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Recommended Book for Thyroid / Hashimoto’s: “The Paleo Thyroid Solution...”, by Elle Russ
Related: air quality, auto-immune disease, ethics in medicine, gaslighting, gears of the machine, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, health, mental health
re: ethics in medicine
re: Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis
If you have any form of thyroid condition, or even suspect it, start with this book:
Foggy, And Fatigued At The Hands Of Uninformed Doctors -
Reclaim Your Health!, by Elle Russ
I recommend the book wholeheartedly because after years of trying to understand thyroid issues, I just could never quite get a grasp on it. Everything I had come across previously was simplistic or obtuse or both.
What Elle Russ has done is to make understanding the thyroid and its issues and how to solve them accessible to just about anyone. She pulls it all together in the most understandable and actionable form I have yet seen, by far. Which no doctor or paper or anything I ever came across could remotely approach.
Russ worked with Dr. Gary Foresman MD on the book; it includes a length Q&A interview with him. But it is her experience that makes the book a winner: what she suffered, what she learned and the methodology of getting to a Good Place for yourself that is the real value.
Why not just “speak to your doctor”?
Because your doctor has a 95% chance of being worse than worthless for a quality outcome, and yes that includes endocrinologists, the doctors that ought to know. They don’t.
These are my statements based on seeing my daughter suffer for a decade, and my own experiences too. Reading the book, all those years of what my daughter went through suddenly made perfect sense—ignorant asshole doctors.
For years my daughter suffered from awful Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis issues at the hands of endocrinologists too incompetent or callous to actually help her feel better. She was constantly gaslighted by her doctors. They never did the right tests, she was told that medicine A was the same as B when A was horrible, etc, etc. So she was “fine” by the numbers while feeling horrible for too many years. The “standard of care” used by endocrinologists for thyroid conditions is outrageous patient abuse.
You can suffer for years and maybe your whole life, or you can inform yourself and reject doctors that fit the patient-abuse pattern described below. The search might be challenging (particularly in a managed care organization), but it is not impossible.
As an uninformed patient, you will be gaslighted by most all endocrinologists out there:
- You will be told it’s in your head, that you are fine even when you feel like shit because you are “in range”. That generic number ranges are all that matter for you personally. You don’t matter, my paint-by-numbers numbers do. See you for the next $300 gaslighting checkup, next patient please!
- You will be told to bugger off if you ask for anything but T4.
- You will be told that generic meds are all bio-equivalent (definitely not).
- You will be told that T3 is dangerous. You will chastised should you dare ask for NDT. Stupid patients, doctors know best!
- You will be told that you don’t need some tests, tests that might be critical to understanding your particular situation. But these will never be mentioned, even if the doctor is aware of them (often not).
- You might even be told to see a psychiatrist.
- You will suffer needlessly.
That, my friends, is the stunning truth about how thyroid disease is treated today.
Brian G writes:
I've spent an exuberant amount of time on this subject matter, and felt the need to reach out after your latest post about Thyroid. I hope you get some value from this.
Check out Ray Peat PhD's work (https://raypeat.com/articles/), he has multiple papers with studies on Thyroid, TSH, etc there. You can find his interviews all over the internet. He's getting up there in age (85+). He's become popular because of TikTok as of late, which is nice to see. You can read his 'about' on his website, but he's a University of Oregon Professor, who's dedicated his whole life to Biology and Nutrition.
Danny Roddy is a great student of Ray's work, and speaks and Interviews Ray Peat on Youtube. Here's a good quick clip with Danny and Ray discussing Thyroid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XBkO2cqXYgHere's a great substack article about Thyroid supplementation by Danny that summarizes all of Ray's teachings: https://dannyroddy.substack.com/p/demystifying-thyroid-supplementation
As a primer, Ray quotes and uses a lot of Broda Barnes MD work/studies from the 50's:
Broda Barnes Books on Amazon (side note: Non of his thousand+ patients ever died of a heart attack)
Hope for Hypoglycemia: It's Not Your Mind it's Your Liver @AMAZON (easier read)
Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected illness @AMAZON (longer more thorough)
Solved The Riddle of Heart Attacks @AMAZON
About Thyroid Heart Attack Rareness in Thyroid-Treated Patients @AMAZON
WIND: Thanks to Brian for the links. I haven’t had time to look at any of this as I write this, packing for a trip. So I have no comment on any of it yet.
Side note:
Visiting insecure http sites (not https) as in raypeat.com above, is a bad idea. Probably they should be prohibited soon. Lots of good info out there is on such insecure sites, and their authors, not being technical, are seemingly clueless about good digital hygiene.
Second, TikTok should be banned as a national security risk. Do not go there. It has enormous power over minds (which means if nothing else, election interference), and your data is fed to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). Once you’re hooked, you’re theirs to mess with in all sorts of subtle ways. This is just basic psychology and hypnosis technique. Don’t be a sucker. Not that the CCP is the only bad actor (Twitter, Facebook, etc are bad too), but we are in a cold war with the CCP.
