HPT axis
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Stop spreading the unscientific myth about the normal T4:T3 ratio!
Sigh. Just sigh. Even some of our best thyroid patient advocates can unknowingly share misinformation about thyroid therapy. Mary Shomon’s thyroid articles on Verywell.com are usually to be trusted. But yesterday I was saddened to see that an article supposedly authored by Mary Shomon was spreading unscientific myths about “normal” thyroid secretion ratios being 13:1…
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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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Individual thyroid ranges are far narrower than lab ranges
We’ve known since at least 2002 that being within “normal range” is never good enough when it comes to thyroid hormone blood tests. An important set of four articles has taught us that each human being has an optimal range for TSH, Total T4 and Total T3 that is far less the width of the…
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A Dialogue with Utiger: T3-based thyroid therapy over-suppresses TSH
Robert Utiger, M.D. (1931-2008) is well known in endocrinology as the father of the TSH test. Despite his trust in the TSH test, in his publications he acknowledged that TSH behaved very unnaturally in response to T3 levels in blood while dosing T3 thyroid medication. What Utiger discovered in the 1970s and 1980s about the…
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Overreliance on TSH is a thyroid therapy policy that fails to detect its own failure
In standard T4 thyroid therapy, TSH normalization is so easy to achieve that it is almost impossible to fail. First, TSH out of range is the judge of an initial DIAGNOSIS. Next, normal TSH becomes the sole TARGET of therapy. Finally, normal TSH becomes the sole JUDGE of therapy success. This is faulty reasoning. There…