Article: Understanding Your Thyroid

by Linsey McLean

Many of you have asked for more information concerning the functioning of the thyroid glands, to better understand the monitoring of your thyroid blood tests, and why such regular monitoring is really necessary to the fine tuning program of your biochemistry.

To simplify a very complicated endocrine pathway for your understanding, we can say that the thyroid, with help from the adrenal glands, regulates the speed of biochemical reactions at the cell level, in every cell of the body. This means that, essentially all biochemical processes that go on in the body are regulated by these small glands in the neck.

By regulating the speed of all processes, the implications for treating such syndromes as chronic depression, chronic fatigue, poor energy metabolism resulting in obesity, and many other conditions emanating from low basal metabolism, can be successfully treated - if we also understand the other, interfering, mechanisms at work here in Environmental Induced Illness'. Conventional medicine, in years past, has tried, often without success, and with undesirable side effects, to simply "plug in" to the thyroid pathway with various and sundry combinations of synthetic Thyroxine (T4) and Triiodothyronine (T3).

Thyroid replacement therapy is now viewed with caution, and righteously so. Many patients suffered mental and physical side effects so severe so as to never want to touch the stuff again. I know from first hand experience; I was one of those. However, medicine went through the same growing pains with other hormone replacement therapy, namely, estrogen. My mother, and other mothers of her vintage some 20 years ago, quickly decided that the side effects of estrogen replacement therapy at that time, were worse than suffering through menopause unaided. Worse, she was left with a legacy of breast cancer.

Now, with state of the art laboratories and natural source hormone precursors available, I should be spared the horrors of hormone replacement that my mother suffered. New information is available to us about thyroid metabolism also, so that we no longer have to "throw the baby out with the bath-water".

How Things Are Supposed To Work

The thyroid glands manufacture the hormone thyroxine, from the bonding of two molecules of the amino acid tyrosine, with four molecules of the mineral iodine. This molecule is called T4, because of the four iodines and is commonly referred to as the storage form of thyroid hormone. The active form of the hormone that plugs into receptor sites of the cell membrane and "turn things on" is called T3. This form has had one iodine removed by an enzyme process to free up a bonding site for the receptor.

When there is too little iodine at the cell level, a message is sent to the hypothalamus area of the brain to release more Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH), thyroid stimulating hormone, which, in turn, goes to the thyroid glands and stimulates the glands to produce more T4. The pathways involve more chemical transferals than areas shown here, simplified for easier understanding. But this is the basic premise, in a "normal" thyroid.

With Environmentally Induced Illness', many road blocks can make these normally biochemical highways nearly impassable dirt roads. Many of these roadblocks are unknown to the physicians trying to correlate your, sometimes strange, case history with your laboratory reports. Your physician may feel like "Alice in Wonderland", where nothing makes sense, or at least not from the perspective of his or her traditional medical training. That's because Environmentally Induced Illness' simply didn't exist in this near full blown capacity we experience today, when most of their textbooks were written.

Thirty years ago, when industry was burying barrels of bad stuff, burning bad stuff and dumping bad stuff in our lakes and rivers, nobody recognized that it was bad stuff. (Except, of course, some crazy and rebellious college kids back in the 60's who organized the first Earth Day, and who turned out not to be so crazy after all).

In order to understand what is happening to us with Environmentally Induced Illness, we all have to be like Alice, and learn how these relatively recent additions to our planet have made our biochemical world a more precarious place.

Looking Through The Looking Glass

Identifying these potential roadblocks in normal biochemical pathways involves using not only laboratory tests, but also symptomatology, for which we may not have developed a lab test. This is very important, as we do not have a test for every compound, antibody or intermediary metabolite in the body. In fact, the more we learn and discover, the more we find out just how much we don't know. It's a humbling encounter, or at least it should be. This makes listening to the patient all the more important, as it was in the early days of medicine, when fancy lab tests weren't yet available.

Relying exclusively on lab tests, without understanding and recognizing their limitations, especially in mapping of the superficially appearing abnormal biochemistry of Environmentally Induced Illness', can lead to "the treating and diagnosing of the little piece of paper, instead of the patient." I say "superficially appearing abnormal biochemistry" because that is exactly what it is.

When the forces driving Environmentally Induced Illness' are understood, then everything makes perfect sense again like Alice when she finally figured out how everything worked in Wonderland. I can't tell you how many times I have heard people tell me that their doctors have told them that their blood tests, including their standard thyroid profiles, are all normal and that "there is nothing wrong with them." They then ask the doctor why they feel so bad, receiving the standard reply that it must be all in their heads and write a prescription for Prozac®. Now let's look at some of the roadblocks in the thyroid biochemical highway and see how they can affect us and precipitate symptoms of Environmentally Induced Illness.

It's Not Nice To Fool Mother Nature

Starting at the top, the first ingredient in the formula for thyroxine (T4) is the amino acid tyrosine. This amino acid is also a neurotransmitter, which means that it is also involved in carrying chemical messages in the brain. Tyrosine manufacture in the body can be interfered with and nearly shut down by exposure to certain herbicides, which are commonly used in agriculture, and often abused in lawn care. In fact, homeowners are, by far, the most rampant users and abusers of herbicides in this country by not following directions in the dilution of these lawn care products.

NTBC, a common agricultural herbicide, is being given intravenously in Europe for treatment of a genetic disease called hereditary tyrosinemia, which can cause liver failure and liver cancer from overproduction of tyrosine. This treatment is being used in 12 countries around the world. The implications for those of us not afflicted by this genetic disease - depression of tyrosine production in "normal" individuals that may affect supply of raw materials for the thyroid gland, are scary. This may affect the ability of the normal person to make tyrosine in their own body. Tyrosine conventionally is thought of as one of the "non-essential amino acids" in nutrition, meaning that it does not have to come from the diet because the body can produce it. However, with continued exposure to this herbicide, tyrosine should more appropriately be listed with the "essential amino acids", as production becomes more inhibited.

Another common deficiency is iodine itself. We all know of the "Goiter Belt", but do we remember that simple law of halogen substitution that we learned in high school science? Any of the lighter and more chemically active of the halogens in that family of elements, namely, fluorine, chlorine and bromine can and will, if given half a chance, replace iodine in any and all chemical reactions. This can cause havoc in trying to make a specific hormone molecule, designed to fit into a specifically designed receptor site, like a key into a lock. This spells trouble for the thyroid, especially, since our environment is already so contaminated with chlorine, fluorine and bromine compounds.

You may have heard about some of these culprits of modern technology in DDT (an organochlorine) pesticide, and PBB, (a bromine fire retardant that was accidentally mixed into cattle feed in Michigan), and gasses used in chemical warfare, (also bromine compounds). Exposure to any of these or any other halogenated compounds can really muck up our thyroid highways, and even give false normal lab tests, as other halogen clouds, ( the electron outer orbital configuration that is common to all halogens, and responsible for their chemical natures) mistaken for iodine, are read by lab indicators.

Here let me insert a really appropriate saying; "all that glitters is not gold". Imagine the implications of this little piece of insight in consideration of everyday exposure to lower weight halogens, from bleaching of clothes, chlorinating water for drinking, languishing in heavily chlorinated and possibly brominated hot tubs and swimming pools, fluoride laden toothpaste every day and, not to be forgotten, the dioxins associated with chlorine bleached paper products that we down by the bucketsful every day from tea bags and paper coffee filters. The list goes on and on, and should send shivers down your spine.

Here it is appropriate to expound on this previously mentioned separate class of horrors, the dioxins. Yes, there are more than one. In fact there is a whole family of them, which is expanding all the time as we discover more of them. They are not commercial products, but contaminants. They are created during high temperature combustion by incinerators, during the chlorine bleaching of pulp for paper, and the manufacture of certain pesticides. (There's that chlorine again.)

We knew back in the 70's that Vietnam War veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange (a defoliant later found to be contaminated with dioxin) exhibited problems with their endocrine systems by the symptoms they had. Recent research has shown that dioxin and thyroxine are chemical cousins, and that dioxin can plug itself into receptor sites meant for thyroid hormone and block the real thing. Or, worse yet, turn things off and/or perhaps some other less-than predictable function. To date, we are still learning about the family of dioxins, and they appear to be all bad apples.

At the lab in which I worked, we had many referred to us from veteran's hospitals for various and sundry "Jungle Rots", many of which could not be cultured. It's also interesting that the horses I have worked with over the past 20 years, suffering from varied fungal infections are subject to the same low basal temps as the veterans studied. In my thorough research of body temperatures for one of my patents, I found that Nature has evolved in every species, an ideal basal temperature specific to them for a very important reason - that of protection from disease.

Each species, because of its unique metabolism, sources of foodstuffs and niche in its ecological environment, has its own inborn weaknesses, or shall we say, susceptibilities to different viral, bacterial and fungal invaders. This ideal and common temperature gives each species an adaptive advantage over its most commonly associated pathogen. It goes like this: birds, for example, may be thought to be Nature's enigma. Their basal temperature raises up to 106ºF, even outside during winter cold up in Michigan.

On first thought, this would seem like Nature goofed, expecting them to maintain such a ridiculously high temperature in such an extreme environment, with little access to food in the dead of winter. A sure script for extinction, you would think. Certainly not efficient as Nature is seen to be everywhere else - or is it? A bird's worst pathogen threat is Salmonella which bumps off at around 104ºF. So we can see that the ideal temp is just a degree to a degree and a half or so higher than the highest optimal temperature for threatening pathogens. As added protection, the body further has the ability to pump up even more heat with a fever mechanism designed to essentially "fry" these infectious critters out.

Our human ideal basal temperature of 98.6ºF also has a purpose. It is just a tad higher than the favorite from our old friends from the strep and the yeast families, namely, Candida species. Considering that most modern health practitioners rarely see 98.6ºF in routine physicals for healthy patients, many of these patients who feel feverish and come in for what they describe as acute illness often don't register such expectedly high fevers on the thermometer. The yeast and strep can be grown in the lab much better at slightly lower temperatures. Do you now begin to see the clinical picture? These lowered basal temps are predisposing us to chronic problems associated with overgrowth of yeast and strep in our bodies, which thrive at less than our ideal temps - which is, of course, the very reason that our ideal temp is just what it is. Add to this the situation with many physicians, who are forbidden from treating a person without an actual fever by their medical malpractice insurance.

Helping The Handicapped

Now we come to a common problem exhibited commonly among the hypothyroid population, that of the inability to enzymatically convert T4, the storage form of thyroid, to the biologically active form T3, in any amount necessary to be truly effective. This common scenario results in the patient consistently showing a "normal" T4, even being treated with the common synthetic T4, by the name of Synthroid® or Levothyroxine, and still feeling rotten.

For this group, changing to a natural form of desiccated thyroid, and starting with a low dosage of 30mg, increasing every two weeks by 15mg to normal basal temp, and normal range blood levels can make all the difference in the world. In fact, the generic forms of desiccated thyroid that weigh in at 65mg per grain, are what I have found to be the best choice for sufferers of Environmentally Induced Illness, beginning by cutting the 1 grains in half, with a sharp non- serrated knife. The 65mg one grains are standardized to contain exactly the same amount of T4 and T3 as the standard one grain of 60mg. The added 5mg are more of the desiccated thyroid components known to contain, as yet, unidentified factors that help with such problems as water retention and possibly other things.

A common misconception with physicians in using a natural based product over a synthetic one is that so much more of the natural one has to be used, which, in turn, appears to lower its potency and therefore, its effectiveness. This is, I repeat, a total misconception. The one grain is standardized at 38mcg T4, and 9mcg T3. This amount of T4 is equivalent to 0.38mg of a synthetic version. But is it really? Environmentally Induced Illness sufferers who have been down the roads of synthetics, myself included, firmly resound a "nay". There is just no comparison in how you feel! And isn't that the real bottom line anyway? There would be no reason to challenge the current establishment and create unnecessary havoc for ourselves if the stuff really wasn't much better, if at all, since both are equally inexpensive, as prescriptions go.

The problem that just won't seem to go away in the minds of physicians, is that, in the early days of thyroid therapy, thyroid extract wasn't able to be standardized to be the same potency, batch after batch. This was a huge problem, as it depended on the thyroid status of the pigs that the glands were extracted from. Those days are now, thank goodness, long over. Could this residual resistance be coming from the pharmaceutical manufacturers of synthetics, for which they are protecting patents? Yes, I own patents too, and I know how much work and dollars go into them. But protecting them with false advertising about questionable potencies of competing products is more of a business than an ethical policy, especially when standardization of every batch is now guaranteed by law.

Checking Basal Metabolism

Monitoring basal temperature is more important than I can ever stress in words alone. It is the very best indicator of just how things are going in your body, since energy pathways work on oxidation and the burning on food sources chemically, heat is produced as a byproduct of that burning, just as if you were burning a fire outside. This heat in the body is important not only as an indicator of the amount of fuel being burned, but also the rate at which it is burned. Heat is also necessary to speed reactions of the body up biochemically, to add "fuel to the fire" so to speak. Remember from high school chemistry that you always added heat to speed chemical reactions? You also added heat to speed melting and dissolving of a substance in a solution. Like the old saying, "love makes the world go `round", well, "heat makes the chemical world go around".

Many years ago, a now famous thyroid researcher, Dr. Broda Barnes, M.D. , PhD. , conducted batteries of exotic basal metabolism studies, and spent quantities of money trying to determine the most accurate method of diagnosing low basal metabolism and subsequent hidden hypothyroidism. After 50 years of thyroid research, longer than anyone has ever studied the subject, his conclusion was that basal temperature tests were the most accurate (and by far the most economical!) of all. This is so simple! It even takes into account interfering roadblocks mentioned above, which Dr. Barnes did not have knowledge of back then. This further attests to this man's true genius, and it is fitting that progressive practitioners who continued to follow him named the test after him.

This test is performed by taking an axial (underarm) temperature first thing in the morning when you wake up, but before you get out of bed. These temperatures are recorded each day and correlated to menstrual cycles for women. In my nearly 20 years of research, I have seen very few "normal" axial temps, (mostly around 97.6ºF anymore) and even less so where I live, in the infamous " Michigan I-75 corridor" so noted for its terrible health statistics, toxic dumps and industrial pollution problems. In fact, body temperatures are going down more all the time. It used to be that a temperature in the 96's range was rare, now 95's and even 94's are becoming more common. I see low temps in animals as well, correlating them with known "normals" for their species'. In every case, the condition can be also associated with symptoms of the collection of ailments that I have identified as Environmentally Induced Illness.

I have carried the Barnes Basal Temperature Test to a higher degree still. Correlating these axial temps with oral temps, with certain food preferences that will fuel energy pathways in most people, with food intolerances, and very importantly, with autoimmune disease, particularly that of Hashimoto's autoimmune thyroiditis. This is, perhaps, the most commonly underestimated, most overlooked, most misunderstood and most totally ignored "roadblock" in the thyroid pathway. Basal metabolism is, thus, probably the most significant contribution to Environmentally Induced Illness that I have found. It also ties into the halogen and dioxin "roadblocks" as well. Let's examine why this is the medical orphan that it is.

When The Body Doesn't Like Itself

The word "autoimmune" means that the body does not recognize its own tissues as being its own, and proceeds to attack them as it would any other foreign threat, such as a toxin, virus, bacteria, etc. To understand how such an important self-preserving function as the immune system could go "haywire", we must understand just how our immune system works. Again, let me describe this in the simplest way for ease of comprehension. Then, with this knowledge, and the new knowledge of driving forces behind Environmentally Induced Illness, it will be clear that the immune system has not gone "haywire" after all, but is just doing its job as it is supposed to do. It's just that some of the "roadblocks" to normal biochemical metabolism, produced by 20th century technology, to which our body has not had time to adapt, are proving to be formidable foes indeed.

The center of most immune functions is the thymus gland. Not to be confused with the thyroid glands situated on either side of the neck, which we have just spent a great deal of time discussing, the thymus gland sits behind the breastbone. It is responsible for "training" so to speak, of certain white blood cells previously made in the bone marrow. This is akin to the armed forces selecting their best recruits for specialized training for the special forces like the Rangers or the Green Berets. They give them specialized training for special missions. Some specialize in explosives, some are rescue personnel, and some assassins. The thymus gland does this kind of training too for specialization jobs for these white blood cells; let's imagine two scenarios that could put the protectees of both the thymus and these "special forces" into double jeopardy.

The first scenario is simple outnumbering. This is easy to understand. Too many of the bad guys can wear down even the most sophisticated of troops. On the biochemical model, this could come about by a shift in the environment or ecosystem, which allowed a much greater exposure to one or more pathogens. Diseases such as these are referred to as "dose related". Our common cold is such a disease. Cold viral particles are everywhere, but some "catch" a cold and others don't. Or at least not at the same time. Some are exposed to greater amounts of viral particles when someone who is actively infected sneezes on us. Thus, a simple case of the immune system being outnumbered.

But what about the differences in the strengths of the individual's "armies"? Doesn't that account for anything, you ask? It certainly does! And now we add another consideration, that of susceptibility of the host. Yes, all pathogens have different strengths of invasive ability, but the door of the host must invariably open for them to gain entrance in the first place. Even in the most severe epidemics throughout history, there were always some who survived, and some who did not get sick at all. If this were not the case, all species would have been wiped out the first time some bad bug came along.

Now we come to the second scenario. This involves an indestructible enemy. Or I should say, temporarily indestructible, so far as our present evolution and sophistication of our immune force armies are concerned. Simply being outclassed, so to speak.

An example of this scenario would be the past situation in Bosnia. The opposition forces sent in to rid the city of the menace of snipers occupying some of the buildings, had a virtually impossible task. In the process, they had to virtually destroy the buildings themselves to get them. When our immune system identifies some foreign protein or element or other chemical compound that it knows does not belong there, it is stimulated to attack. The foreign element may be a separate entity in itself, a relatively easy target to search and destroy. But what if the enemy is only half foreign, or part foreign? What then? How do we get the snipers out who are actually living in the building with the permission of the owners, and even being supported and cared for by the unsuspecting owners? The trained assassins have no choice but to sacrifice the innocent but ignorant and unsuspecting owners, for the sake of the many others that need to be protected. ( I did not say that this was fair, I only report to you what actually happens.)

The best of assassins are trained not to feel, but to do their job "come hell or high water". Armies of the immune system do just that, and very well, I might add. So tissues and organs harboring foreign invaders, from all corners of the chemical and biological worlds, are attacked repeatedly and are eventually destroyed by the body's own forces in an effort to rid it of "snipers" who do nothing but muck up the biochemical pathways. Eventually, the immune "armies" tires in their efforts to eliminate an indestructible foe, and fall prey to more attackers and invaders, succumbing to every bug that comes along, or, worse yet, running out of good training personnel for the special forces. When this happens, as would happen if the budgets were cut, awesome assassins would be created, but there would be no one to teach them which uniforms to shoot at. A high percentage of allies would be senselessly lost. So too with the body, on a nutritional budget cut, common with today's Standard American Diet (aptly referred to as "SAD".)

Our thymus is not able to monitor the training very well of its premier assassins, to eliminate and weed out the improperly trained ones. These renegades then set up their own training facilities, cloning themselves and passing down the errors of their ways. They orient their attacks to different specific tissues and organs of the body, but all originate in the thymus gland, the seat of immune function. This describes "autoimmune disease".

A Rose By Any Other Name, Is Still A Rose

So how do we medically describe this sad play of events? Traditionally, we have named the diseases after the targeted tissues or organs. This was useful because of the different sets of syndromes and symptoms that were elicited by the partial incapacitation and inflammation of the targeted tissues or organs. Some of the more common targets for autoimmune responses and their corresponding names for the "diseases" are as follows:

TARGET "DISEASE"

Pancreas - Type 1 (often called "childhood") Diabetes

Thyroid - Hashimoto's thyroiditis

Connective Tissue and other systems - Systemic Lupus Erythematosis (SLE )

Skeletal muscles - Fibromyalgia

Myelin sheath of nerves - Multiple Sclerosis ( MS )

Joints - Rheumatoid Arthritis

You notice I have put the word "disease" in quotations. This is because these manifestations are not truly separate "diseases" per say. They are all a result of a weakened and or faulty thymus gland, and are really only different manifestations of one disease. Traditional medicine still calls them different diseases, however, and it was thought to be so until very recently, when knowledge of the importance of the thymus gland was discovered. In traditional medicine, diseases are described and identified by the combination of symptoms and manifestations called "syndromes".

New Age medicine, like New Age everything else, seeks to integrate into the whole, showing how everything is connected to everything else, and that virtually nothing ever really stands alone. This style of thinking is the foundation of the holistic approach to medicine, which is so popular, and I might add, so effective, especially in treating conditions like Environmentally Induced Illness. This is the direction in which medicine is evolving ,and it is a most welcome thing. We have learned, finally, that the biological package that we call a "living entity" is not just a collection of its parts, like the parts of a car, that function independently from one another.

All tissues work together to bring about the healthy existence of the organism. Some even sacrifice themselves for others to provide nutritional support in times of crisis or life threatening situations. You certainly don't see this in a car! There have been times, when I thought about this, cruising down the expressway far from the next exit on an empty gas tank. I wished, then, that the oil and water would automatically kick in to the temporarily empty gas tank, but no such luck.

Our progressive physicians are finally realizing that they are not simply "medical mechanics", but really step-in "orchestra directors", trying to find out who is playing the wrong notes in the symphony!

Incidentally, information provided to you here is not commonly known to most physicians, not even to most of those who work so closely with this subject on a daily basis. So, in a way, you will be more knowledgeable in these subjects than the physicians you consult with. Please be patient with them. They do not have the time to pursue a 10 hour a day course of study for 30 years that it took me to comprise this research. They are too busy in their offices seeing increasing numbers of patients, and their increasing numbers of complaints. This schedule is certainly enough to frazzle anybody. They are practicing medicine with the body of knowledge that they learned in medical school, and this information, for the most part, wasn't in their books.

Today, it is only found in international research books, so expensive ($150.00 to $300.00 per book on average) that medical libraries only purchase one, and for reference only, not to be checked out. My favorite haunt, the University of Michigan Medical Library in Ann Arbor, where I began my research for publication some thirty years ago as a very sick student, still invites me, though.

Scanning shelves of well-filled stacks of recent acquisitions gives me further ideas on books to order for my own reference library, since it is not practical to copy an entire book that cannot be checked out. You would be surprised at the information known up to 100 years ago that has been lost. I am now presenting to you some of this" lost" information as "new", simply because many patients and health care practitioners are just now hearing it for the first time.

Resistance To Thyroid Hormone

This is a newly recognized condition in the body that occurs when there is an adequate level of active thyroid hormones circulating in the blood, as measured by the standard thyroid profile, but the patient still exhibits symptoms characteristic of hypothyroidism, or low thyroid activity. Environmental chemicals known as xenohormones, and more specifically xenoestrogens, (as of today there are over 70,000) are known to interfere with thyroid metabolism in the body, creating this syndrome of normal thyroid blood levels with hypothyroid symptoms. Specific detox of these chemicals while supporting normal basal chemistry has been shown to free thyroid metabolism in the body, relieving many symptoms of hypothyroidism and even normalizing blood profiles. Autoantibodies decline as well. See Nutritional Restructuring Program in the human health portion of our web site.

Many obese, clinically depressed, severely allergic, chronically fatigued, etc., patients suffer from this problem and have slipped through the cracks of conventional medicine for years. With the advent of the Prozac generation of medicine, your "response" to the symptoms may be addressed, but the disease process still goes on.

As many others before me have said, clinical depression, PMS, obesity, food cravings etc., are NOT Prozac® deficiencies. Mammalian bodies do not produce Prozac® naturally. These are problems with physiology and many are responses to twentieth century environmental chemicals. It is interesting to note that behavioral, physiological, social and self-control systems break down in a society when environmental considerations are ignored.

The industrial revolution had its problems, and Rome, itself, fell and its power disintegrated when ruling classes no longer could rule, due to lead poisoning they suffered from drinking from leaden goblets furnished through leaden plumbing. Of course, only the rich could afford such luxuries. Aren't they the ones who exert controls on lesser classes in societies? Nero probably wasn't the only one who fiddled while Rome burned.

Back to our original topic, the more we understand physiological responses to environmental contaminants, the more we can see that our body acts in a very logical way. Then we can research ways to protect and eliminate these foreign substances from the body. After all, that is where it is all truly at, besides trying to clean up the environment and prevent exposure in the first place.

We simply do not have enough time to sacrifice generations of individuals the way Nature does, in adaptations for survival of the fittest, now do we? This is what Hitler had in mind in trying to create the perfect race, eliminating all the imperfections from the gene pool. Understanding the body's physiological responses to anything it is not used to is essential in trying to heal the body's disease process. When these responses are understood, like Alice traveling through Wonderland, everything becomes logical.

Seeing The Forest Through The Trees

Incorporating all of this new information is crucial in interpreting the truly limited data we can acquire from our current laboratory tests. As mentioned previously, we don't have tests for everything and probably never will have, at least in our lifetime. So it would be a mistake to try to categorize every individual patient, each with his or her own collection of symptoms and syndromes and different exposures, and to forget - their own set of genetics, into a "one size fits all".

It has been found that chemical compounds, viruses, bacterial infections and whatever else you can think of as foreign to the body, can set off an "autoimmune "reaction. It has also been discovered that these culprits can also cause genes to activate that normally would not. Add to this list nutritional deficiencies as well. Shocked? Well, researchers who worked with cats generations ago found, quite by accident, that the genetic anomalies resulting from nutritional deficiencies in only one generation, took a full three generations to correct on a good nutritional program. It makes you think twice about what we are putting into our and our children's bodies. See Defusing the Genetic Time Bomb.

The current procedure for evaluating thyroid metabolism in the body is to first screen for a standard thyroid profile which measures circulating T3 (biologically active form) and T4 ( storage form), plus a TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) . What happens to be circulating, however, often is not able to be biologically active, or can't plug into the receptor sites to do its job efficiently. Even though it is currently thought that this profile covers just about everything, you can see from new information being presented that it doesn't.

It would be much more representative if there were no "roadblocks" to consider, and if everybody's thyroid followed the rules we think must apply, but in Environmentally Induced Illness, The "Alice in Wonderland" principle applies. You have to know the rules of the kingdom to understand the logic of how things work. Then the light of day shines down and things suddenly make sense.

Simply relying on one test like TSH to gauge the activity or dosage of thyroid replacement, can miss a lot of pertinent information, which can make a dramatic difference in how people feel (not to mention losing lots of business for physicians who treat these victims). If the thyroid had a normal ability to respond in the first place, then we wouldn't be facing certain of the thyroid metabolism problems.

We have to use as many of the testing abilities that we have, however, we must look at them with different eyes, now armed with the new information in Environmentally Induced Illness. And, word spreads like wildfire for those physicians who are progressive enough to dare to consider the possibility. They quickly become swamped by people, that I or other successful patients, have referred.

I am always searching for new doctors to work with because of the complaints that will shortly come from patients, about one, two and three hour waits in the lobby, and three to five month waits to get in to see those doctors, once the word is out. It is my hope, that, with this site and my educational materials, more physicians will become interested in helping these people, so more will take a more active role in achieving their own state of health. This process will relieve the physicians of a great amount of responsibility which their patients should rightly assume.

There really is no little pill that will cure all, and allow us to abdicate responsibility for ourselves. Hopefully, as you read this page it will give you a sound background so that you can provide more pertinent information to your physicians to better help you. Then help the process to attain health, yourself, by taking responsibility for adjustments in unhealthy lifestyles such as smoking , eating and exercise. In fact, I make this point right up front with my clientele, that I cannot work with them unless they are actively making these responsible adjustments. One can be lead to the right road, but it is unfair to ask to be carried down it.