If you're old enough to remember Doc Adams in the western TV series Gunsmoke, or have seen any reruns, you'd know that ol' Doc was the kind of crusty codger of a doctor who would look right at your symptoms and get a pretty good idea how he needed to treat you.

And somehow, you'd think that kind of intuitive medical wisdom would have been passed down to modern physicians.....

It has not.

Today's science-and-Big-Pharma-stuffed physicians are as wise and observant as a bag of rocks when it comes to clear symptoms, all thanks to their tunnel vision love affair with ink spots on a piece of paper called a “lab result”. And one of the worst laboratory tests ever invented? The TSH, aka Thyroid Stimulating Hormone , or thyrotropin for short.

In the body, the real live Thyroid Stimulating Hormone is produced by the pituitary gland as a messenger to the thyroid gland. When your body needs more energy, the TSH from the pituitary knocks on the door of your thyroid gland, telling it to produce and secrete more energy-giving, life-sustaining thyroid hormones.

Doctors, and especially Endocrinologists, will proclaim the TSH lab test as a reliable gauge of your thyroid function with its so-called “normal” reference range. Since it's inception around 1973, the TSH lab has been the gold standard of diagnosis used by doctors and health fairs alike.

Theoretically, if your TSH lab result falls outside the top of the normal range, you are hypothyroid, i.e. the real TSH hormone is screaming like a deranged madman at your dawdling thyroid . If it falls below the normal range, you are hyperthyroid, i.e. the real TSH is unemployed because your thyroid is in fast forward motion. And if it falls anywhere within that range, bingo. You have normal thyroid function.

And it's all been a big bunch of baloney for hundreds of millions of thyroid patients.

Testing via the TSH lab has ultimately been measuring the function or malfunction of your pituitary gland, such as the detection of hypopituitarism. Testing a pituitary hormone response to the thyroid gland gives no clue as to which organs are receiving the secreted thyroid hormone into its tissues, and which are not.

As a result, luckless thyroid patients around the world for over 35 years have been subjected to the tyranny of the TSH , a term coined by Dr. John C. Lowe. Even deeper, we have been subjected to the tomfoolery and crazy-making of the term “normal”.

Visit numerous thyroid patient groups on the net, including the Yahoo group Natural Thyroid Hormones, and you'll find a slew of thyroid patients reporting years of a “normal” proclamation within a dubious TSH normal range. Yet, all those “normal” years included obvious and clear hypothyroid symptoms which modern myopic physicians dismiss, including chronic low-grade depression, easy fatigue and poor stamina, weight gain, aches and pains, anxiety, constipation, feeling cold, dry skin or hair, rising blood pressure or cholesterol, and/or other clear symptoms of a flagging thyroid.

And when the TSH lab result finally rises high enough to reveal the hypothyroid state, the compromised patient is not only sick as a dog, but they may have crept into another difficult condition to treat: adrenal fatigue. Adrenal fatigue is explained on the activist website Stop the Thyroid Madness here: http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/adrenal-info with even more detail in the book of the same name.

On a side note: doctors who fail to ascertain the presence of an autoimmune attack on the thyroid, called Hashimoto's disease, can also miss the reality when they solely rely on the TSH, since the result can be normal one time, and high or low another due to the die off of thyroid cells from the attack.

Even when one's hypothyroidism is caught and medications started, some symptoms will persist in spite of moving the TSH lab result back into the problematic normal range. That reality is a double whammy thanks to the use of the inadequate T4-only thyroxine medications. (See my OpEdNews Feb. 2 nd , 2009 article titled Synthroid Sucks! The Rallying Cry of Thyroid Patients vs. Clueless Doctors here: click here Finally, as a growing body of patients have discovered a far better treatment with desiccated natural thyroid like Armour, they are forced to fight the TSH-is-boss mentality of their doctors all over again. When all symptoms of hypothyroidism are removed with desiccated thyroid, the TSH lab result is suppressed i.e. far below the normal range with not one hint of hyperthyroidism. Yet rattled and rigid doctors proclaim “You are hyper!”, once again based solely on an ink spot on a piece of paper, and force the hapless patient to lower their desiccated thyroid with the return of some symptoms. Or if hyper symptoms do raise their ugly heads with a suppressed TSH, doctors are clueless about the problem of adrenal fatigue, aka low cortisol causing the problem, and the need for correct treatment of either sluggish adrenals or an HPA (hypothalamus/pituitary/adrenals) hypofunction. No wonder so many thyroid patients feel forced to self-treat. Of course, the TSH lab test doesn't stand alone in the blame game. Doctors garner the bonehead award for the TSH calumny. It's doctors who make man-made TSH lab ranges more important than clinical presentation, causing millions of patients to leave their doctor's office still sick to one degree or another. A true loss of medical wisdom.



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