Has anyone else on this forum read the book Hypothyroidism Type 2 by Dr. Mark Starr?
I am reading it now and it is a very interesting book. Starr is a medical doctor who has a
pain and sports medicine clinic in Arizona. He noticed that many of his pain patients displayed
hypothyroid symptoms and when he started treating them for hypothyroidism most of them
greatly improved.
So based on his experience and research, especially the work of thyroid doctors such as Broda
Barnes, Hermann Zondek, Eugene Hertoghe, etc, he wrote this book and as he describes it:
This book is a compilation of the overwhelming evidence that not only is the modern
laboratory testing used to diagnose hypothyroidism completely inadequate, but the
current treatment for the illness is equally lacking in efficacy.
Essentially he differentiates between hypothyroidism type 1 which is a failure of the thyroid
gland to produce enough thyroid hormone necessary to maintain "normal" blood levels of those
hormones. This type of hypothyroidism can be detected with thyroid blood tests. However he
believes that there is a hypothyroidism type 2 that he defined as "peripheral resistance to
thyroid hormones at the cellular level" and since it is not due to a lack of thyroid hormones it
cannot be detected with blood tests.
It is very interesting and he cites a number of research and his experience treating his own
patients to bolster his theory. If you are interested in finding out more about it, here are
a couple of sites:
http://www.townsendletter.com/Dec2008/hypothyroid1208.htm
http://www.21centurymed.com/
There are so many people who have hypothyroid symptoms but their blood tests come back
as in the normal range, I really wish that the mainstream medical community would at least
consider the possibility.