The Thyroid Solution (Third Edition): A Revolutionary Mind-Body Program for Regaining Your Emotional and Physical Health - Softcover

Arem, Ridha

 
9780425286401: The Thyroid Solution (Third Edition): A Revolutionary Mind-Body Program for Regaining Your Emotional and Physical Health
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0425286401 ISBN 13: 9780425286401
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

An updated and expanded edition of a trusted resource, which explains how to use diet, exercise, stress control, and hormone treatments to maintain thyroid health

The Thyroid Solution is a must-read for anyone who suffers from thyroid disease. Written by a medical pioneer and leading authority in the field of thyroid research, this groundbreaking book offers Dr. Ridha Arem’s practical program for maintaining thyroid health through diet, exercise, and stress control—and through his revolutionary medical plan, which combines two types of hormone treatments and produces astounding results. This revised edition includes information on

• the discovered links between thyroid issues and fatigue
• a unique treatment program to overcome the physical and mental effects of thyroid disease
• the best ways to combat Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and Graves’ disease
• optimal treatment of thyroid imbalance before, during, and after pregnancy
• strategies to minimize cardiovascular risks related to thyroid disease
• how thyroid hormone affects weight, metabolism, and eating behavior

Featuring a thyroid- and immune-system-friendly diet for healthy and successful weight loss, inspiring patient histories, and interviews that document the dramatic success of Dr. Arem’s bold new treatments, The Thyroid Solution remains the essential resource for doctors and patients on maintaining thyroid and immune-system wellness.

Praise for The Thyroid Solution

“Dr. Arem uncovers the root causes of thyroid disease and lays out an innovative program to help you overcome thyroid dysfunction.”—Amy Myers, M.D.

“Clear, comprehensive, and incredibly useful . . . the best thyroid resource I have ever read.”—Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D., author of Your Last Diet!

“Quite simply the best thyroid book on the market today . . . Dr. Arem validates what I have found in my practice for more than twenty years, especially the importance of T3. I highly recommend this book.”—Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D., author of Screaming to Be Heard: Hormone Connections Women Suspect . . . and Doctors Still Ignore

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ridha Arem, M.D., is a clinical professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. For years he served as chief of endocrinology and metabolism at Ben Taub General Hospital and medical director of the endocrine laboratory at Houston Methodist Hospital. He currently runs a practice specializing in thyroid disorders at the Texas Medical Center.

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1

Thyroid Imbalance

A Hidden Epidemic

Could you have an overactive or underactive thyroid and not even know it? Millions of Americans—and a high percentage of women in menopause and perimenopause (the decade or so before menopause during which hormonal, emotional, and physical changes begin)—do. A thyroid imbalance is not always easy to recognize. Physicians continue to argue whether a minimal thyroid imbalance affects mental and physical health. But the truth is that it does—and big time.

Do you have any of the following symptoms?

•Always fatigued or exhausted

•Irritable and impatient

•Feeling too hot or too cold

•Depressed, anxious, or panicky

•Bothered by changes in your skin or hair

•At the mercy of your moods

•Inexplicably gaining or losing weight

•Losing your enthusiasm for life

•Sleeping poorly or insomniac

Are you feeling burned out from having acted on an excess of energy for several months? Are you listless, forgetful, and feeling disconnected from your friends and family? Are people telling you that you’ve changed? Are you taking Prozac or a similar drug for mild depression but still feeling that your mind and mood are subpar? Or have you been treated for a major depression in the past?

If you suffer from more than one of these symptoms or answered yes to one or more of these questions, you could be one of the many people with an undiagnosed thyroid condition. Although some of these symptoms may seem contradictory, all of them can be indications of a thyroid imbalance.

You could also be one of the many people who has been treated for a thyroid imbalance but still suffers from its often-overlooked, lingering effects—effects that may continue to haunt you even after treatments have presumably restored your thyroid levels to normal. If you’ve ever been treated for a thyroid imbalance, answer these questions:

•Do you still suffer from fatigue?

•Do you feel better but still not quite your old self?

•Do you have unusual flare-ups of anger?

•Are you less socially outgoing than you used to be?

•Are you less tolerant of the foibles of family and friends?

•Do you suffer from occasional bouts of mild depression?

•Do you have frequent lapses in memory?

•Are you often unable to concentrate on what you’re doing?

•Do you feel older than your real age?

If you’ve had a thyroid problem in the past but still answer yes to one or more of these questions, it is quite likely that your symptoms are thyroid-related. You don’t have to suffer any longer. The Thyroid Solution will show you how you can work with your physician to heal these lingering symptoms.

The Hidden Suffering

At any given time in the United States, more than 30 million people suffer from a thyroid disorder, more than 10 million women have low-grade thyroid imbalance, and nearly 10 million people with thyroid imbalance remain undiagnosed. Some 500,000 new cases of thyroid imbalance occur each year.1 All of these people are vulnerable to mental and emotional effects for a long time even after being diagnosed. Incorrect or inadequate treatment leads to unnecessary suffering for millions of these people. But these are numbers. Behind the numbers are the symptoms and ravaging mental effects experienced by real human beings.

For the past two decades, we have witnessed a major increase in the recognition and detection of thyroid diseases. This stems in part from improved medical technology, which has led to the development of sensitive methods of screening and diagnosing thyroid disorders. It also stems from the increased public awareness that thyroid disease may remain undiagnosed for a long time and that even mild thyroid dysfunction may affect your health.2 It is also likely that thyroid imbalance has become more common as a result of deleterious effects related to our environment. Medical associations such as the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists have conducted public screenings for thyroid disease, much as cholesterol testing has become available in shopping malls and other public places. At any given time, more than half of patients with low-grade hypothyroidism remain undiagnosed. In a thyroid-screening program involving nearly two thousand people that I directed in the Houston area,3 8 percent of those tested had an underactive thyroid. Many people screened had never heard of the thyroid gland but rushed to be tested when they recognized that they were suffering many of the symptoms listed in the announcement of the screening. In a statewide health fair in Colorado conducted in 1995, 9.5 percent of the 25,862 participants who were screened for thyroid imbalance were found to have an underactive thyroid and 2.2 percent had thyroid hormone excess.4 The public’s awareness of thyroid disease was boosted by press reports about former president George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and Olympic track champion Gail Devers when they were diagnosed with thyroid disease. Thanks to these factors, people with unexplained symptoms are becoming increasingly likely to ask their physicians whether these symptoms might be related to an undiagnosed thyroid disorder.

As an endocrinologist who has focused his research, teaching, and patient care on thyroid conditions, I realized early on in my practice that taking care of thyroid patients was not as easy as I had expected. Treating and correcting a thyroid condition with medication may not always make the patient feel entirely better. I discovered that to care fully for my patients, to help them heal completely, I had to treat their feelings as well as their bodies. If they didn’t feel better even though their lab tests said they were cured, I learned to listen to them, believe them, and work with them to help them become wholly cured. In taking care of thyroid patients, the physician’s role is not merely to address physical discomfort, test the thyroid, and make sure blood test results are normal (indicating normal amounts of the various thyroid hormones in the bloodstream). Addressing the effects of thyroid disorders on the mind, addressing the health of the immune system (often the root of the thyroid condition), helping patients cope with their condition, and counseling them sympathetically are equally important.

Many physicians treat dysfunctioning thyroids, but few of them listen to the person attached to the gland. They concentrate on the blood tests, and once your lab results become normal, for these physicians your case is closed. Yet you may go on to suffer for years from a variety of physical and mental symptoms related to the thyroid condition. Research has shown that patients with thyroid imbalance continue to have symptoms even after their thyroid hormone blood levels have become normal with treatment.5 Physicians should be treating the still-suffering patients in a more comprehensive way for as long as it takes for the physical and mental effects to subside. The reality today, however, is that millions of patients suffer needlessly while their doctors continue to treat thyroid disease as a simple physical disorder rather than what it is: a complex blow to the body and brain.

In general, primary care physicians have not been adequately trained to detect and manage thyroid disease and may lack the expertise needed to diagnose and treat a wide range of thyroid disorders.6 They also receive little teaching on the effects of thyroid disease on mental health or on understanding the interplay between the mind, the thyroid, and the immune system.

The majority of practitioners of internal medicine and family medicine...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0425286401
ISBN 13 
9780425286401
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
3
Anzahl der Seiten
496
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar