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Facilitated by the Restorative Medicine Conference, October 1 through 4, 2015, in Blaine, Washington.
E. Denis Wilson, MD, will address thyroid function and Wilson's Temperature Syndrome at the 2015 Restorative Medicine Conference in Blaine, Washington, October 1 through 4. Dr Wilson was the first practitioner to use sustained-release T3 thyroid hormone. For 20 years, he has treated more than 5000 patients with T3 and trained more than 1000 physicians on how to use T3 to improve the health of patients with low thyroid function and low body temperature who have normal blood tests. He is the author of Evidence-Based Approach to Restoring Thyroid Health.1
Integrative Medicine: A Clinician's Journal (IMCJ): What originally drew your attention to issues of thyroid and metabolism?
Dr Wilson: A patient came to my office and she brought with her a book and she said that I should read it. It was called Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness, by Broda Barnes, MD.2 In that book, he explains the importance of using body temperature as a guide to evaluate thyroid function. I was intrigued by that and also his suggested treatment of using desiccated thyroid as an empirical treatment to normalize the body temperature. Though I did not look at the book for a few weeks, I eventually read it and decided to try his approach in a few of my patients. To my surprise, some of those people got 100% better.
That was really illuminating to me because, according to my training in medical school, that was not supposed to happen. These people had normal thyroid blood tests and, supposedly, that meant that they could not benefit from thyroid hormone treatment. These people did not get just a little bit better; they got completely better. It did not work for all the patients I tried it with, but it worked in about 60% of cases.
I was looking at the other 40% and wondering how we could help them, too. It could be that they did not have thyroid problems, or maybe the particular treatment I was using was not really addressing their issue. As I was trying to think of ways to increase the yield, I looked at the thyroid hormone pathways and saw that T4 is converted to T3....