Hypothyroidism and Desiccated Thyroid: Medical Journals

Purpose of this compilation

To show via excerpts from medical journals that:

• Using desiccated thyroid to treat hypothyroidism is necessary for some patients to achieve wellness
• Any negative reputation that desiccated thyroid may have with some doctors stems from false or dated information and is not based on fact

See also the links in the right column, as well as the T3: References and TSH: References sections.

1. "Thyroid Insufficiency. Is Thyroxine the Only Valuable Drug?" (Belgium, 2001)

Under treatment with NDT [natural desiccated thyroid] the mean score of symptoms dropped from 10.72 (±3.17) to 3.6 (±2.6). [p. 162]

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We had...the opportunity to meet hypothyroid patients who had been treated elsewhere with T4 and were still complaining of hypothyroid symptoms. These patients improved with the combined T3 + T4 treatment (NDT).

We also had the opportunity to meet patients, suitably stabilized under NDT, who had been taken off NDT by their GP and reinstated on T4, who presented with the same symptoms as before. Renewed treatment with NDT corrected the situation.

Improvement under NDT treatment cannot be attributed simply to a placebo effect. A placebo effect rarely exceeds a 25% improvement. In this study the improvement range averaged 69.15% and varied between 53.6% and 84.5% according to the symptom examined, as shown in Fig. 2. [p. 163]

2. "50 years of commercially motivated fraud relating to thyroid" (US, 1999)

Older practitioners recognized that it [synthetic thyroxine] was not metabolically the same as the traditional [desiccated] thyroid substance, especially for women and seriously hypothyroid patients, but marketing, and its influence on medical education, led to the false idea that the standard Armour thyroid USP wasn't properly standardized, and that certain thyroxine products were, despite the fact that both of these ideas were shown to be false.

3. "Treatment with thyroid hormone" (1989)

...practitioners who continue to use thyroid extract despite criticism from their colleagues do so for a good reason: it sometimes works better than other thyroid preparations. I frequently see patients receiving long-term levothyroxine sodium therapy who, despite supposedly appropriate treatment, still complain of fatigue, depression, cold extremities, dry skin, or other symptoms. After changing to an equivalent (or sometimes slightly less than equivalent) dosage of desiccated thyroid, these symptoms improve considerably....

We should not automatically assume that diiodotyrosine [T2] is physiologically inactive, merely because we have not yet discovered what it does. Nor should we reject the possibility that other, as yet unidentified, substances present in thyroid extract have therapeutic value. Physicians who have not routinely prescribed thyroid extract are not qualified to label it obsolete.