Thyroid Patient Experiences vs Medical Research: do they jive or not?

There was a long time in my life – more than 20 years in fact – that I suffered immensely, in spite of managing to live my life. I paid hefty prices….and suffered constantly. You can read my story on STTM, and read even more details in the Introduction of the revised Stop the Thyroid Madness book.

Ultimately, science-based, mainstream medicine failed me…and others.

During those 20 years, and more so during the final ten years, I went from doctor to doctor. Thank the good Lord for insurance!! I visited premier medical centers and was subjected to numerous tests and medical procedures. One in particular resulted in a scar on my left bicep that I still carry today – an attempt to see if my extreme fatigue and weakness had an answer in a muscle biopsy.

But I got NO answers, and no relief. There was no pharmacological drug, nor any physical intervention, or a lab result analysis, or any medical diagnosis that changed my misery. I was left to deteriorate on my own. And that pushed me to apply for Social Security Disability. It was only through my own drive in discovering a better treatment I finally got well.

And turns out my experience, both the negative and positive, has similarities with millions of others, to their own degree and kind, as we discovered in patient groups all over the internet.

Reported patient experiences became the gold, NOT medical science

When I started the Natural Thyroid Hormones (NTH) group on Yahoo in 2002, oh did we learn!! (See STTM’s Talk to Others page). It was NOT science that helped us get better. It was learning from each other!! And all of that reported patient experience and wisdom birthed the STTM website, the STTM book, and many more groups. Because we were now getting WELL thanks to all those reported experiences. And others still are getting well–NOT because of “medical science”, but because we have been listening to each other’s experiences and wisdom!

Does “science” support the success we have achieved?

At first, there was little science to support what we knew to be true by our combined and growing experiences in getting well. And we didn’t care. We were FINALLY getting well!

And as we’ve been getting well, we simply roll our eyes when we occasionally run into a “science snob” who looks down his or her intellectual stuffy nose with ignorant criticism like “It’s nothing more than “anecdotal BS”!! i.e. you can’t POSSIBLY know what you are talking about if there’s no rigorous scientific analysis, debate, or documentation.

**crickets chirping**

But it turns out there ARE medical scientific studies which support some of what we already know by our experiences. Many readers of Stop the Thyroid Madness may not have discovered this yet, but STTM has a page which lists medical studies which support what we already know. So take a peek.

On the other side of the coin, how science can be completely flawed

One 1993 scientific study titled “Levothyroxine Therapy in Patients with Thyroid Disease” is one of MANY studies that informed patients came to realize was faulty. The concluding paragraph stated:

With proper patient monitoring, levothyroxine replacement therapy should be effective, inexpensive, and free of complications. Recommendations for thyroid-stimulating hormone suppression with levothyroxine are based on riskbenefit considerations of the biologic characteristics of the thyroid disorder and the individual patient.

Effective? Free of complications? It didn’t take long for a growing body of thyroid patients, who were comparing notes with each other (besides looking back at the experiences of their relatives) to see that this was FAR from the truth for many of us, to our own degree and kind. I started compiling plenty of non-effective results plus complications of being on T4-only medications from the mouths of patients worldwide over the years.

And the longer we’ve been talking to each other, we also discovered that even when some T4-treated patients report good results on these meds at first…or for several years…they were coming into groups to honestly report seeing more and more symptoms of a poor treatment crop up the longer they stayed on their Synthroid or any other T4-only treatment. It’s not a pretty picture overall.

(And by the way, natural desiccated thyroid is CHEAPER.)

Medical school training is just as much the problem as is flawed science

The Carnegie Foundation did a study about medical schools, and in a particular paragraph, concluded (italics mine):

Medical training is inflexible, excessively long and not learner centered. They found that clinical education is overly focused on inpatient clinical experience, supervised by clinical faculty who have less and less time to teach and who have ceded much of their teaching responsibilities to residents, and situated in hospitals with marginal capacity to support their teaching mission. They observed poor connections between formal knowledge and experiential learning and inadequate attention to patient populations, systems of health care delivery, and effectiveness. Learners have inadequate opportunities to work with patients over time and to observe the course of illness and recovery; students and residents often poorly understand non-clinical physician roles. The team observed that medical education does not adequately make use of the learning sciences. Finally, time and again the researchers saw that the pace and commercial nature of health care impede the inculcation of fundamental values of the profession.

And sadly, patients will report problems with their doctors long after they attended medical school. Common descriptions include unteachable, clueless, rigid, narrow-minded, arrogant, and/or blind to the “clinical presentation” of their patients clear symptoms of continued hypothyroidism (for example, depression, anxiety, high cholesterol or other fatty acids, rising blood pressure, aches and pain, and so much more!) These same doctors will then bandaid these symptoms with anti-depressants, statins, pain meds, blood pressure meds and more.

But to be clear: patient reports don’t equal that they feel their doctors are purposely trying to do harm! Instead, thyroid patients clarify that even their most well-liked doctors just aren’t listening, or aren’t willing to learn from patient experiences, or feel threatened if a patient wants to guide part of his or her own care, or are condescending, as if a patient couldn’t possibly have a brain of their own about what they need. So patients leave…and search for a doctor much more willing to listen to patient experiences and wisdom.

Bottom line: some of reported patient experiences and science jive to some degree. For the rest, medical research studies need to catch up with the truth of our successful experiences, or continue to look stupid.

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Important notes: All the information on this website is copyrighted. STTM is an information-only site based on what many patients worldwide have reported in their treatment and wisdom over the years. This is not to be taken as personal medical advice, nor to replace a relationship with your doctor. By reading this information-only website, you take full responsibility for what you choose to do with this website's information or outcomes. See the Disclaimer and Terms of Use.