The Future of Life under ObamaCare

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand." Milton Friedman

Now that ObamaCare is the law of the land, let me tell you what to expect from your government mandated death panel. You see, I was sentenced to a death panel back in 2008. I have severe under/un-treated Hypothyroidism. Or as the medical community now calls it, Middle-aged White Fat Chick Complaint. Three doctors in a row told me to get off my ass and work out more and I’d lose weight. One even said, "hey, honey, when you get old you get fat. Deal with it." I explained, 1.) I live on farm land and used to own string of show dogs. I do more all day than you with your fancy urban gym membership do in 45 minutes and 2.) I’m being burned from the inside out from an autoimmune disease and you dare to tell me that more exercise will cure me?

For those that don’t know what life with Hypothyroidism is like, let me give you a simple explanation.  Have you ever cut or burned your arm?  That wound gets a thin clear fluid that forms over it and eventually hardens and forms a scab.  Right?  Imagine being burned from the inside out.  Literally every cell of your body is on fire and forming that clear fluid except it has nowhere to go but to swell up your joints, fill your chest cavity, fill up your knees with fluid so they can’t bend, every opening in your body to include your muscles.   Relentlessly, day by day you are burned alive at the cellular level until you die.  Untreated hypothyroidism usually causes the sufferer to gain up to ½ a pound every single week without end.   The American media loves to report that 36% of Americans are obese.  Wonder why that is.    Hypothyroid people are not "fat" they are slowly dying from internal suffocation by myxedema while the medical community sings Kumbaya and tells us to put down the Twinkies. 

Louise as a girl.

In other words, you end up like my Great-Grandmother Louise, a German.  Thyroid experts should be nodding their heads.   You might as well paint a bulls-eye on Germans because so many of them are hypothyroid.

Louise just before she died.

Louise died at age 53 from DROPSY, Heart failure, and Diabetes leaving behind 9 children.  Dropsy is a word no longer used, but used to refer to someone with swelling of the soft tissue caused by "excessive water."  In other words, she had myxedema, a hallmark of hypothryoidism.  These pictures would probably make Dr. Mark Starr, the author of Hypothyroidism Type 2: The Epidemic, scream in frustration.  Pictures like these are repeated endlessly in his book as he talks about how Hypothyroidism was fully documented and "cured" in 1875.  There is no reason for anyone today to suffer.   Yet up to 15 million Americans today are being denied treatment for Hypothyroidism.  How did we get to this?   How did we get to a point where a fully documented and researched disease is no longer treated. 

The answer:  socialism.

Under Socialism government statists determine mandated "norms."   To determine these mandated norms you need to have mandated tests that produce these norms.   Due to government intervention in to the marketplace, you now have lobbyists lobbying to make their products and services the preferred product and insurance companies lobbying to find ways to deny coverage and protect their shareholders.  For Hypothyroidism, lobbyists have gotten the TSH test declared the "gold standard" to determine if you have the disease. There’s a problem with this.  The TSH test really has very little to do with hypothyroidism.   The TSH test is so despised by thyroid suffers that author Janie Bowthorpe refers to it as Thyroid Stimulating Hooey in her book, Stop the Thyroid Madness.   It gets better, in order to "manage costs" the insurance industry lobbyists put pressure on the medical industry to alter what is "normal" on this test.  So you have a test that is generally useless with "passing" numbers just as generally useless.  And to add ice cream to the top of this sundae, you have a medical community now educated to only dispense medicine by looking at lab results instead of the living suffering patient in front of them.  The result?  15 million Americans have been told they are "normal" and there is nothing wrong with them. 

Additionally what is normal for the TSH test has wandered all over the road map.  In November 2002, the National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry (NACB) issued a new laboratory practice guidelines for diagnosis and monitoring of thyroid disease.  "In the future, it is likely that the upper limit of the serum TSH euthyroid reference range will be reduced to 2.5 mIU/L because >95% of rigorously screened normal euthyroid volunteers have serum TSH values between 0.4 and 2.5 mIU/L…  A serum TSH result between 0.5 and 2.0 mIU/L is generally considered the therapeutic target for a standard L-T4 replacement dose for primary hypothyroidism."  Living Well with Hypothyroidism, Mary J. Shomon. P11

Based upon this report, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) issued an announcement in January 2003, recommending that the TSH be reset to 0.3 to 3.0.   From 2008 to today, I have had my blood repeatedly tested at a number of different labs, not one of them has the correct TSH range listed on the report results.   Most list 0.45 to 5.0 as being "normal" misleading every single doctor who isn't aware of the AACE's recommendations.   Let alone the fact that you can be perfectly "normal" on blood tests and still be sick as hell.   Besides, "normal" is nothing more than a statistical average and has nothing to do with the individual.  

It gets better.  Hypothyroidism has been proven to be the major cause of a number of diseases and conditions.  Treat the hypothyroidism and the cascading list of other issues goes away.  Three doctors ago I was repeating my litany of symptoms and when I mentioned massive constant fluid in my ears, my feet, and throat.   That pesky myxedema again, more commonly known as mucin.   First my head.   Mucin has built up in my ears so badly that I operate constantly feeling like I am in a plane that is taking off, but never landing.  The pressure inside my head is horrific, makes me woozy  and sometimes nauseous.  The fluid buildup has given me massive migraines.  Mucin has taken over and coated my throat so bad that sometimes I have to swallow repeatedly in order to breath, and it has changed my voice and made it harsh and husky and it has built up around that pesky little flap that closes off your stomach… meaning I have acid reflux from hell.   In my feet, I have battled plantar fasciitis, tarsal syndrome (related to carpal tunnel in the arms), and a giant mucus cyst on my foot from fluid leakage, grossly distorting it.   This doctor said he could not treat any of these issues, the best he could do is give me a prescription for an acid reflux medication, and a referral to see an ear, nose and throat doctor and a foot doctor.   Think about the costs.  All of these conditions are caused by untreated or undertreated hypothyroidism but instead of treating that, this doctor wants me to take medication for acid reflux (a band-aid), and see two other specialists.  Is that an efficient use of medical resources?  Of course not!   Instead I take enough Mucinex to make some low level idiot at the NSA think I’m running a meth lab, in order to drain the fluid out of my ears.   Soon enough this band-aid might not even be available to me as the socialists want to make Mucinex by prescription only to battle the meth trade. 

Before modern fancy labs, doctors treated patients by listening to their symptoms and by the use of the basal body temperature test.   Yes, those of us with hypothyroidism are almost always colder than the rest of you.  "The 200-page report on hypothyroidism by The Clinical Society of London in 1888 was the most comprehensive description of the illness of its time.  Their findings concluded that patients' temperatures were almost always subnormal, "although it may now and then rise to the normal standard or even a degree or two higher."   Dr. Mark Starr, the author of Hypothyroidism Type 2: The Epidemic, p.12.

Oh but your temperature was mostly "normal" at your last doctor's visit you say?  That would be because that is not the appropriate time to test body temperature.  You have to do it immediately upon waking up when the body has been at a complete rest.  Not in the middle of the day when you have been active.  I did a basal body temperature test two doctors ago when I found a doctor who had actually even heard of it.  I took my temperature at a certain time of day, every day, for over 2 months and logged it.  Sure enough, my temperature was almost always below normal, well below normal.   He agreed to treatment for Hypothyroidism until he joined an HMO, suddenly he was no longer able to issue my medication and on I had to move to yet another doctor.  My test results and symptoms didn't change, his insurance status did. 

One of the primary experts in the field of thyroid issues was Dr. Broda Barnes.  He died in 1988, and many doctors today have never heard of him.   Dr. Barnes' paper, "Basel Temperature vs. Basal Metabolism," was published in "The Journal of the American Medical Association" in 1942.  In this study of 1,000 patients with low basal metabolism tests and symptoms of hypothyroidism, all had subnormal temperatures (unless an infection was present)."   Dr. Mark Starr, the author of Hypothyroidism Type 2: The Epidemic, p.14.

Dr. Barnes was famous for something else as well.  He proved that thyroid issues were to blame for a great deal of the new wave of heart attacks plaguing Americans who were now living long enough for their heart issues to be revealed.  He published two books on this, Heart Attack Rareness in Thyroid TreatedPatients in 1972 and Solved:  The Riddle of Heart Attacks in 1976.  Both books are now out of print and the "heart disease" industry is huge and ticking with dozens of new drugs to treat your problems.  But thyroid meds?  No, sirey!  None for you.  Today Dr. Barnes research is almost routinely suppressed and ridiculed even though all he did was provide up to date research that had originated back in 1888 showing that hypothyroidism causes Atherosclerosis with the results of 70,000 Austrian autopsies to back up this discovery.  A .5 cent a day thyroid pill could potentially put a large part of the heart disease industry out of business.  We can't have that.   Dr. Barnes also linked Diabetes, Cancer, and Multiple sclerosis (MS) to thyroid problems.   Let alone a subset of thyroid suffers who later go on to come down with Lupus like both my aunts.  I have a very bright future of horrific disease ahead of me while I struggle every 4-6 months to find a doctor willing to give me thyroid medication.  Right now I’m on 90 mcg of Armour and my brand new doctor is already screaming that I’m on way too much, while I’m crying in despair because I’m on too little.  90 mcg is on the lower end of treatment and I do not have one single symptom of hyperthyroidism.   (It is a common myth among doctors today that if you give a patient too much medication for hypothyroidism they will develop hyperthyroidism and osteoporosis.  Both ideas have been discredited but the myth persists.)   I tell you what, I will happily take on osteoporosis if it means I avoid Lupus, MS, and heart disease.   In just 30 days on 90 mcg Armour, the giant tumor of mucus fluid in my right foot has slowly drained away and is almost completely gone.  My foot looks almost normal now instead of grossly distorted.   Enough mucus has drained from my face that I can smile again without extreme effort.  My current doctor of only one month already wants to take that away from me. 

If a heavily documented and fairly easily (and cheaply!) treated disease like this can be sidelined, suppressed, and the "norms" manipulated, just what does that mean for other disease?    ObamaCare supposedly ensures we all have medical insurance, but insurance is not medical care.   Medical care is going down the tubes.