin regimen, which made me feel somewhat better.
Then Dr. Spreen put me on very low doses of thyroid and immediately—within two to three weeks—all the problems I just mentioned were gone. Now, I had had thyroid checks three times during the whole time when I was being treated for infertility, and the blood tests had always come up negative. But I knew that in my family there were thyroid problems. There are at least six members of my family I can think of who have thyroid disorders, but mine just never showed up on my tests. After taking these very low doses of thyroid, my skin problem cleared up, I stopped biting my nails, and my legs stopped aching. The mild depression I was still suffering from all of a sudden in August vanished. I felt great. I slept like a normal person again. I had energy. People started commenting on how I seemed to be like my old self again. It was like getting a new lease on life!
I feel rather fed up with the original doctors I went to see. They treated me like I was a hysterical woman who needed to get a grip on things. I have never told them about my recovery using alternative methods because I don’t think they’d be receptive to it.
—Jenny
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I had hives, some kind of an allergic response, about five years ago and it progressed to the point where I had hives on my vocal cords. It was a pretty serious allergic reaction, for which I was first treated with antihistamines. Later, I was treated with prednisone. When small doses of prednisone given every other day didn’t help, my doctor began increasing the dosage until I was taking 70 milligrams every day. After about six weeks I started declining physically from taking this tremendous dose. I gained about fifty pounds. I had conjunctivitis in both of my eyes. I had open sores.
I was so weak I was almost bedridden. I did find another doctor who slowly weaned me off of the prednisone. But when it was all over, my immune system had been damaged. I had a lot of viral illnesses that are usually associated with chronic fatigue syndrome. I could scarcely get out of bed, and I couldn’t lose all the weight I had gained. So I went from doctor to doctor. I was living in the Midwest at the time, and many of these doctors said, “Your metabolic system has been altered by prednisone. Too bad, but you will never lose that weight. And prednisone can damage the immune system. Too bad, but your immune system has been damaged.” No one could offer me any help at all.
I first went to Dr. Atkins in New York and he was a lot of help. It was through Dr. Atkins and his association with Dr. Huggins that I learned about dental amalgams, because when your immune system is depleted, you are much more susceptible to any kind of toxins, including mercury leaching from mercury amalgam fillings. It was causing me a great deal of trouble and I did have those removed.
Then I moved to California and I had heard, previous to my moving, about Dr. Slagle and her work with depression. In fact, I referred friends to her, friends I had made in California, and they had these miraculous cures from depression after two weeks of taking B-complex vitamins and amino acids. But I didn’t think of going to her myself for quite a while because I thought of her as someone who only treated depression. In fact, like many alternative physicians, she treats the whole person. She had worked with fatigue a lot, and she first tested me thoroughly and found that my thyroid and, in fact, my whole endocrine system, was not functioning properly, most likely as a result of prednisone. She picked up subtleties in the test that other doctors ignored. She has the philosophy that a body should be healthy and whole. She doesn’t need gross parameters of unusual test results to say something is wrong here. So she was able to discover that I had a rather unusual problem in my thyroid and she was able to treat it.
When I began seeing her, I still had very limited energy. Even though Dr. Atkins had helped me lose weight so I looked normal, I still didn’t feel normal. In one day, I could either go to the grocery store or go to a doctor’s appointment. That was all I could do. The remainder of the day I had to rest. I went to Dr. Slagle and after she began treating my thyroid, I had a leap of improvement. I regained my energy. She also gave me amino acids, which heightened my mood. Even though I hadn’t thought I was depressed—and I still don’t think I was—generally the amino acids made me feel healthier. And while I don’t have the energy of a lot of people around me, I can pretty much function normally, which is a miracle. It has been a five-year struggle and I’m finally living practically a normal life.
Here’s what I have learned from my experience: You simply cannot go to a traditional physician and carelessly allow that doctor to treat your symptoms with drugs. Traditional physicians tend not to look at the whole person, but to give drugs to ameliorate the symptoms, or to treat individual problems without regard to what that treatment does to the rest of the body. I learned to use tremendous caution when entrusting my body to someone. If you’re going to trust your body to someone, you should know a lot about the physician. You should know whether the physician treats the whole person and sees you as more than an allergy or a gallbladder.
—Helen
An increasing body of evidence is showing the benefits of natural modalities to overall health and well-being. Following is a sample of recent peer-reviewed scientific studies regarding thyroid disease.
A 2012 report in the Russian journal Likzars’ka Sprava concluded that the herb Polentilla alba, used in traditional Russian medicine for centuries, “could be recommended for monotherapy and for combine conservative therapy of diffuse and mix benign euthyroid goiter, and also for complex treatment of toxic and hypothyroid goiters.”