iThei mdcdaelcinfd o c elllllrlllll tcfdohsc dt“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
— Gandhi1: INTRODUCTION
Why Focus on Hashimoto’s?
The easiest answer to this question is I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s
thyroiditis during a routine physical at age twenty-seven.
As a pharmacist, I was trained about the pathophysiology of diseases
as well therapeutic treatments. Our professors always stressed lifestyle
interventions to reduce the need for medications and prevent disease
progression.
People with hypertension were told to eat a low-sodium diet, those with
high cholesterol were supposed to reduce their fat intake, and people
with type 2 diabetes were informed they could reverse their condition by
eating foods with low glycemic indexes and losing weight.
In mild cases of most chronic conditions, we were always taught to rec-
ommend lifestyle interventions first, followed by medication therapy if
the interventions were unsuccessful or if the patient was unwilling to
change.
In advanced cases—and if the benefits of medications outweighed the
risks—the patients would be started on medications in conjunction with
lifestyle interventions.
We also learned patients should be monitored as they made progress to-
ward their goals to see if medication therapy was still warranted.
Thus, I was confused, as there were no mainstream lifestyle interventions
for Hashimoto’s—or any autoimmune conditions, for that matter. The
only intervention recommended by endocrinologists was a pharmacologi-
cal one: to take a supplemental thyroid hormone such as Synthroid®, one of
the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States.
While I was prepared to start Synthroid® in my nineties when my body
would undergo a gradual decrease in thyroid hormone production,
I didn’t feel this medication was sufficient to address my autoimmune