- "Real thyroid experts" should restrict patients to ONLY T4-replacement
- "Real thyroid experts" believe that there is NO BENEFIT to using T3 in treating hypothyroidism, so the treatment should be T4-replacement
- "Real thyroid experts" believe that most patients on T4-replacement after antithyroid therapy DON'T gain weight
- "Real thyroid experts" know that patients DON'T have chronic fatigue or depression after becoming hypothyroid despite using T4-replacement
- "Real thyroid experts" believe that TSH and free T4 levels CAN NOT possibly lead to different conclusions about a patient's thyroid status depending on when her blood is drawn
- "Real thyroid experts" know that TSH and free T4 levels CORRESPOND to patients' TRUE clinical status
Says Dr. Lowe: "their beliefs aren't just dead, they're in rigor mortis..."
If you are dealing with doctors who are basing their treatment of you on out-of-date information about thyroid disease, or who feel that you don't have the right to the kind of information I provide you here at the site, this is a report you must read.
JEERS: The ATA Alliance for Thyroid Patients
That American Thyroid Association has been busy, because it's not enough they have their own group to advance their agenda, they had to go ahead and join up the various other groups and, with a healthy dose of drug company funding, create the ATA Alliance for Thyroid Patients.
According to their publicity page, "The mission of the ATA Alliance is to standardize and validate information provided to patients about the diagnosis, evaluation and treatment of thyroid diseases, based upon evidence-based, unbiased, non-anecdotal, accurate data and provided for the patient's best interest."
Does this sound like it's a group focused on patients? Or does it sound suspiciously like something meant to serve the pharmaceutical companies and physicians? If you're suspicious, you should be. Because the various groups that belong to the ATA Alliance -- which include the Thyroid Foundation of America, the National Graves' Disease Foundation, the Thyroid Cancer Survivor's Association, and the Light of Life Foundation -- are primarily groups run by or heavily influenced by conventional physician interests and funded by pharmaceutical companies. For example, while the Thyroid Foundation of America is a supposed "patient" organization, it's run by physicians -- not patients -- and the group, and its leadership as individuals, are also beneficiaries of drug company funding, research grants, and resources. The National Graves' Disease Foundation, Thyroid Cancer Survivor's Association, and Light of Life Foundation have strong and often controlling board presence from physicians, as well as heavy drug company funding.
In a perfect world, there would be a wealth of evidence-based, unbiased, non-anecdotal, and accurate data about thyroid disease. Unfortunately, since thyroid disease is not often the topic of research -- one physician told me that her proposals for studies regarding thyroid and fertility are regularly met with "It's not sexy enough, do you have anything on diabetes?" or "people just don't die from thyroid disease, why would we fund research on it?" So there simply isn't that much out there that focuses on the patients' best interests. And even more unfortunate, most of the research that IS done is commissioned and funded by a handful of drug companies, whose influence is seen in the choice of topics. (Finding the undiagnosed thyroid patients who need to be taking thyroid hormone replacement drugs is a noble, if self-serving, focus of the majority of thyroid research.) Among the few studies that have been done, many are haphazard and inconclusive, such as the T4/T3 studies that showed, quite effectively, that neither a specific combination of levothyroxine plus T3 nor levothyroxine alone could relieve persistent hypothyroidism symptoms. (Unfortunately, some misguided doctors have compounded the travesty by misinterpreting the data to mean that T4 alone is more effective than T4+T3 -- an unscientific conclusion that, not surprisingly, serves their funding sources, the levothyroxine manufacturers.)
In an idealistic, perfect world you could take a variety of groups led and/or made up mostly of doctors -- most of whom are recipients of drug company largesse -- finance those groups primarily with drug company money, and then expect those doctors and groups to act in an "unbiased" way as conduits of information for patients. But it's not a perfect world, and such a scenario is not realistic.
