The American Thyroid Association prolongs the suffering of patients with autoimmune thyroid damage whose TSH has not yet risen to >10 mIU/L or their Free T4 has not yet fallen below reference. (1, 2) As I will outline in this post, medicine’s inability to distinguish “subclinical hypothyroidism” from true hypothyroidism stems from the misguided policy of dismissing Free T3 testing in hypothyroidism and overreliance on the TSH test. Part of the problem is that medicine is handicapped by the incorrect assumption that any level of Free T3 that falls within the statistical reference range is acceptable to the individual human …