I hardly recognise myself at age 66 compared to the person I was when aged thirty.
By the time I was thirty years of age, I was married and had two children. My career was enjoyable, satisfying and paying me a lot of money because I was good at it. The future looked bright.
Thyroid problems came and turned everything upside down.
The many endocrinologists and doctors that I saw during the first seven years of my thyroid problems, were completely incapable. They had a belief system that made them unable to help me. I have written about the broken paradigm and dogmatic beliefs inherent in thyroid treatment so many times. Levothyroxine does not always work. It does not always convert to enough T3. Laboratory test results that are in range, do not mean that the person is correctly treated, and the patient can still be horrendously symptomatic. That is what happened to me.
It took me many years of hard work, research, reading endocrinology text books, and persuading doctors to prescribe what I knew I needed, to get well. I had to create a protocol for using the rarely prescribed thyroid medication, T3. Many aspects of that protocol were highly inventive.
As a result of my experience, I have written three books and am working on a fourth one at the moment. My books are widely read and used by thyroid patients in order to recover from hypothyroidism. The books are also increasingly used by doctors around the world.
It was never my intention to write any books, let alone do all the work that I have done subsequently. It has been an incredibly strange journey for me, and it was a road that I would definitely not have chosen for myself.
My life changed dramatically due to my thyroid condition, which was untreatable by the endocrinologists and doctors that I saw. The end result was the loss of my career, the end of my marriage. Eventually, as a result of all the damage, I lost contact with my children through their estrangement of me.
One of my main concerns now, is how to enable my books to continue to be available. Dr Broda Barnes wrote ‘The Unsuspected Illness’ in 1976. His book is more relevant now, nearly fifty years later, than it was when he first wrote it. Liothyronine (T3 thyroid hormone), is now more needed by those patients who cannot process enough Levothyroxine (T4) into enough T3. Doctors do not want to prescribe T3, and they do not understand thyroid treatment, or T3, well enough. Thyroid treatment is actually worse now than when I was first diagnosed. It is more mechanical, less flexible and less focused on the individual patient.
I am still trying to work out how to keep my books available for another one hundred years and maybe even longer than that – I think they will be needed for at least that length of time.
As a result of my journey, I am a very different person now than I was when I was young. Am I glad that I took this road? Well, I had little choice at the start of it. But I could have just got well and then got on with my life. What I have managed to do has made a contribution. However, it has been a very, very hard road. I hope that my choice to do this work has made, and will continue to make, a difference.
Here are two quotes from poems that I really like and also seem to sum things up for me (see the poems below):
Firstly, from The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost:
“I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Secondly, from Stopping by Woods On A Snowy Evening – Robert Frost:
“But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”
Best wishes, Paul
Edited 7th February 2025
The Road Not Taken
BY ROBERT FROST
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
BY ROBERT FROST
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
