Thyroid Balance

As the saying goes, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.”  Sometimes, practicing out of the conventional medicine mainstream, you can feel like someone’s out to get you, or at least that you’re Alice in Wonderland.  Nowhere is this more obvious than when treating chronic Lyme disease in one of […]

Two related events marked this week’s trip to visit my parents in Boca Raton.  My father proudly showed me his plummeting cholesterol and LDL cholesterol (termed “Lousy” cholesterol by his doctor to distinguish it from HDL “Happy” cholesterol).  And, my mother showed me the stock market drop that Schering Plough had taken that morning.  The […]

As I’ve written about before, vitamin D  is the current sexy vitamin.  In fact, it’s probably not a vitamin at all but a hormone that controls much of our metabolic and immune function.  New information on the wondrous web of vitamin D activities comes out all the time.What fascinated me about this article in the journal […]

Every couple of years my patients go to the pharmacy to refill their prescriptions, only to have the same rumor gets whispered to them: Armour thyroid is going off the market.  It’s happening again.In the past four months, it has been increasingly difficult for patients to get 120 mg (2 grain) and 15 mg (1/4 […]

 In the late 1970s I was Medical Director of the Marco Polo Rest Home in East Boston.  Anxious to improve the health (as I saw it) of the residents, I contracted with Quebrada Bakery (which coincidentally now lies down the street from my office).  Twice a week, they would deliver whole grain bread to the […]

It happened again this year.  The Thanksgiving table got cleared and the dishes done and immediately the over 30s crowd sunk deep into the living room couch (there is a very long couch at my folks’ house) and started the evening dozing.  It took the promise of decaf and multiple desserts (gluten-free for me, various […]

Here’s the story, repeated countless times in my office over my 32 years of practicing medicine. It goes like this:
“My doctor found that I had thyroid disease, he put me on Synthroid (or other thyroid medicine) and told me the numbers were better. But I still feel tired, sluggish, bloated, constipated and depressed!”
Another version:
“I have […]

Another study has confirmed the relationship between thyroid function and mood. In this study, reported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 2/3 of 65 patients diagnosed with depression from Bipolar Disorder have “sub-optimal” thyroid levels. These patients with low-normal thyroid levels took an average of 4 months longer to respond to their depression […]

Five absolutely baffling things said to my patients by other physicians:

To a patient with persistent stomach problems, said by a gastroenterologist: “Take the Nexium”. Don’t worry what you eat; food doesn’t make a difference in stomach problems.”
To a patient who had just completed an unsuccessful very toxic chemotherapy program, and was being offered another toxic […]

Things to blame chocolate cravings on….
Excuse #1: Gut Microbes Swiss researchers at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, recruited men - some who craved chocolate and some reportedly indifferent to its charms - then fed them all the same diets for five days. Urinary analyses found that the chocolate-lovers had a distinctly recognizable metabolic […]