Clinical guidelines are supposed to promote patient health and encourage evidence-based medicine and physician discernment, but thyroid guidelines aim to restrict testing, restrict medication, and prevent any change in therapy practices. Indeed, the enforcement of restrictions appears to be the main purpose of local and international thyroid therapy guidelines today. These thyroid therapy guidelines, and national guidelines that derive from them like those in the UK by the British Thyroid Association (BTA), are being used oppressively and punitively against clinicians by medical peers who police their application. Guidelines as persuasive vs. obligatory John Midgley has written this in a 2019 …