Jessica Terry is an 18 year old student at Washington State high school in the Bay Area who had years of problems which doctors couldn’t figure out: vomiting, diarrhea, weight loss and stomach pains. Doctors said she had irritable bowel syndrome or colitis, and said her intestinal tissue was just fine according to slides.
Yet, she just knew that wasn’t correct.
So she took some of her own intestinal tissue to her Biomedical Problems class, and voila…she diagnosed her own problem: granuloma, and specifically, Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of her intestines.
Sound familiar??
Yup, thyroid patients have had to do the exact same thing–self-diagnose– for almost ten years because of continuing symptoms of hypothyroidism which doctors have routinely dismissed, pooh-poohed or blamed on something else. It’s all been a horrific, wide-reaching and damaging 50 year medical scandal by the medical establishment upon thyroid patients.
And why has this calamity occurred? Because doctors have always been hoodwinked by their medical school training, continuing education and Big-Pharma-financed-research in believing that T4-only thyroxine medications like Synthroid, Levoxyl, Levothyroxine, Eltroxin, et. al. were from God Almighty, and the TSH lab test was just as holy.
And thanks to thyroid patients around the world who had the gall to use the internet and join patient groups, we figured out it’s all because those medications and labwork have not worked, and what has worked. Additionally, it was patients who discovered they had adrenal fatigue and/or low ferritin and how to treat it, and patients who have succeeded in beginning a wave of change around the world in the treatment and diagnosis of hypothyroidism (except for the UK, who has gone backwards to the dark ages).
You can read Jessica’s story first reported in the Sammamish Reporter, and only recently reported to a wider audience in the Bay Area News newspaper. She also spoke to a CNN affiliate.
Thanks to Kem on NTH for informing me of this news.
P.S. Do ya think that any newspapers or major news outlets like CNN are going to finally get what a huge story thyroid patients have given them?? We’re still waiting……
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4 Responses to “Yes, Jessica Terry, it’s weird to have to self-diagnose, but thyroid patients have had to do the same thing!”
Cat Dromont
Finding ANOTHER prescriber
I want to know how the medical profession can get away with telling a patient that how they feel is less important or not important at all to the kind of “medicine” they receive. For example in my personal and recent experience: I have been told by a certain “health care professional”, that the FDA will only allow me to take a certain amount of Armour Thyroid per day and that I am at that limit [180 mg]. Her statement is NOT true, because the FDA has no relationship with Armour Thyroid – yet I can not convince anyone that what they collectively, and as general practice, are doing is incorrect and that their inaction to help me, and others like me [mostly women], is purely immoral.
I was told that medicine is more an “art form than it is a science” AND I have been told that my symptoms are “too many” and “in my head” so I was prescribed antidepressants and Seretonin uptake “inhibitors” and told to see a psychologist, because the clinic offered this service on a sliding scale {CICP/MCPN in Colorado}.
I was told that Armour is not the modern and standard treatment for Hashimoto’s and other hypothyroid conditions. Because the AMA says only L-Thyroxine is acceptable! Why do these people insist on keeping people sick and not address the root cause? Yes I know it is for money – but it will never be correct and always morally wrong!
Now I am back to finding a care practitioner that knows how to dose this much needed bioidentical hormone that if I do not receive will cause me to suffer this disease while causing additional compounded health problems.
Teresa Nevins
GC I too have suffered for fourteen years with confusion and exhausion from extreme muscle weakness. I have had numerous other symtoms also like restless leg syndrom. I had been taking thyroid but not enough. I discovered T3 and asked a doctor on thyroid-info. com to try it along with a higher T4 dose. For two years I felt 75 percent better. But the doctor left my group health hmo and left me without a referral. I went to a new doctor and she is great but won’t allow me to continue my suppressed levels of T4 and has lowered my meds and I am slowly becoming worse. We are financially ruined because I was unable to work several years and here we go again facing the same miserable existance. I am going to see an encrinologist and laid out my cards completely once and for all and see what happens. My new doctor is stuck in the same old rut of: it will ruin your bones. I already have osteoporosis so she is having difficulty getting past that. I see they are seeing evidense now of SSRi’s causing bone loss and I have been on them for ten years thanks to the doctor’s narrow minds. So who knows what caused the osteoporosis? I am 53 and only recently have started having hot flashes so still premenopausal. Don’t they know that having a decent quality of life is more imporatant than the risk of a slight bone loss risk ?
GC
It’s sad but true. For ten years, I muddled through life with chronic fatigue, weight gain, joint pain, memory loss, brain fog and hair loss. I went from doctor to doctor trying to initially find an answer and then, after determining that what I had was a thyroid condition, trying to find a doctor willing to treat me. I’ve been told that I carried my child too much, that’s why my back hurt, that I was depressed, I needed to drink less sodas and more water in order to lose weight… but when I told the doctors I just wanted to try some thyroid medication, I was told I didn’t know anything, since I wasn’t a doctor. Finally, I ended up with a DO and he was willing to try it out, since there was nothing to lose. Within a week of taking armour, my life was so much better. I was alive again!
Lily
It gives me great comfort that my current Dr. has stated flatly “most doctors are idiots.” I’ll still trust my own instinct over his, but if I have to work with an MD, it’s nice to know that we agree on at least one thing.