Hypothyroidism Mark Star 7-28-10
Hypothyroidism Mark Star 7-28-10
Hypothyroidism Mark Star 7-28-10
Hypothyroidism:
A Rapidly Growing Epidemic
Contents:
Hypothyroidism:
A Rapidly Growing Epidemic
Dr. Ruth Buczynski: Hello everyone, welcome to the call tonight. We’ve got a really
important agenda and I want to get started, but before we do I just want to say welcome
to everyone no matter where you’re calling from.
We have people that are listening from all over the world and from all kinds of time
zones. Welcome to everyone.
We have practitioners who are physicians and nurses and psychologists and social
workers and there are physical therapists and occupational therapists and clergy and
dietitians and marriage and family therapists and counselors and psychologists. We
represent a wide, wide range of professions.
So, welcome to tonight’s call; it’s an incredibly important one. Our call is on
hypothyroidism. It’s a rapidly growing epidemic and it’s something, no matter what your
specialty is, no matter what your profession is, I think you’ll want to know about because
you’ll be finding that in many, many cases, even if it’s not something that you treat, it’s
affecting your patients.
Our guest tonight is Dr. Mark Starr. He is a physician and author of the book
Hypothyroidism Type 2: The Epidemic. So Mark, welcome to the call.
Buczynski: And let’s get started right away by talking about why thyroid function is so
critical to both optimal health and mental health.
Starr: Sure. Well, the thyroid controls our metabolism - basically the speed and
efficiency at which each of our trillions of cells works and if the cells aren’t working at
optimal speed, then obviously things slow down and waste products accumulate and you
have a myriad of symptoms that can result. The central nervous system is the number one
target of low metabolism, but first, I’d like to say a little abut my book.
So, I was a medical doctor; I didn’t finish medical school until I was 37—I was a late
bloomer. I had a back injury in high school when they offered a laminectomy at the ripe
old age of 17.
Luckily, in 1970, the doctors weren’t as anxious to operate on young folks as they might
be. Anyway, I had back pain for 25 years and by the time I was in my residency and I was
40, I was having dry skin, constipation, my concentration was decreasing, I had joint and
muscle pain.
Thyroid problems run in my family, and I couldn’t get any of the doctors at the University
of Missouri where I went to medical school to treat me for my thyroid problems because
my blood tests were normal.
They assured me that I was just working too much and my cholesterol, by the time I got
back to New York, had gone from 160 to 250, and my triglycerides were sky high and my
symptoms were getting worse and as soon as I saw Dr. Kraus, he said you need to see Dr.
Sonkin.
And my first visit with Dr. Sonkin resulted in me being put on thyroid hormones. And Dr.
Sonkin showed me his research that there were millions of people out there who weren’t
getting treated because the blood tests were missing their low thyroid.
And I felt better and when I went back after two years of studying in New York, and went
back and started a pain clinic (I’m board certified in pain), I realized that after a year or
two, that most of my pain patients had the same thing that I did.
So, I spent six years writing my book. I wanted to find out how come doctors could have
gone so astray basically, and how come these old, wonderful giants of medicine—how
come their research wasn’t in the books and wasn’t in our teachings.
I spent six, seven, eight years doing research. My book contains the best research, I think,
that was ever done on the thyroid beginning in the 1800s when it was first described. The
first cure was 1891, and the last textbook that had before-and-after treatment pictures was
1957.
At about that time doctors became convinced that they needed to treat the blood test and
use synthetic thyroid instead of the old-fashioned Armour Desiccated Porcine Thyroid
that they’ve used quite successfully for over 70 years. And there were no more before-
and after-treatment pictures.
So anyway, this was the best research I could find. And as I say, it’s not my research, I just
compiled it. I do have some of my own research in my book, but these were the giants of
medicine and this is the best research.
For instance, one family in Belgium has had four generations of endocrinologists. It’s the
Hertoghe family, and I have the senior Hertoghe who published a treatise in 1915. It’s a
wonderful book on the milder form of hypothyroidism.
I have his research and his pictures in my book as well. And his grandson also had a
wonderful study that’s in my book showing that the symptoms of low thyroid were
reduced by 70 percent just by switching from the synthetic thyroid back to the old-
fashioned thyroid. So that’s a bit of an introduction.
Buczynski: Great…thanks. So let’s talk a little bit about… first let’s just talk generally.
There’re a lot of mental health practitioners on the call and they may not have gotten as
thorough an exposure to what is the purpose of the thyroid. Where is it in the body and
what’s its purpose?
Starr: Well it controls the speed in which each of our cells operates. Its purpose is to
maintain health. Without it, nothing else functions properly. Even metabolism is the sum
of all physical and chemical processes by which living substances are produced and
maintained.
Starr: I have all the neurologic and psychiatric manifestations of hypothyroidism listed
in my book.
Starr: Everything from headaches and paresthesias and carpal tunnel to vertigo, tinnitus,
depression, akinetic or agitated schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar disorders, stress or
compulsive disorders, eating disorders—you can name it, it’s on the list of things that
(low functioning) thyroid can cause.
Buczynski: So now, let’s just talk briefly about when the thyroid is malfunctioning,
it can be in a hyper fashion or a hypo fashion. Can we just lay out some introductory
groundwork before we get into more specifics on hyper and hypothyroidism?
Starr: Well, hyper is obviously too much thyroid hormone. Your heart rate speeds
up, you get tremulous, you can have diarrhea, it’s a life threatening condition that is
very uncomfortable for the people who have it, and you lose weight, and your body
temperature is high.
One of the main points in my book is there’s good research from the time that the thyroid
problem was described. All the papers in the old days said that low temperature was a
sign of low thyroid, and high temperature, or above normal temperature, was a sign of a
hyperthyroid.
And one of the best doctors, probably the best endocrinologist that America ever had,
was named Broda O. Barnes, MD, PhD. He died in the late 1980s. But he did research
on thousands of patients covering 30 years and he has a research foundation in his name.
Brodabarnes.org is the website and I will email that to you if you don’t have it. It’s in my
book as well.
But he did studies. They used to do the basal metabolism study where they put a tube
in your mouth and a nose clip on to see how much oxygen you inspired and CO2 you
expired, and according to your age, height, weight, and sex, they had a whole bunch of
normal values.
If you were below normal, you were deemed low thyroid. If you were above normal, and
that’s normal or above, then anxiety, pain, and all sorts of things can do that…so the test
was accurate about 75 percent of the time.
That’s why doctors were always looking for blood tests, but Broda Barnes did all of
his own basal metabolism studies on his thousands of patients and published a paper in
JAMA in 1942 that compared basal metabolism with basal temperature. He showed how
much more accurate the basal temperature was than basal metabolism.
So, the basal temperature was described in all the “Basal temperature is
older research by the prominent doctors in my a very accurate way of
book, and it is a very accurate way of detecting
detecting low thyroid.”
low thyroid.
And Dr. Barnes, after 35 years of study said he still couldn’t tell the difference between
low thyroid and hyperthyroid without his thermometer, because oftentimes, people will
be low thyroid, but still be under weight. They will have a rapid heart rate, they will have
tremor, and it looks as if they’re hyperthyroid.
But if their temperature is low, he would give them a small dose of thyroid and they
would improve and their basal temperature would normalize and their symptoms would
resolve.
“The blood tests are missing so That’s one of the main points in the book—
many millions of people and the the fact that the blood tests are missing so
basal temperature is a good many millions of people and that the basal
test to determine whether or temperature is a good test to determine
not you’re low thyroid.” whether or not you’re low thyroid.
Buczynski: There are a lot of challenges with diagnosis and we’ll get to that in a
minute, but from there, we’ve come to determine that we’ve got hyperthyroidism and
hypothyroidism, but then if you take the hypothyroidism, which is the far more prevalent
of the two, I believe, you find that there are Type 1 and Type 2 kinds of hypothyroidism.
Can we just clarify that a little bit so people understand where we’re going here?
Starr: Well my editor and I decided… my teacher was Larry Sonkin, the MD PhD at
New York Cornell, and he called the problem peripheral resistance syndrome, and that
was kind of a mouthful. But it’s quite similar to diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes is when the pancreas fails to produce insulin, and you have to go on
insulin right away, otherwise you’ll die. Type 2 diabetes is not a problem with the insulin
level. It’s a cellular problem, and so oftentimes, the patients have normal or elevated
levels of insulin, but the cells are not able to utilize it properly.
So, my publisher and I decided to name the two types of hypothyroidism Type 1, which
is when the thyroid gland fails, which is what they pick up on their blood tests, or Type
2, which is when you have normal blood tests, the TSH and free T3 and the free T4 and
whatever tests you want to measure are normal, but the patients are still low thyroid.
And like I said, it’s quite similar to Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics. Just as Type 1 diabetics
are very much in the minority of the total diabetic population, something like 90 percent
or more are Type 2.
My publisher and a whole lot of doctors now think that about 90 percent of the people
who are low thyroid are Type 2 and are not being treated or diagnosed properly.
Buczynski: And that’s because it doesn’t show up on a blood test. A blood test is valuable
for determining Type 1, but not so much for the peripheral type of hypothyroidism, which
you’re calling Type 2.
“About 90 percent of the
Starr: That’s correct. people who are low thyroid
are Type 2 and are not being
Buczynski: And what’s unfortunate is that 90 treated or diagnosed properly.”
percent of the people who have hypothyroidism
fall into the Type 2 category, which means that
90 percent of the people who have it aren’t diagnosed with it. Would that be right?
Starr: Yes, that’ my opinion. Broda Barnes, one of the experts, published a book called
Hypothyroidism: the Unsuspected Illness, which I highly recommend to everybody
(Barnes and Noble and widely available despite being published over 40 years ago).
He said that 40 percent of all men, women, and children in America had low thyroid at
that time. And he added that in another 10 years, he estimated it would be 50 percent. The
third Hertoghe generation in Belgium, among the four generations of endocrinologists in
Belgium, estimated that 80 percent of his Belgian countrymen were low thyroid.
I’m not the one who’s saying that there’s an epidemic although I like to quote the giants
of thyroid who did the best research in the history of the treatment of low thyroid and
diagnosis, but that’s what the best doctors who ever treated low thyroid say.
Starr: Well, Dr. Broda Barnes did 70,000 consecutive autopsy studies in Graz, Austria,
where everyone who has died since the late 1700s has had an autopsy. They had a terrible
state of health and when medicine was emerging out of the four humors when they were
bleeding everybody, autopsies came into vogue in the late 1700s.
He found that they had wonderful autopsy studies and it turns out, about 75 percent of all
the deaths in the second largest city in Austria—and that was a mountainous area that was
iodine deficient and for instance in 1800 and something, one out of a hundred adults was
a cretin, which is a mentally retarded dwarf that has no thyroid function.
So, Dr. Barnes’s autopsy studies show that there was a drop in infectious diseases because
the two hallmarks of low thyroid is, number one: it causes accelerated hardening of the
arteries, and number two: it causes a decrease in the immune system so you’re much
more susceptible to infections.
His 70,000 autopsy studies, which I’m thumbing through my book to find, showed that
the thyroid related illnesses were the ones that exploded…basically the people who used
to die were susceptible to infection and low thyroid.
And once we introduced antibiotics and anti-tuberculin drugs in 1945, then the low
thyroid population exploded. You know, small pox, plagues, tuberculosis and infections,
you name it…they would take out all those with low thyroid for thousands of years.
And so, since 1945, and even before that, we had washed our hands and cut the rate of
TB in half and much more than that, we reduced the numbers already.
One reason he went over there was to prove that it was the low thyroid that was causing
the explosion of heart attacks which were barely described before he went to medical
school in the 1930s.
The first description of a heart attack was in 1912 and he wrote a book called Solve the
Riddle of Heart Attacks where he decreased the incidence by over 90 percent by treating
his patients for thyroid.
He had very few heart attacks in his 30 “People lived longer because they
years of treating thousands of patients. He weren’t dying of cholera and
had a total of four. So the death rate from malaria and tuberculosis, but as
infections went down 56 percent in Graz, they lived into their 50’s, they
Austria between 1930 and 1970, and heart
started dying of heart disease
attacks went from 1 in 125 to 1 in 14—they
which hadn’t been seen before.
increased 915 percent!
People with heart disease were
Buczynski: So people lived longer because usually killed off before then at
they weren’t dying of cholera and malaria younger ages by infections.”
and tuberculosis and so forth, but as they
lived into their 50’s they started dying of
heart disease which hadn’t been seen before. People with heart disease were usually
killed off before then at younger ages by infections. Did I get that right?
Starr: Yeah. Those were the people who were susceptible to infections.
Buczynski: So what is it about the thyroid that has such an influence on immunity?
Starr: Well, the immune system is very energy intensive. For instance, anemia is one of
the hallmarks of low thyroid. I just saw a patient again this week who has severe anemia,
Nobody can figure out why she has it—of course she’s low thyroid and she’s also toxic.
So… and it was a long winded answer to say that a whole lot of these…the thyroid is, from
birth, in most of the Type 2 patients because they’re low thyroid from birth. If mom is low
thyroid, then very rarely will she have a normal thyroid child. And, so I’ve treated all sorts of
women.
Gosh, in the old days, the GYN doctors, the OB doctors, knew that if a patient couldn’t
conceive, they needed Armour Thyroid, and I still see 50, 60, and 70 year old women who
couldn’t get pregnant, but they had a big family and once they were on Armour Thyroid… and
it’s a shame because all these expensive fertility drugs and so on… you know, even if the mom
is pregnant, or becomes pregnant, I mean, and has a child, the child is usually low thyroid, or
more so than the mother.
And I remember seeing a picture of the first test tube baby on the cover of TIME magazine, and
she had myxedema, which is another main point I make in my book.
And they used to do biopsies. You know, they used to look for myxedema by doing biopsies. In
the conclusion of my book, I say that I asked a senior pathologist once: when was the last time
he did a biopsy looking for low thyroid, and of course, the answer was never.
But, I have a quote—the first 300 page description of low thyroid before there was even a cure
was by the Clinical Society of London in 1888. And it had 60 autopsies because they
couldn’t cure it, and the autopsies were wonderful descriptions of all the atherosclerosis
and they called it contracting… oh gosh, what was it… it was chronic kidney failure
was a lot of the low thyroid deaths, but the quote I took was this: the general uniformity
of the more prominent symptoms is indeed remarkable, allowing ready recognition
of the malady in any freshly encountered case by an observer who has seen one well-
pronounced case. That’s from the Clinical Society of London’s report of myxedema in
1888.
Buczynski: So, I just want to make sure people understand some of the range of things
that it might look like. So, you’re looking at decreased circulation, you’re looking at
baldness in women…
Starr: Hair loss is one of the symptoms, and hair under the arm pits…
Starr: Yeah, thinning of the hair…you lose the hair under the arm pits. They lose the
pubic hair, and hair on their arms and legs. Gosh, if you had high cholesterol for the first
half of the 20th century, that meant you were low thyroid.
A doctor from the Lehey Clinic proposed that they use cholesterol to diagnose thyroid
problems because there was such a close correlation between the patient’s metabolism
and the cholesterol.
So that’s gone by the by as well, but menstrual “A study from the 1990s,
difficulties—Dr. Barnes has studies showing 90 shows how they reduced the
percent of the menstrual difficulties resolve with incidence of depression by
low thyroid, and Dr. Hertoghe’s study from the two thirds just by putting
1990s, shows how they reduced the incidence of
them on desiccated thyroid.”
depression by two thirds just by putting them on
desiccated thyroid.
So, acne, premature aging, obesity, cancer, headaches, constipation, dry skin, like I said,
arthritis was treated with thyroid hormones for the first half of the 20th century until
prednisone, or rather the glucocorticoids were found in 1948. Before that, it didn’t matter
what type of arthritis you had. If you had arthritis, you got Armour Thyroid.
Buczynski: And hoarseness is also a frequent symptom. The vocal cords become
swollen.
Starr: Well, I wouldn’t say it’s frequent. It certainly isn’t among the top ten, but if you’re
hoarse, it may very well be why you’re hoarse. And I had hoarseness. It was bothersome.
I don’t have it anymore no matter how long I talk which you can tell. I tell everybody I
had to write my book because my friends got tired of listening to me talk.
Buczynski: I think a lot of people are interested in metabolism because it has so much
to do with both energy, the energy of life, and also with weight management. And the
thyroid is the most critical gland in the body to deal with metabolism. Can you give us a
sense of how metabolism is involved here?
Starr: Well, your metabolism can be decreased by 50 percent. I did basal metabolic
studies on 50 consecutive pain patients who had normal THS’s and the average was 15
percent below normal.
One lady was 48 percent below normal—she couldn’t stay awake in my office on our first
visit, and she’d been on thyroid for 30 years before they took her off her thyroid 10 years
earlier because they said her blood tests were normal and she didn’t need it anymore.
There are lots of problems with teeth and jaw bones…that can cause adrenal deficiency
and problems tolerating thyroid if your adrenals are weak, which the endocrinologists and
the mainstream doctors have not been taught whatsoever.
Then, you oftentimes do not tolerate thyroid. And iodine has been used since 1827 in the
treatment of Goiter and thyroid problems, but for the last several decades, the doctors
are not taught to use iodine, or glucose iodine which cures goiters. Glucose iodine was
the first medicine that was used for a specific illness, and that was to cure goiter. So, I’m
sorry it’s so screwed up, but it’s not my fault.
Buczynski: And so, in any of the recent studies…I know you were describing Broda
Barnes’s findings about heart disease, but has anyone followed up his work? He was
saying that cholesterol isn’t what causes heart disease. Cholesterol was a sign that the
person had a thyroid problem, and that when you treated that, the heart disease got better.
Is that a fair summary of what he said?
Starr: Well, as I said, he had a research study that lasted over 30 years. I couldn’t get
copyright for the final, but I do have his twenty-some year study in my book, in which
over 90 percent of heart attacks were avoided in his patient group.
And besides that, Dr. Barnes’s patients had about half the normal rate of cancer because
the immune system is of course necessary to prevent cancer. So anyway, for this
gentleman patient, I put him on one grain of thyroid because steroids greatly suppress
Starr: The glucocorticoids, in general, yeah. And the studies on that are in my book as
well. They’re in Broda Barnes’s book, too, for that matter.
So his thyroid is being suppressed even more than when I put him on one grain and when
I raised him to one and a half grains, he had a fatal heart attack. And that’s not a huge
dose of thyroid, and he was only 49 or 50 years old.
So obviously, he had severe coronary artery disease in addition to all of his other thyroid
symptoms. And fortunately, his wife didn’t sue me because when you give patients
the old-fashioned thyroid who have normal TSH and you have a bad outcome, you’re
susceptible to being attacked by the medical board, or your colleagues, or whomever
because it’s not quote, “the standard of care.”
So if people want to know why there aren’t more doctors who do what I do, it’s because
they like to suspend their hospital privileges and do whatever… if you’re not doing the
standard of care.
Buczynski: Why aren’t there more studies that would validate this perspective?
And one of the doctors after I lectured stood up and said, “Why aren’t there more
studies?”
Well, it’s because the thyroid is cheap. And it cures a whole lot of stuff, and it’s generic,
and if there’s no money in it… that’s the bottom line.
Buczynski: So often we look at adrenal fatigue. It’s the same kind of thing: why don’t
people know more about it? Well, there’s not a lot of pharmaceutical intervention for it,
so it’s not studied. Let’s talk about… you started in our introduction; you alluded to the
idea that environmental toxins play a significant role in hypothyroidism. Let’s flesh that
out some.
Starr: Sure. There are some wonderful studies that came out in the 1990s showing how
scores and scores of common environmental toxins block thyroid function.
The phthalates that cause plastic to be flexible “Scores and scores of common
leach into the water and block thyroid function.
environmental toxins block
PCB’s, dioxins, mercury, arsenic, cadmium,
thyroid function... one of the
aluminum…gosh…there’s just so many
chemicals I can’t go over all of them. main offenders is fluoride.”
But one of the main offenders is fluoride. You know, the halides (a group of minerals
containing one of the halogen elements, such as chlorine, fluorine, bromine, and iodine,
as a building block) are in one column on the periodic chart, and at the top of the halides
column is fluorine. So, it has a higher affinity to the iodine receptors than does iodine.
And one of my good friends, Jerry Tennant and he’s an MD who did his eye surgery
residency at Mass General, was the first doctor to do out-patient eye surgery. He did most
of his research on the computer…the one used for Lasik surgery.
He was teaching Lasik around the world when he became ill, and he was in bed for six
years before he sought integrated medical care and started getting better. His research is
in his recently published book, Healing is Voltage.
But anyway, he didn’t know that thyroid problems aren’t being diagnosed or treated
properly and I didn’t know about voltage, and when we met about three years ago, our
work meshed extremely well, so he’s taken over. He’s such a wonderful researcher.
He’s basically … I told him, my research led to the right guy being on the thyroid
hormone trail because he has research in his new book showing that T4 can be fake T4,
basically it can be replaced by the iodine that attaches to the tyrosine.
It’s not iodine, its fluorine or bromine or chlorine, which are all above iodine in the
periodic charts so they have a higher affinity to the receptor, and we’re being exposed to
fluorine and chlorine, for instance, on a daily basis in our water here in the United States.
And there are lots of naturally occurring areas where the fluorine is high in the water. But
fluorine is a fake T4, and can be converted into a fake T3. So he thinks that’s one of the
main reasons you see people with normal thyroid levels.
And not only does it screw up the thyroid hormone, it damages the thyroid gland. It
causes infiltration that looks a whole lot like Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune
disorder (and the most common cause of hypothyroidism in the United States).
Starr: That’s correct…bad news. And I recommend everybody get Dr. Jerry Tennant’s
new book. It’s called Healing is Voltage, and it’s on Amazon. It’s only on kindle right
now. It just came out this week I think.
But it didn’t take Dr. Tennant long. He’d been studying voltage because voltage and PH
are hard-wired together. PH’s 7 is neutral. Everything below 7 is acidic and has a positive
voltage. (0 is plus 400 millivolts.) Everything alkaline is above 7 to 14 and is a minus
voltage. Negative voltage is able to donate electrons up to almost 400 millivolts at PH
14.
Our bodies work at 7.35, which is about minus 25 millivolts. Healing occurs at minus 50
millivolts and cancer occurs at plus 30 millivolts. 6.04 is when you have DNA damage in
cancer.
And he’d been studying all the causes of low voltage for years before we met. All the
voltage is stored in good fat so 20 percent of your diet has to be high quality fat, because
for instance, you replace every cell in the liver every eight weeks, and every cell in
the brain or nervous system is replaced every eight months according to Dr. Tennant’s
research.
So, in order to make healthy cells, you need “All the voltage is stored in good
a heck of a lot of good fat. And in Broda fat so 20 percent of your diet
Barnes’s book Solve the Riddle of Heart has to be high quality fat... In
Attacks, one of the last chapters was called the order to make healthy cells, you
Demise of the Cholesterol Theory, and that need a lot of good fat.”
was 1976 or 1980 when that was published.
But anyway, there’s a great website, the Weston Price Foundation. The Weston Price
Foundation talks about how important good fats are. It also talks a lot about teeth.
So he and I have become close friends and his research is quite remarkable. He has
something that puts voltage into people called the biomodulater, and it helps increase
the healing… you know you can increase the voltage in people’s organs by using
the acupuncture system. He has merged together the Kabbalah, the Chakras, and the
acupuncture system.
He’s completely figured out the entire electrical system of the body which is a good
enough reason all by itself to buy his book. He’s quite a remarkable man. All of his
illustrations are in his book by the way.
Buczynski: Some of the energy therapists might be particularly interested in his book. So
if you’re treating someone with environmental toxins, would you take any different kind
of approach than if you’re treating someone with any other kind of thyroid problem?
I would say the majority of the people who come to see me… I have something called the
bioelectrical impedance analysis device, a BIA, and I’m sure Dr. Tennant has that in his
book as well. With this, you can measure…how much good fat is in the body.
And when you have a leaky gut because the gut is inflamed from food allergies and
mercury toxicity and so on, you can’t absorb things properly and you’re allergic to almost
everything you eat. So you have to detoxify those patients.
And the teeth… the dentition is a huge part of how I help people get well because
mercury is extremely toxic and it’s not just the mercury itself, but there are 20 different
frequencies associated with the different forms of mercury.
For instance, almost 90 percent of wisdom teeth extractions remain chronically infected
There’s a wonderful book (that I reference in mine…in my adrenal deficiency chapter.
It’s called the Roots of Disease—Connecting Dentistry and Medicine.
A cardiologist wrote that book, along with a dentist. Because the wisdom tooth socket
happens to be at the heart radian and the endocrine radian, they did a study. Almost 90
percent, something like 330 out of 360 wisdom teeth
sockets were infected and that’s gangrene and that’s “Amost 90 percent
just God-awful….That decreases your voltage and your of wisdom teeth
immunity and it’s quite common. Dentists will treat it, extractions remain
but unfortunately, dental boards would like to take their
chronically infected.”
licenses away as well. So it’s a bad situation.
Buczynski: Let’s talk a little bit about, basically, how you started out in the treatment of
pain. You didn’t start out looking at hypothyroidism. How did you get from pain to the
thyroid?
Starr: Well, my teachers in New York knew there was a close correlation. They didn’t
like the diagnosis of fibromyalgia, for instance. I had fibromyalgia even though I wasn’t
disabled. I certainly had tender muscles and all the tender points that are necessary for
the diagnosis, and they said that it was a metabolic problem.
You know, Larry Sonkin said, “It’s not fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia’s a waste basket
diagnosis. This is a metabolic problem.” And sure enough, my tender muscles got a
whole lot better with the thyroid, but they never completely resolved, and it was because
I had chronic infections in my wisdom teeth sockets, and I also had an infection in a root
canal.
So anyway, I went back to Missouri and opened up the pain clinic, and I was poking
everybody’s muscles full of holes and doing the physical therapy the Dr. Kraus spent
60 or 70 years of his 90 years forming protocols for. He treated everyone from Eleanor
Roosevelt and Jonas Salk to Yul Brynner and Katharine Hepburn and John Unitas, and
you go on and on.
He used to see all the ambassadors from the United Nations—they’d come see him when
he was still 90 years old and working. And he was a world famous guy.
Anyway, I did all my own physical therapy because I took insurance at the time and I
wasn’t very well reimbursed, and I didn’t have a huge booming practice because what I
did was quite different and people were skeptical.
But then I would start doing physical therapy, and I could see that they had dry skin
and their extremities were cold and you’d talk to them longer, and yes, they’d had some
depression… and then the myxedema became apparent.
And it took me about two years before I realized that the vast majority of all my pain
patients had low thyroid. And just about that time I found Broda Barnes’s book and it
basically verified everything I suspected, including the pervasiveness of the problem, and
I went from there.
But, gosh, I have professional baseball players out there who couldn’t pitch for two years
and they had elbow and shoulder surgery, but they needed thyroid and they needed their
muscles treated and they needed detoxification, and they’re throwing their 95 mile an
hour fastball again with no pain whatsoever.
Buczynski: And so, let’s get into some of the treatment issues. What would be, in your
view, some of the state of the art treatment for hypothyroidism?
Starr: Well, one thing that’s missing in my book is treatment of Hashimoto’s because
I hadn’t seen that much of it initially, but it’s become rampant. As much as 12 to 15
percent of Americans have thyroid antibodies, and the people whose antibodies are
attacking their own thyroid are the Hashimoto’s type patients.
They don’t have to have just the magic number. If you have an antibody level of 20
verses 40, you don’t have Hashimoto’s when you’re at 20, but you do when you’re at 40
or whatever….I think that’s hogwash. It’s just a man-made number.
Almost anybody who has thyroid antibodies is going to have trouble: first, the majority
of them anyway, because in taking the old-fashioned thyroid, which I talk about so much
in my book, is too much like their own thyroid and it just makes their thyroid antibodies
go higher.
And second, they have to take compounded T4 and T3. The textbooks all say everybody
should have the Synthroid (a synthetic thyroid hormone) and that’s correct, but they also
should have some T3 as well.
And after a period of just weeks or months, you can typically give them one of those
a day or sometimes one every three days, and very, very gradually increase the iodine
because iodine resolves autoimmunity, and it prevents all sorts of allergies.
There’s huge list for iodine and what it can do in my book and most of it is taken from
David Derry. He’s an MD and PhD who did a lot of research on iodine and thyroid. He
has a book called Breast Cancer and Iodine, and that’s an extremely important book
although I wouldn’t say it’s the best written book. But it has some extremely important
information in there.
So I start everybody on some form of iodine if possible because I think one of the main
causes of mild adrenal deficiency is the fact that all of our iodine receptors (and every cell
in the body has iodine receptors and the hormone producing tissues in particular have a
large number of iodine receptors) are full of fluorine, chlorine, and bromine.
Starr: David Brownstein and he has done a lot of research on iodine, and iodine is
extremely important.
Buczynski: Let me just say, David Brownstein will be speaking at our Conference in
Hilton Head this year—the Psychology of Health, Immunity, and Disease Conference.
Dr. Starr will as well, so anyone that can should plan on coming. That’s several months
away, and that gives you some time to plan for a trip to the ocean in Hilton Head, South
Carolina, too.
Many, many of the people we’ve been talking to this year in our teleseminar series
will be coming to that. And yes, I know Dr. Brownstein is very, very concerned about
iodine as an issue. So, what other, beyond that, would you say? What are some other
treatments?
Starr: Sure. My chapter on mild adrenal deficiency, actually the name of the chapter
is Why Patients Don’t tolerate Desiccated Thyroid, and the subtitle is Iodine and Mild
Adrenal Deficiency.
Anyway, if you give an increasing dosage of iodine, which you can’t do with the
Hashimoto’s patients, but most of the Type 2 people you can, and when you do, a lot of
the mild adrenal deficiency will resolve just by using the iodine properly.
And then, you can give them the thyroid without having to worry about their intolerance
because a whole lot of folks, I would say the majority of the patients I see do not tolerate
desiccated thyroid if you don’t give them some other support as well, like desiccated
adrenal, Lugol’s iodine (a solution of elemental iodine and potassium iodide in water),
Prolamine Iodine or whatever… because their adrenals are too stressed out from having
all the poisons in their body.
So anyway, let’s get back to iodine and the teeth. The teeth are so important. And
detoxification, and like I said glandular adrenal stuff is a good starting point. The people
with lots of teeth problems may need a low dose of cortisol, or prednisone if they have
arthritis or asthma.
I have patients that come in who are on prednisone for their autoimmune disease or
asthma, or what have you. And you can’t stop it, you have to slowly… you know, they
may need a little bit long term, but I think if you can… Dr. Tennant for instance, my
friend Jerry Tennant, he has what’s called the Tennant Rules.
It doesn’t matter what illness you have, if you follow his certain set of rules, you get well.
And that’s pretty remarkable, but the body is an amazing machine and if you give it the
proper nutrition and enough energy, and reduce the toxic load and chronic infections, and
the jaw bone and the teeth, then it’s able to heal itself.
And like I said, it doesn’t matter what the illness is, if you follow his paradigm basically,
you can get well. And of course there are exceptions, I see really old folks with no
voltage, and they’re terribly low thyroid, and every tooth in their mouth is metal or
infected, or what have you, and they are a challenge because they can’t afford to get their
teeth fixed and they’re just in the tank. So as I say in my book, it’s a whole lot easier to
help the young before they get to be so severely ill.
Buczynski: Prevention.
Starr: Yes.
Starr: Well, milk, organic meats, organic cage-free eggs, and marine tidal plankton is
probably one of the more important things that are in my armamentarium (the medicines,
equipment, and techniques available to a medical practitioner) but the single celled
marine tidal plankton is extremely well absorbed. You know high in good fats and
probably the most nutritious stuff on the planet. So, I use a lot of Standard Process,
which are organic, whole food vitamins…
Buczynski: Norm Shealy, who is also on NICABM’s board, and has given several
teleseminars and will be speaking again this year in Hilton Head, refers to magnesium
as “the poor man’s valium.” He just says that psychiatrically, magnesium has some
properties that will help elevate mood and should be looked at as the possibility of a
magnesium deficiency if you’re dealing with some of the psychiatric issues.
It’s not good to detoxify somebody when they’re extremely ill—their liver’s not working,
their kidney’s not working very well, their circulation’s poor. So you really have to try
to get them a little bit better before you can try to detoxify them. Although, I’d say, the
Procaine works on everybody. It really turns people around in a hurry— it’s called PD7.
Buczynski: Okay. Now, I imagine that some of the practitioners listening today would
have someone in mind, one of their patients that they’re thinking about, and wondering
if they should have a work-up to see if they have some thyroid issues. How can they
determine a good practitioner to send them to?
“It’s not good to detoxify Starr: Well, I have a list of practitioners, but
somebody when they’re there aren’t that many, because a lot of them
don’t want to be on the list. They want to
extremely ill—their liver’s not
stay under the radar. It’s difficult. That’s why
working, their kidney’s not
I moved away from friends and family—not
working very well, and their from choice, from necessity, to be able to
circulation’s poor.” make a living and work as a doctor.
So people can contact me and I can tell them who I would recommend. My e-mail is
[email protected] and my website is 21centurymed.com. Dr. Tennant’s website
is tennantinstitute.com. So, brodabarnes.org is another good website. What else…
stopthethyroidmadness.com is a good website. aboutthyroid.com is a good website. They
have lists of doctors that patients recommend on those websites.
Buczynski: Thank you. I’m very sorry, but we’re just about out of time. That went by so
fast. I’ve taken lots of notes here today, and I imagine many people listening on the call
here have as well.
I want to thank everyone for being a part of this call. In just a few minutes, we’ll be
sending you an e-mail….to the thousands of people that have been participating here.
And in the e- mail, we’re going to do a couple of things. First of all, we’re going to send
you a link to Mark’s book. The title of the book again is Hypothyroidism Type 2: The
Epidemic, and the author is Mark Starr, MD.
We’re going to send you a link and that will be an easy way for you to check out more
information about it. We’ll put the link to Amazon. If you do want to buy it, that’s
probably the least expensive place to buy. But I’m not pushing that…You could print out
the link and go to your library and see if they’ve got it, or if they’ll be willing to buy it,
but it’s certainly something that you will want to check out.
In addition to that, we’re also going to send you a link to our comment board. Come to
the comment board tonight and tell us how you’re going to use what you heard on this
call. When you do, please put in your first and your last name, your profession, and your
city and state, or country, and then tell us how you’re going to use what you heard, and if
it reminds you of particular patients or symptoms that you’ve seen…
Meanwhile, thank you so much, no matter where you’re calling from, and we have
people that are here today right now from all kinds of time zones listening to this call.
Thank you so much for participating, and Mark, especially to you. Thanks for your work
and I’m looking forward to seeing you in Hilton Head this December, and thanks for
giving us your time on this call.
References:
Brownstein, D. (2009). Iodine: Why You Need it, Why You Can’t Live Without It. Medical
Alternative Press.
Derry, D. (2001). Breast Cancer and Iodine : How to Prevent and How to Survive Breast
Cancer. B.C., Canada: Trafford Publishing.
Kraus, H. (1988). Diagnosis and Treatment of Muscle Pain. Quintessence Pub Co..
Kulacz, R., Levy, T.E., & Jones, J.E. (2002). The Roots of Disease: Connecting Dentistry
& Medicine. Xlibris..