Health care system
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2012 ATA thyroid guidelines ask for clinicians’ independent judgment

In recent years, Canadian and other international thyroid guidelines have enacted local policies that restrict thyroid therapy and testing, often citing the American Thyroid Association (ATA) & American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists’ (AACE) guidelines in 2012. What most “guideline policers” fail to notice is that the 2012 ATA-AACE’s guidelines begin with a disclaimer against their…
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Thank you, good thyroid doctors!

Today is Canadian Thanksgiving Day. Today all thyroid patients in Canada and all over the world can reflect with gratitude toward all our good thyroid doctors past and present. To guide reflection and thanks, I’d like to outline 10 of the important things good thyroid doctors know and do. We all know there is no…
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LifeLabs BC handout reveals thyroid testing policy failure

This week (as of October 4, 2019), a thyroid patient from British Columbia posted an image of a piece of paper handed to her at a LifeLabs laboratory. LifeLabs BC was using this paper leaflet to explain to her why “Free T3 and Free T4 will not be tested when the TSH is in reference…
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The loss of thyroid clinical knowledge from Werner & Ingbar’s The Thyroid

Decades ago, a lot more doctors knew how thyroid hormone levels influenced all organs and tissues’ health. It wasn’t all about the influence of thyroid hormones on the TSH. It was more about the influence of truly adequate thyroid hormone levels on real health outcomes. A lot more doctors learned and understood that if thyroid…
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2014 ATA therapy guidelines: 5. Research

This post continues my series of paraphrases of Jonklaas et al’s 2014 guidelines that I left unfinished weeks ago. Posts in this series: 2014 ATA Thyroid therapy guidelines: 1. Levothyroxine 2014 ATA Thyroid therapy guidelines: 2. Ethics 2014 ATA Therapy guidelines: 3. Desiccated thyroid 2014 ATA Therapy guidelines: 4. Using Synthetic T3 2014 ATA therapy…
