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Archived
E-mail Newsletters Fibromyalgia Research Foundation
The Metabolic Treatment
Your Guide to |
August
17, 2005 New Items: Ordering
Your Own
Lab
Tests When Your Doctor Won’t Good news!!! Many people have told us that their doctors will not order the lab tests they need to start the diagnostic process for metabolic rehabilitation. Now you can go directly to QuesTest lab draw sites to have the majority of the "new patient" lab tests done without a doctor’s order. The Women’s or Men’s Health Profile includes urinalysis, CBC, lipid panel, comprehensive metabolic panel, and TSH with reflex. ("TSH with reflex" means that if your TSH is abnormal, a free T4 will automatically be tested.) The rest of the thyroid lab tests will have to be ordered by your local doctor or by us when you come to the clinic in Boulder, CO. The cost for either the Women’s or Men’s Health Profile is $115.00, which is quite a bargain. Through our clinic, your cost for the TSH alone is $101.50, so these profiles are amazingly inexpensive. Be sure to fast 8 hours ahead of time if you do either of these profiles. You can go to Quest’s website, www.QuesTest.com, for more information about options and pricing. The "Customer Service" page displays frequently asked questions, some of which explain payment methods. The "Location Finder" at the top of the page will help you find a draw site near you. New
Studies Refute an Old Objection to T3 Therapy Some doctors believe that patients shouldn't take T3 alone. The basis of their belief is a conclusion researchers reached in the 1950: that conclusion is that brain cells get their T3 only from converting T4 to T3. If this conclusion were true, brain cells of a patient who takes only T3 would be deficient of T3. New studies, however, show conclusively that this isn't true. Hopefully, when these doctors learn that studies have refuted the conclusion, they'll let patients use T3 alone when they fail to benefit from T4/T3 therapy or T4 alone. Online
Low Cost Brand Name Supplements
& Other Products I recently became aware of a couple of websites that may help you get your favorite brands of nutritional supplements and other products at a lower price than what’s offered at most health food stores. The sites are www.iherb.com and www.swansonvitamins.com. As an example, www.iherb.com's price for Pro-Gest by Emerita is $16.19 for a box of 48 single-dose packets. Our local health food stores' prices range from $23.00 to $28.00 for the same product. (I've read that the natural progesterone creams in tubes or jars can oxidize when exposed to air and may lose potency, so I use and recommend the single-dose packets.) There are many other bargains at these sites that can reduce your overall cost for the supplements we recommend. If you need to discuss our recommendations to see how they may fit into your health regimen, we'll be glad to schedule a consultation with you. Happy shopping!
August
17, 2005 New Items: Dr.
Nicholas Calvino: August 7, 1973-July 19, 2005
The
Problem of Fibromyalgia is Solved: Metabolic Rehab Again the Focus of Care
Healthy Controls Needed
for Metabolic Study
July
4, 2005 New Items: Happy Independence Day As the colonists had to free themselves from domination and exploitation by King George, we health care consumers now must free ourselves from domination and exploitation by big pharma (the composite name for the powerful pharmaceutical industry). As many critics have recently shown, big pharma has co-opted the medical profession, its institutions and agencies, the FDA, and the United States Congress. Through these, it now exerts control over health care consumers the world over. and in its ravenous hunger for profits, big pharma continually tries to expand its control, depriving us of progressively more freedoms of choice in health care. We publish a lot on drlowe.com about the harm the endocrinology specialty does in two ways: perpetuating false beliefs about hypothyroidism and imposing a standard of practice on doctors that leaves many hypothyroidism patients suffering. The ultimate source of this harm, however, is the large sums of money and other incentives that big pharma gives the specialty. But the endocrinology specialty isn't usual in this way; every medical specialty is now corrupted to some degree by money from big pharma. As I spell out in Tyranny of the TSH, the harm the endocrinology specialty causes is but a special case that illustrates the more general problem caused by big pharma. We can free ourselves from domination and exploitation by big pharma, but to do so, we must educate ourselves and take action. In the spirit of independence appropriate to July 4th, we urge you to read about big pharma's latest effort to deprive us of a health freedom, and we urge you to help block that effort. (See below, Protest Congress Making DHEA a Controlled Substance). I wish you the very happiest Fourth of July. False
Claims by Endocrinologists that As an example of such published statements, consider what endocrinologist Dr. Monte Greer wrote in 1986: "The [RMR] test is very difficult to perform accurately, and even when done correctly there is so much overlap between euthyroid [normal thyroid lab test results] and thyrotoxic [overstimulated] patients that it is of extremely limited value. It has been almost totally abandoned throughout the world as a useful screening procedure."[1,p.310] Two years after Dr. Greer claimed that the RMR test had been abandoned, researchers at Harvard’s Cancer Research Institute reached the conclusion the that the test is extremely accurate and useful—and being actively used. They wrote, "Given the importance of matching energy intake to needs in many critically ill patients who are mechanically ventilated, accurate measurement of the [RMR] is recommended now that instrumentation is equal to the task."[2,p.875] [Italics mine.] They also wrote, "Since portable indirect calorimeters are now easily available and are reliable, simple to use and accurate, we would advocate their use."[2,p.877] In 1997, endocrinologists at McGill University in Quebec published results that also contradict Greer’s denunciation of the RMR test.[3] They found that the RMR, measured with indirect calorimetry, was extremely sensitive to small changes in patients’ thyroid hormone dosages. Despite the claims of some endocrinologists, then, the RMR test is a valuable clinical tool. A major goal of thyroid hormone therapy for hypothyroid patients is to increase the patient’s metabolism to normal. When the metabolic rate is normal, patients are usually free from hypothyroid symptoms. The TSH, of course, doesn’t measure the metabolic rate; nor does the TSH level correlate with the RMR. This means, as I show in The Metabolic Treatment of Fibromyalgia, that the TSH is virtually useless for deciding whether a patient’s thyroid hormone medication and dosage are effectively raising her metabolic rate. Only indirect calorimetry can tell us this, and when done properly, it does so with extreme accuracy. References  [1] Greer, M.A.: Manifestations of thyrotoxicosis. In The Thyroid Gland: A Practical Clinical Treatise. Edited by L. Middlesworth and James Givens, 1986, pp.305-314. [2] Hunter, D.C., Jaksic, T., Lewis, D., et al.: Resting energy expenditure in the critically ill: estimations versus measurement. Brit. J. Med., 75:875-878, 1988. [3] Al-Adsani, H., Hoffer, J.L., and Enrique Silva, J.E.: Resting energy expenditure is sensitive to small dose changes in patients on chronic thyroid hormone replacement. J. Clin. Endocr. Metab., 82(4):1118-1125, 1997. Please
Object to Congress The issue of DHEA is also very important to others who want the freedom to use the dietary supplements they choose. Big pharma loses money when we remain healthy and don’t have to use its drugs. So repeatedly, it tries to deprive us of the rights ensured by the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health Education Act. Partly because of its awesomely powerful lobby, big pharma has allies in Congress who’ll submit the necessary bills, and it has friends in the FDA who’ll make the desired rulings. Today, big pharma is trying to deprive us of easy and inexpensive access to DHEA; tomorrow it will target another supplement you might choose to take. It has wealth vast enough ($200 billion annually in the US, $400 worldwide[1]) to get legislators to propose bill-after-bill that would deprive us of various supplements. Members of Congress need to know that we’ll protest in mass any bill intended to deprive us of a dietary supplement. If we’re to keep our freedom to use the supplements we want, we must protest every attempt by big pharma to strip of us of that freedom. Please add your energy to the collective effort to block big pharma’s relentless machinations. Let your Members of Congress know that you object to its classifying DHEA as a controlled substance. It will take only a few minutes using the link we’ve provided. You don’t have to look up your Members of Congress; typing in your zip code automatically brings up their emails addresses. Sending the emails will help make the American people a stronger lobby in Washington. Reference [1] Angell, M.: The Truth About the Drug Companies. New York, Random House, 2004. Breathing
Problems The subject of our last newsletter was breathing problems caused by untreated or undertreated hypothyroidism. The response to that report has been enormous. Many patients wrote or called to thank us for publishing the report. They told us they never knew that hypothyroidism can cause breathing problems, nor did their doctors know. Editors of several newsletters asked for permission, which we gave, to reprint the report in their publications. Many new people subscribe to this newsletter every day (more than a thousand since the last newsletter was published). If you’re one of them, you’re hypothyroid, and you have a breathing problem, we want to make sure you know about the report. Its content may help you and your doctor relieve your breathing problem. You can read the report at http://www.drlowe.com/jcl/comentry/breathingproblems.htm. Paying
for Consultations Dr. Honeyman-Lowe and Dr. Lowe do consultations with some patients who don’t have credit cards; the patients pay with money orders or checks. These payment methods, however, aren’t as convenient as paying with credit cards. Now these patients can have the convenience of credit cards through a new service provided by Walgreens stores worldwide. The new service is the "Green Dot" card, which is a prepaid MasterCard or Visa card. The customer doesn’t need a bank account and Walgreens doesn’t do a credit check. Customers can easily reload the cards when needed. For details, please visit a Walgreens store. |
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