Forgotten Foundations of Thyroid Knowledge
© Edna Kyrie
"Peter Medawar, Nobel prize-winner for his contributions to transplantation observed that...the real 'science' in medicine is the thorough understanding of the nature of a medical problem that comes from talking at length to the patient, and performing a physical examination to elicit the relevant signs of disease. From this old fashioned...style of medicine it is usually possible to infer precisely what is wrong in 90 percent of cases. By contrast, the technological gizmos and arcane tests that pass for the 'science' of medicine can frequently be quite misleading. The logic of Medawar's argument leads to the playful paradox that the more tests that doctors can do, the less 'scientific' (in the sense of generating reliable knowledge) medicine becomes." from The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by James Le Fanu 1999 Little, Brown and company 253
Perhaps that reasoning helps to explain why thyroid never achieved more status in mainstream medicine. Medicine has always gone in fits and starts claiming one idea as gospel and later rejecting it as untrue. Which ideas are taken up by the system is often the result of pure chance.
Following is a brief selection of people whose work in the area of thyroid research has impressed me greatly. IF ONLY their ideas and research had been listened to and built upon by more of the medical profession.
- 1915 -- In a lecture presented to the International Surgical Congress, Eugene Hertoghe argued that the slighter forms of thyroid deficiency were being missed by most doctors. At a time when most doctors were using thyroid extract to treat specific symptoms, Mr. Hertoghe realized that the thyroid was deficient and that deficiency needed to be corrected. He had the courage to search for former patients whom he had realized were suffering from low thyroid and treat them.
Mr. Hertoghe published his ideas when World War I was devastating many European countries, a generation of potentital researchers was wiped out. Perhaps the anti-Hun feelings during and after the war led to a dismissal of the research of many Germanic physicians and scientists. The Spanish flu epidemic was the focus of medical attention immediately after the war.
- 1939 -- G.K. Warton published Unrecognized Hypothyroidism in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. He proposed that the best test for hypothyroidism was giving small doses of thyroid supplement to reverse the symptoms. The list of specific symptoms suggesting thyroid problems included arthritis and migraine.
"If we do not learn from the past, we remain in the infancy of knowledge." Cicero
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