Radiographics and the Thyroid

http://radiographics.rsna.org/content/19/5/1161.full
Navigating the thoracic inlet with radiography.
Discusses and presents images of thyroid conditions such as Cancer, Pyramidal Structures, Hemiagenesis and more.

Thyroid T3 Recovery from Fibromyalgia

What if... your doctor prescribed years of pain killers and antidepressants for your Fibromyalgia... when what you needed was thyroid supplementation?


"Recovery from "Fibromyalgia" with T3
Therapy after T4 and Desiccated Thyroid Failed

Fifteen years ago, I published a case study in which a hypothyroid female dramatically recovered from her diagnosis of fibromyalgia by swithching to T3 after she had failed to benefit from both T4 and desiccated thyroid.
Fibromyalgia researchers who work with their heads buried in the sand of failure will dismiss the case, as they did all those years ago, because the report isn't about a blinded study. However, as Carlton Fredericks, PhD noted, such reports are controlled. After all, the woman recovered quickly and dramatically with T3 after extensive treatment with two other approaches to thyroid hormone therapy failed. It is a failure of intellect that dismissive fibromyalgia researchers saw (and undoubtedly will still see) the study as "uncontrolled." By the very unfolding of the woman's case, the trial was indeed controlled.

This highly illustrative case of recovery from "fibromyalgia" through thoughtful administered T3 therapy has for many years been unavailable except through my office. The reason is that the journal containing the report was sold in 1996 to Haworth Medical Press, which didn't make the issue containing the report available to subscribers.

Today, however, Thyroid Science makes the case report available for perpetuity through its open-access webpages. For those who are curious about T3 therapy and its proper use, and how so-called "fibromyalgia" can be relieved with hormone treatment, we republish this case report. "

Introduction to the Case Report at THYROID SCIENCE

What Exactly Are They Teaching in Medical School?

What Exactly Are They Teaching in Medical School?

Dateline: 05/05/97
In the May/June issue of Health magazine, there's a familiar but frightening story. The article by Barbara Bailey Kelley describes a woman who had constant fatigue, constipation, constantly feeling cold and difficulty swallowing. According to the article, this group of symptoms had the woman "hopping from doctor to doctor. None could identify a medical problem." Three years after her symptoms appeared, the woman was checked into a hospital, where a coterie of specialists -- an allergist, heart specialist and psychiatrist -- examined her. The psychiatrist wondered if she was suffering from depression. After a battery of tests which, WHEW, finally included a thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) test, they FINALLY discovered that she was very hypothyroid, in fact, her thyroid had almost shut down completely.

Okay, calling Dr. Kildare! Marcus Welby! The entire staff of St. Elsewhere, Chicago Hope and ER! Where are the doctors who recognize thyroid disease's symptoms quickly?

On an AOL chat a few weeks ago, a group of us were speculating what would happen if a woman with a basketball-sized goiter walked into the ER at "ER." We decided she'd be told she was stressed out, and sent home with a prescription for Prozac, AND a big fat bill from the emergency room (that her insurance company would probably deny!!!) Now how bout that storyline for dramatic tension? (Of course we all agreed we'd keep the goiter if it meant George Clooney'd be our endocrinologist!)

In any case, doesn't it seem like anyone who's spent more than five minutes reading anything about thyroid disease would have a problem recognizing the familiar litany of symptoms the poor woman in the article described? In fact, I sometimes have to watch about becoming too evangelical myself when friends say, "you know, I've been feeling a bit tired and run-down lately, and..."

"COULD BE YOUR THYROID!!!" I announce.

Continues at Link

Thryoid Awareness: The Akita

A new American film based on the story of a loyal dog may help raise awareness of human thyroid problems. Dogs of this breed, the AKITA, frequently have problems with low thryoid, resulting in health and temperament problems.
http://www.petpublishing.com/dogken/breeds/akita.shtml

Just as the dog Hachiko waited faithfully for his master, human thyroid patients often wait a long time to get help from the doctors they rely on. Let us hope that their long wait will not be in vain.

Memory Loss and Thyroid Function

From Great Smokies Diagnostic Laboratories

Memory Loss and Thyroid Function
Every cell in the body, including cells in the brain, contains receptors for thyroid hormones. Thyroid hormones can stimulate and change the structure of particular regions of the brain, such as the hippocampus, the area primarily responsible for learning and memory.1,2 They also modulate enzymes that regulate the metabolic rate of brain cells.

Temporary memory loss is a classic symptom of hypothyroidism, a condition arising from inadequate production of hormones by the thyroid gland, or from decreased peripheral conversion of the thyroid hormone thyroxine (T4) into triiodothyronine (T3) in the kidney or the liver.

Fortunately, memory loss caused by thyroid hormone imbalances can often be effectively treated. As a recent case study illustrates, proper diagnostic testing is crucial, because memory loss may be the only symptom of thyroid insufficiency, and may occur without any other physical signs of thyroid imbalance.3

Even sublinical thyroid imbalances can affect mental ability. Evidence indicates that as levels of thyroid hormone thyroxine decrease, cognitive function generally declines.4 Researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden found that levels of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) correlate with episodic memory performance in healthy men and women over the age of 75.5 They speculated that TSH may actually help the brain encode and store memory. Another study reported that memory loss was the only cognitive symptom of subclinical hypothyroidism in a group of female patients with goiter, and was effectively alleviated with thyroid hormone treatment.6

For these reasons, optimizing thyroid function is considered an important tool for anti-aging therapies designed to safeguard memory and cognitive function.7

Link

On GDSL thyroid assessment
http://web.archive.org/web/20060328012531/www.gsdl.com/home/assessments/thyroid/index.html

The company has changed its name to Genova Diagnostics and the site is
here.

MTBI Rehabilitation: The Patient's Perspective

A useful article for those who are putting their lives back together after medical error.

MTBI Rehabilitation: The Patient's Perspective
by
Constance Miller, MA
October 27, 1998

A Presentation made to the
Consensus Development Conference on
Rehabilitation of Persons with Traumatic Brain Injury
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD

My interest in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, MTBI, grew out of my own MTBI in a 1982 car accident. Prior to that life changing event I enjoyed a full, rich lifestyle that included women's rights and health care advocacy as well as a brief career as a university professor.

On that fateful day in 1982, I bumped my head in a car crash and my world turned upside down. When I came to I felt as though I had been disembodied, disconnected from myself and my past. The sensation was one of being outside of my body; viewing myself from afar. It was as though my head was in the clouds and my feet were planted in some strange yet familiar place.

There were blank spots in my memory and gaps in my consciousness. Words eluded me and my thoughts were frequently out of control. Sounds were muffled and sometimes irritating, and worst of all, nothing made sense. I thought to myself, this is spooky, suddenly for some unknown reason the world had become a strange and scary place.

Instinctually, I felt that something was very wrong although I was hard pressed to get others to confirm my impressions. I desperately needed answers. Much to my horror, the answers that were offered were the wrong answers. It did not take long for me to realize that my very life was at stake. In the blink of an eye I had been transformed from a vital, mid-career professional to one of the undead.

Essentially, life as I had known it no longer existed for me. I had become a mere shadow of my former self. Yet something in myself propelled me onward as I launched into the task of creating a new self and a new identity out of the wreckage of my life. Fortunately, my pre-injury accomplishments enabled me to unlock the mystery of MTBI, and create a new life for myself.

I was relieved to find that the answers to the mysteries of MTBI were known to medical science. I applied what I learned to restoring myself and to selecting and educating my doctors and lawyers. Then, I put everything into a self-help guide called From The Ashes. Then I founded the Head Injury Hotline to advise people on the syndrome, on good care providers, on legal options, and on social and career services available to them.

Continues at Link
Brain injury checklist symptoms may match those of thyroid problems.

Ultrasound Images of Thyroid Dysgenesis and More

Link
Osler didn't have this fancy technology; doctors should be able to tell if half of something isn't there by sight and touch.

Resource: Werner and Ingbar's THE THYROID

Werner and Ingbar's THE THYROID is online at Google Books. This link leads to the chapter on Hypothyroid conditions.

Thyroid Dysgenesis

No type of human transformation is more distressing to look at than an aggravated case of cretinism. The stunted stature, the semi-bestial aspect, the blubber lips, retrousse nose sunken at the root, the wide open mouth, the lolling tongue, the small eyes half-closed with swollen lids, the stolid, expressionless face, the squat figure, the muddy dry skin, combine to make the picture of what has been termed the "pariah of nature." Not the magic wand of Prospero or the brave kiss of the daughter of Hippocrates ever effected such a change as that which we are now enabled to make in these unfortunate victims, doomed heretofore to live in hopeless imbecility, an unspeakable affliction to their parents and their relatives.
[Sir William Osler, 1897]

Remarkable progress in our therapy and knowledge of congenital hypothyroidism (CH) has been made since the demonstration by Murray in 1891 that thyroid extract could ameliorate many of the features of untreated cretinism, an advance described in dramatic detail in the above quotation from Sir William Osler. At this time, despite the striking improvement in the clinical features observed in affected patients, the associated developmental delay proved to be less amenable to therapy, and indeed some cognitive delay was thought to be inevitable. It was not until the 1970s that the importance of the timing of postnatal treatment in obviating the mental retardation was demonstrated convincingly. In a study by Klein et al. (1), 78% of infants with CH treated before 3 months of age but 0% treated after 6 months of age had an intelligence quotient (IQ) above 85, the mean IQ of the early treated group being 89, compared with an IQ of 54 in those treated late. Unfortunately, only one third of patients were recognized clinically within the first 3 months, and even fewer (10%) in the first month of life. The subsequent development by Dussault and Laberge (1A ) of a sensitive and specific RIA for the measurement of T4 in dried whole blood eluted from filter paper paved the way for the modern era of newborn screening for CH prior to the development of clinical manifestations.

Continues at Link

Embryology
Thyroid gland development and disease in children - PDF

Images of thyroid dysgenesis

Myxedema

Thyroid patients restored to health - Before and After.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxedema

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Myxedema+madness

Merck on Thyroid disorders



Hands and feet may swell in hypothyroid conditions. Doctors should not confuse this with acromegaly.
http://tinyurl.com/hypothyroid-hands-and-feet

Hypothyroid presenting as psychosis - PDF

Veterinary: Hypothyroid in Canine Care

Veterinarians know that Hypothyroidism is a common disorder in dogs, particularly Japan's Akita.

Cats more often suffer from Hyperthyroidism.

Pets get proper physical workups and examinations, and are not automatically given Prozac.

People may not be so lucky.

http://www.provet.co.uk/health/diseases/hypothyroidism.htm

http://www.provet.co.uk/health/diseases/hypothyroidismclass.htm Classifications of Hypothyroidism

http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?c=2+1597&aid=449

Hypothyroid Symptom Checklists

http://thyroid.about.com/cs/basics_starthere/a/hypochecklist.htm?p=1

Also see the Hypothyroid checklist at http://www.diagnose-me.com/cond/C20336.html

Does your doctor ask you about all these symptoms, or just some? Or does s/he simply go by test results?
Maybe it's time to ask some questions.