74 Achieving pH Balance to Treat Specific Ailments
By the time I was thirty, my eyes had become oversensitive to light.
Even in winter on a gray day I wore sunglasses and left them on when
entering a store because of the glare from the fl uorescent lights. During
the winter I caught one viral infection after another. Each infection
lasted for two weeks, and my canker sores had become so painful they
kept me in bed for days.
In trying to heal myself, I ignored the role of the thyroid in regulat-
ing the energy needs of the body—until treating each symptom sepa-
rately no longer worked. Like a mechanic who repairs first one
broken-down part of a car and then another, I had treated each mal-
functioning organ as a separate entity. Now I took the reverse approach.
I recognized that all my health problems were due to a single cause: low
thyroid function.
I took the basal thermometer test, a method for testing thyroid func-
tion discovered by Dr. Broda Barrens. Hundreds of studies in England
have verifi ed that this test is a far more reliable measurement of an
underactive thyroid than testing the thyroid stimulating hormone
(TSH) blood levels.^1 My waking temperature, which was 96.1, con-
fi rmed that I had extremely low thyroid function. A blood test, showing
my TSH blood level to be 20—far too high—thus confi rmed my
depressed thyroid function as revealed by my low body temperature.
I took thyroid medication, fi rst synthroid and then thyroxin, for
more than a year but developed allergic reactions to both medications.
They made me feel restless, and my hair stood on end as though an
electric current were running through it. Once I went off all thyroid
medications, my thyroid symptoms returned. I was frightened until an
idea out of the blue struck me: maybe my depressed thyroid was caused
by an allergic reaction to certain foods. Aware that the foods and/or
beverages consumed most often are the offending allergens, I reduced
the number of cups of tea I drank every day from fi fteen to one. Since
then I have not been plagued by canker sores, fatigue, viral infections,
or eye sensitivity. Confi rming that an allergy to tea was the cause of my
slow thyroid was the fact that my below-normal basal temperature had
gone up to 98.5. The irony is that although a slow thyroid was undoubt-
edly at the root of my “lazy baby” syndrome, my thyroid must have
normalized by the time I became an adult but then was being “held
down” by my overconsumption of tea.