Solving the Hypothyroidism Puzzle: Q&A: Antonio Bianco, MD, PhD

This annoys me. The person being interviewed spends a lot of it deflecting blame onto others :

https://endocrinenews.endocrine.org/solving-the-hypothyroidism-puzzle-qa-antonio-bianco-md-phd/

I'm glad that at least some doctors are changing their minds about hypothyroidism treatment rather than blaming the patient, but why did it have to take so long!

 

Residual symptoms is one hell of a way to deflect blame about having failed to do their job properly. Calling them residual doesn't make them so, or irrelevant. At some point experts are expected to take notice of patterns and make sense of them. That's what they all do, medicine is unique in its traditional dismissal of patient experience, of letting obvious clues and relevant data go completely ignored.

This is not obscure or hard to see, patients kept telling them, just like we are, they just didn't pay attention, didn't even record most of it, which is unlike all other fields of science, where no easily-recorded data go unnoticed.

It's deflating to think of all the progress that will be made once medicine starts understanding symptoms, a real model that replaces all the psychosocial junk that took the whole space, and how much of that progress could have happened decades ago. For sure that total power imbalance plays a huge role in it. It's critical to how slow and dysfunctional it all is.

Obviously experts need some level of deference but this is unlike any other type of expertise, it's direct sensory lived experience. There is no counterpart to this in any other discipline. No one has deep personal lived experience of being an airplane, an industrial process, a volcanic formation or a mathematical formula. Living something gives unique insight that has no equivalent anywhere else and this is directly connected to our senses, to our brains, the only thing that experiences things.

We could be decades ahead and it wouldn't even have anything to do with technology, which is also quite unique. Freaking hubris.

 

I think there are various things that annoy me in the interview, and I'm not necessarily annoyed with AB in all my comments :

Patients in their thousands have been telling doctors about their continuing symptoms over and over again for decades. Doctors didn't need to be warned - they needed to listen to their, mostly female, thyroid patients, and believe them.

Another comment - referring to "residual symptoms" minimises the symptoms by implying they are minor and unimportant. Again, patients have been stressing that this is not the case for a very long time.

I am not directing this particular comment at AB, it is just a general comment. I want to know where these medical myths about T3 in particular and thyroid hormones in general actually come from :

1) T3 has been described as addictive, and has been compared to cocaine, heroin, and speed. Anyone saying this also has T3 flowing through their veins and arteries. If they didn't they'd be dead.

2) T3 has been described as dangerous, and some doctors believe it can kill. This is not backed up by the Yellow Card data on T3 :

If you want to see the Yellow Card report on T3, go to this page : https://yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk/idaps and select the liothyroinine report. It won't work in Firefox, but does in Chrome. I haven't tried any other browsers. The MHRA or its predecessors started collecting adverse events data in 1967 (but I do know that for a long time there was almost no yellow card data collected on anything - but since roughly 2000 the number of reports have greatly increased for all sorts of drugs since the system was computerised). There have been zero recorded reports of osteoporosis. There have been 54 reports of cardiac disorder since 1967. There have been zero deaths. Hardly the dangerous hormone that doctors are terrified of!

3) Like so much of medicine which is "controversial" the phrase "more research is needed" comes up a lot when referring to T3. There was research on it in the 50s and 60s but that research has been buried and ignored. This article is worth reading, although it is quite long and could be too exhausting for many people here :

https://thyroidpatients.ca/2021/01/...yronine-as-a-replacement-for-thyroid-therapy/

My energy has run out.