Treating Thyroid Patients Like Children - Dr. Malcolm Kendrick

CSARdiver

One of the finest articles I have found explaining the shift in treatment of thyroid disorders.

https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2015/05/01/treating-thyroid-patients-like-children/

I have been a great admirer of Dr. Kendrick and especially love the reverence to the late and great Dr. Gordon Skinner.

Fuzzipeg

Thank you. None of this is new to me. How does one enable common sense to prevail?

CSARdiver

Fuzzipeg wrote: »

Thank you. None of this is new to me. How does one enable common sense to prevail?

Common sense is remarkably uncommon, especially to academic institutions. This is where I prefer a capitalistic model. Bottom line is the medical community is failing to meet the needs of the consumer however has no means to go to an alternate vendor due to regulatory restrictions. Dr. Kendrick is trying to highlight this fact. Dr. Skinner was demonized by the establishment simply because he dared question the answers.

I find it fascinating the susceptibility of medical professionals and scientists to fall into the herd mentality. None of this is new, but shows how easy it is to fall into this trap of consensus thought. I also found this in the comments below and find this absolutely true:

On my Way to Being a Scientist
Thomas M Schofield

I knew I wanted to be a scientist when I realized that science was not about the truth. I know that this statement requires some clarification; it might help if I told you how I came to this realization. There is nothing particularly special about my story except, perhaps, for how it began.

In the early 2000s, I was at work at a recruitment company in London when I got a phone call. It was my mother: she told me that my sister had had a brain haemorrhage, and was critically ill. I ran home, packed a bag and took a train to the hospital, arriving just as my sister came out of surgery. She was in a bad way, the doctors said. The operation had been complicated and there was no way of knowing if she would ever wake up. She did not regain consciousness for many days.

I stayed at the hospital for the entire time, and sat by her bed through the days and nights. I knew that I wasn’t doing anything useful, but I couldn’t sleep and the hospital room seemed to be as good a place to be awake as any. I spent most of that time thinking. I was upset. Why could no one tell us what was going on? I assumed that some people, somewhere, knew a great deal about the brain and how it worked. I thought that the problem must have to do with the distribution of the relevant information — if there were more neurologists and psychologists, then more could be done for people who were ill. It seemed to me that the job that I had been doing for five years was not as important as this sort of aspiration. I was earning good money, but I had started to feel that the job was repetitive and boring. And now I began to feel that it was rather a pointless thing to be doing with my life.
Change of tack

My sister began to get better, and after about two weeks she was allowed to go home. I went back to my life in London, relieved but determined. I decided to take a master’s degree in neuropsychology, with the aim of becoming a clinical psychologist. But I did not become a clinical psychologist. I became a scientist instead — by accident. How did this happen?

There are four stages on the road to becoming a scientist, and I remember them all.

To begin with, you simply want someone in the know to tell you the truth. You read textbooks and attend lectures, and are overawed by the immensity of it all but struck by how neatly everything fits together. You do a few simple experiments in your lab, and you get exactly the results that are expected. There seem to be answers to all of your questions, and you feel that if you read enough textbooks and attend enough lectures then you will understand all there is to understand. This is the stage I was at when I finished my first undergraduate degree, and what I was expecting to find when I went back to do my master’s.
Conflicting stories

The second stage begins when you realize that scientists frequently disagree with each other about what is true. This stage is disturbing, and is caused by taking the business of writing essays and papers seriously. Typically, you will be given a question along the lines of, “What function does Broca’s area of the brain serve?” To answer it, you start by reading a long paper by Professor X, who sets out his theory in convincing detail. You think, “Of course, how obvious. It controls the processing of syntax — how could anyone think otherwise?” Next, you read an equally long and detailed review paper by Professor Y, who takes a contrary view, and you think, “Hmm. Professor Y makes some very good points. Perhaps Professor X doesn’t know what he’s talking about after all”. And then on you go to Professor Z, and utter confusion. One of them must be telling the truth, but which one? So you write your essay, describing the contrasting theories of X, Y and Z and conclude: “Opinion is divided — more research is necessary.” This is the stage I was at when I finished my master’s degree. I decided that maybe I could do some of that research, so I started a PhD.

” If I am lucky, I will spend the rest of my life finding new things that I will never quite be able to explain. ”

The third stage of becoming a scientist begins with the realization that nobody knows the truth. This stage is absolutely terrifying, and is caused by doing research. When I started running real experiments, collecting data and testing my ideas against those data, I came to realize that things were not as clear cut as they had seemed from the papers that I had been reading. Sometimes things did not work out as predicted by any of the theories that I knew about. There was always something that could not be explained. I found this troubling, and began to doubt my work. Luckily, I had a very supportive supervisor.

When you start doing science at the PhD level, you begin to work and socialize with real scientists — occasionally the very scientists who wrote the papers that so impressed you during your studies. Once you become a professional scientist, these people are usually happy to let you in on an important trade secret: nobody is really sure of anything. A scientific paper is just one cut and polished facet of a bigger, uglier stone. Behind the beautiful graphs and whip-smart arguments lies a tangled mass of doubts, conjectures and anomalies. Pulling any loose thread is usually enough to make the paper lose its shape. The most important thing my supervisor taught me was that this is not a bad thing.
Better and better

Some scientists are lucky enough to pass through a fourth stage. This is when you realize that science is not about finding the truth at all, but about finding better ways of being wrong. The best scientific theory is not the one that reveals the truth — that is impossible. It is the one that explains what we already know about the world in the simplest way possible, and that makes useful predictions about the future. When I accepted that I would always be wrong, and that my favourite theories are inevitably destined to be replaced by other, better, theories — that is when I really knew that I wanted to be a scientist.

A theory can never be perfect: the best it can be is better than the theory that went before. I want to come up with better theories about how the brain works. If I can do this, then someone else can use my ideas to come up with something even better. As theories improve, we are able to make more useful predictions about how things might work in the real world, and from those predictions we can develop better treatments. I want to be part of this progression. This means that, if I am lucky, I will spend the rest of my life finding new things that I will never quite be able to explain.

So there it is. My interest in the brain is pragmatic, rather than curious. I never really wanted to become a scientist. But I became one eventually, because I had to.
Author information

Thomas M. Schofield was a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at New York University. He died in 2010 in a bus accident in Colombia. Writer Stephen S. Hall helped to edit this essay on his behalf.

Fuzzipeg

I didn't read all the comments, I'd not come to this. (lacked concentration).

All scientists are human. Group think, affects us all at some time or another. Even the scientist who designed the tsh testing believes his science has been subverted by "group think", others seeing tsh as the only answer. Its a brave person like, Gordon Skinner, who is able to think outside the box or was "Old School", to be condemned. I was thinking of consulting him, for all he was at the other end of the country.

The problem, I was unable to travel to his clinic. Chemical sensitivity/salicylate intolerance/histamine intolerance all made mixing with people, travelling, staying in public accommodation impossible. All these symptoms and others developed because I had a long term exposure to thyroid antibodies etc. I was a very long way down. Now I've eliminate yeast overgrowth, re-balanced my digestive biome, used low histamine probiotics to replace microbes lost to historic antibiotic use, as well as having taken copious amounts of dietary supplements in the last 11 months. I'm confident, I can now probably go anywhere without issue. I'm taking tentative steps to prove this. I'll get the festive season out of the way, perfumes are always worse at this time of year, I will find a concert or play to go to, then I'll know I really do have my life back. Antibody etc test results awaited. This outcome is mind-blowing, its so very new for me. I'd just like more stamina, please.

I think, Dr Skinner would have been open-minded to the new understanding of why the ndt or t3 treatments he used worked. He'd embrace the growing immunological understanding of the role of microbes play in the bodies ability to convert t4 to t3 among many other processes including their role in all autoimmune diseases. Unlike those in the main stream health system today who are hog tied to the recent past.

Duchy82

Brilliant insightful article, well worth the read