By: Roger Zotti
Janie A. Bowthrope, M.Ed., author, Stop the Thyroid
Madness: A Patient Revolution against Decades of
Inferior Thyroid Treatment (Laughing Grape Publishing), believes
“there may have been some bad treatments going on for hypothyroid
patients for fifty years. Namely, we’ve been put on a kind of medication that
has not worked for us and left us with continuing thyroid symptoms, and
we’ve also been dosed with a lab test, called TSH [thyroid-stimulating
hormone], that has kept us sick.”
Her book is written from the pain of personal experience. “I got so bad I
was going to apply for social security disability,” she said. Resigned to stay
home for the rest of her life, she began doing research on the Internet and
discovered “there was a different medication out there all along” called
Natural Desiccated Thyroid— which “gives you exactly what your
own thyroid would be giving you.”
Janie started taking it, “and though I wasn’t optimal yet, my life completely
turned around. It was nothing short of a life-changing miracle.” At the same
time, she realized that “there are millions of people on thyroid medications
[that don’t work]. I didn’t want to see them suffer, so I began a journey to
educate them.”
Janie started a Yahoo group called Natural Thyroid Hormones: “On
it we began comparing notes, and it became clear to us we have a
worldwide problem.” Soon Janie realized such a group
“was not big enough to let the world know what I believe
has been a scandal going on since the sixties about thyroid treatment, and I
was propelled to create the Stop the Thyroid Madness movement.”
Janie’s chronicles her life story in the Introduction of the revised edition
of her book. (To read the entire introduction, visit
www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/my-story/.) When she was 27—
after her second child’s birth—“I had eight illnesses in
nine months.” Two years later, after her third child was born, “the same
chronic illness scenario” recurred. At 31, what she describes as “a dubious
diagnosis of ‘borderline hypothyroid’ was discovered.” Put on Synthroid,
her TSH dropped to normal, but her condition didn’t improve.
For the next 17 years, “while on Synthroid and Levoxyl,” Janie’s
living hell continued. Though she spent huge sums of money seeking a
solution, “I was always ‘adequately treated’ with thyroxine (T4-only
medication) with a ‘target’ TSH.” During this time she saw numerous
doctors “and tested for every condition imaginable.” Nothing worked.
Then in 2002, unable to do much except sit for hours at her computer, her
extensive research began: “It became clear my problem was my thyroid and
being on an inferior medication called T4-only meds…and held hostage to
an inadequate lab called the TSH.”
Janie’s informational thyroid site began a few months later. Its goal is
to make patients aware of Natural Desiccated Thyroid’s existence. The
site and her book are, she emphasized, “Dedicated to the millions of thyroid
patients all over the world, struggling to feel better…in the face of
well-meaning but ignorant medical treatment with T4 meds…
