Hypothyroidism Mark Star 7-28-10

Hypothyroidism: A Rapidly Growing Epidemic

A Teleseminar Session withMark Starr, MD

and Ruth Buczynski, PhD

The National Institute for the Clinical Application of

Behavioral Medicinenicabmwww.nicabm.com

http://www.nicabm.com

Hypothyroidism: A Rapidly Growing Epidemic 2

The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicinewww.nicabm.com

A complete transcript of a Teleseminar Session featuring Mark Starr, MD and conducted by Ruth Buczynski, PhD of NICABM


Contents:

Why Thyroid Function Is So Critical to Optimal Health and Mental Health ....................................... 3

What Happens When the Thyroid Malfunctions ..................................... 6

Type 1 vs. Type 2 Hypothyroidism – Why it Matters ............................... 8

How the Thyroid Influences Immunity .................................................. 10

The Thyroid and the Body’s Metabolism .............................................. 13

The Effects of Environmental Toxins on Patients with Hypothyroidism........................................................... 16

From the Treatment of Pain to Hypothyroidism ................................... 20

State-of-the-Art Treatment for Hypothyroidism .................................... 21


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with Mark Starr, MD and Ruth Buczynski, PhD

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.

Dr. Mark Starr: Thanks, glad to be here.

Buczynski: And let’s get started right away by talking about why thyroid function is so critical to both optimal health and mental health.

Why Thyroid Function Is So Critical to 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.




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I studied with a couple of wonderful doctors in New York City—one who was an orthopedic surgeon and President Kennedy’s last pain doctor who got rid of President Kennedy’s back pain after three failed back surgeries. His name was Hans Kraus. He wrote the book, Diagnosis and Treatment of Muscle Pain. He was an Olympic ski doctor for decades, and he worked very closely with a couple of endocrinologists, and that’s how he got to be President Kennedy’s pain doctor—because Gene Cohen was an endocrinologist at the New York Hospital Endocrinology Clinic, and he and Dr. Larry Sonkin, who was my teacher, was an MD PhD at the New York Hospital Endocrinology Clinic, and those three knew that pain and hormones were very closely related.

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.

“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 a myriad of symptoms can result.”



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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.





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Metabolism is the transformation by which energy is made available to the organism. Appendix A in my book shows all the known functions of thyroid hormone, and there are many—it increases the transcriptions of large numbers of genes, enzymes, proteins…without enough thyroid, the most common symptoms are fatigue and weakness, cold intolerance, joint and muscle pain, depression, any mental illness can be low thyroid… Buczynski: So frequently a psychotherapist might be treating someone who isn’t responding to therapy, and perhaps the problem is that they look like they’re depressed, but they may need to have a work-up to determine if they have hypothyroidism.

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?

What Happens When the Thyroid Malfunctions

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.

“Metabolism is the transformation by which energy is made available to the organism. Without enough thyroid, the most common symptoms are fatigue and weakness, cold intolerance, joint and muscle pain, and depression...”



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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 older research by the prominent doctors in my book, and it is a very accurate way of detecting 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.

That’s one of the main points in the book—the fact that the blood tests are missing so many millions of people and that the basal temperature is a good test to determine whether or not you’re low thyroid.

“Basal temperature is a very accurate way of detecting low thyroid.”

“The blood tests are missing so many millions of people and the basal temperature is a good test to determine whether or not you’re low thyroid.”





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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?

Type 1 vs. Type 2 Hypothyroidism – Why it Matters

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.

Starr: That’s correct. Buczynski: And what’s unfortunate is that 90 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?

“About 90 percent of the people who are low thyroid are Type 2 and are not being treated or diagnosed properly.”



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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.

Buczynski: And is there a typical age of onset or is it fairly random?

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.





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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 years of treating thousands of patients. He had a total of four. So the death rate from infections went down 56 percent in Graz, Austria between 1930 and 1970, and heart attacks went from 1 in 125 to 1 in 14—they increased 915 percent!

Buczynski: So people lived longer because they weren’t dying of cholera and malaria 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?

How the Thyroid Influences 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.

Medical doctors are not taught to test for heavy metals and poisons in the body. It’s not in their paradigm, but it’s rampant. I have a study in my book done by the Environmental Working Group that showed umbilical cord toxins in women who were giving birth. They tested 10 women around the country, the United States,

“People lived longer because they weren’t dying of cholera and malaria and tuberculosis, 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.”

“The immune system is very energy intensive.”



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who were all giving birth and they tested the sophisticated testing on the fetal blood—the cord blood. The women averaged 200 toxins—most of which were neurotoxins, carcinogens, and others that cause birth defects, and a lot of them had all three. So they are not kind toxins that the fetus is being bathed in these days. 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.

Myxedema is the medical term for low thyroid and it is, according to the textbooks, thyroprival and pathognomonic -- which means if you have myxedema, you have low thyroid.

And there are a whole lot of folks out there who have myxedema and are walking around and nobody, including the doctors, has a clue that they’re low thyroid.

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

“Medical doctors are not taught to test for heavy metals and poisons in the body. It’s not in their paradigm, but it’s rampant.”

“There are a whole lot of folks out there walking around with myxedema, and nobody, including the doctors, has a clue that they’re low thyroid.”





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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.

And they also had before-and-after-treatment illustrations, as I have a number of them in my book. I have so many people that read my book, they say, gosh Dr. Starr, I go to the mall and I see all these people who have myxedema, and I say, “Yeah, and I’m sorry the doctors don’t know that as well.”

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…

Buczynski: Or thinning of the hair…

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 difficulties—Dr. Barnes has studies showing 90 percent of the menstrual difficulties resolve with low thyroid, and Dr. Hertoghe’s study from the 1990s, shows how they reduced the incidence of 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

“A study from the 1990s, shows how they reduced the incidence of depression by two thirds just by putting them on desiccated thyroid.”



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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?

The Thyroid and the Body’s Metabolism

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.

So metabolism increases, back to normal, once you give these people the proper thyroid treatment. It’s a lot more complicated than that unfortunately because we’re so full of poisons these days and teeth are a big issue when it comes to health.

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

“Metabolism increases, back to normal, once you give the proper thyroid treatment.”





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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 we were just about to blame you…

Starr: My cold intolerance is gone, my joint and muscle pain is gone, my dry skin is gone—it really is remarkable how you can reverse patients’ health with the proper usage of thyroid.

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.

He compared them to the Framingham Study, so the average number of patients per decade had to have been in the study for at least two years. In my epilogue, I do have my treatment results.

I have now had three patients who have had heart attacks in my 14 years of using thyroid. All three were just starting their thyroid treatment. One had stage four brain cancer….He was on a big dose of Decadron to decrease the swelling in his brain. He’d had chronic sinus infections, premature greying of his hair, severe acne as a teen, and a number of other thyroid symptoms his whole life.

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

“It really is remarkable how you can reverse patients’ health with the proper usage of thyroid.”

“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.”



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thyroid function, all aspects of thyroid function.

Buczynski: The Decadron.

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?

Starr: Well, I spoke in Stockholm last September to the endocrinologists at Karolinska Institute and they promptly declared there wasn’t any such thing as Type 2 hypothyroidism, but they did lower the TSH required to diagnose low thyroid from 3.0 to 2.5. It happens to be 10.0—you have to have a TSH of 10.0 in order to require treatment in Great Britain, and it’s 4.2 in America. 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.





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The Effects of Environmental Toxins on Patients with Hypothyroidism

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 leach into the water and block thyroid function. PCB’s, dioxins, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum…gosh…there’s just so many chemicals I can’t go over all of them.

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

“Scores and scores of common environmental toxins block thyroid function... one of the main offenders is fluoride.”



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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).

Buczynski: So he’s saying that the fluoride that’s in our water is masking the test’s ability to pick up hypothyroidism.

Starr: That’s correct.

Buczynski: And it’s also at the same time, harming the thyroid.

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 a heck of a lot of good fat. And in Broda Barnes’s book Solve the Riddle of Heart Attacks, one of the last chapters was called the Demise of the Cholesterol Theory, and that was 1976 or 1980 when that was published.

But anyway, there’s a great website, the Weston Price Foundation. The Weston Price

“The fluoride that’s in our water is masking the test’s ability to pick up hypothyroidism. And it’s also at the same time, harming the thyroid.”

“All the voltage is stored in good fat so 20 percent of your diet has to be high quality fat... In order to make healthy cells, you need a lot of good fat.”





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Foundation talks about how important good fats are. It also talks a lot about teeth.

I’m getting off the subject, but Dr. Tennant didn’t take long, once he found out about the thyroid, to realize that the number one cause of low voltage is low thyroid. And when you replace the thyroid, the voltage starts increasing quite rapidly…with the right type of thyroid anyway.

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?

Starr: Well, pretty much everyone is toxic these days, and I often have to start with trying to help detoxify the patient and get their liver working again and their gut is extremely important.

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.

“The number one cause of low voltage is low thyroid. And when you replace the thyroid, the voltage starts increasing quite rapidly…”

“Pretty much everyone is toxic these days.”



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And even if you get rid of most of the mercury, you still may have the frequencies, and it takes a whole body wash with Procaine to get rid of those mercury frequencies.

You do the Procaine wash with gauze and Procaine on it once a week, or once every two weeks for six or seven months to help

detoxify the body. There’s a wonderful dentist in Spokane who has a whole protocol for detoxifying the body with just vitamin supplements. He calls it PD7—it has Procaine, DMSO, and 7 other things in it. And I give this to all the children and adults I see. It helps get rid of infections in the mouth as well. 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 just God-awful….That decreases your voltage and your immunity and it’s quite common. Dentists will treat it, but unfortunately, dental boards would like to take their 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?

From the Treatment of Pain to Hypothyroidism

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

“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.”

“Amost 90 percent of wisdom teeth extractions remain chronically infected.”





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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.

I knocked out a front tooth in a motorcycle accident when I was 20, and that was chronically infected. And so those nasty infections will certainly cause joint and muscle pain. The more severe the arthritis and pain, the more I’m sure that there’s a dental problem associated.

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.

So I did all my own physical therapy and spent a long time with my patients. At first I would ask them if they had depression, dry skin, high cholesterol, you know…some of the major symptoms of low thyroid and they would say no.

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.

“It’s not fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia’s a waste basket diagnosis. This is a metabolic problem.”

“The more severe the arthritis and pain, the more I’m sure that there’s an associated dental problem.”



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So after five years, I had to close my practice because the insurance companies wouldn’t pay me and the primary care doctors and a lot of the other doctors didn’t like what I was doing, so now I have a homeopathic license in Arizona and I have a homeopathic MD. There are only three states with homeopathic medical licenses, so I’m not under the auspices of the federal and state medical boards, which try to keep close wraps on what I talk about in my book.

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?

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.

“I would start doing physical therapy, and I could see that they had dry skin and their extremities were cold... they’d had some depression… and then the myxedema became apparent. It took me about two years before I realized that the vast majority of all my pain patients had low thyroid.”





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I can’t tell you how many patients I’ve seen and Dr. Sonkin used to put patients on T4 and then he’d add T3 and he said he would watch them bloom—and that’s true because a whole lot of people can’t convert T4 to T3 and there are all sorts of other issues involved. But the people with Hashimoto’s typically need compounded T4 and T3. Iodine is crucial in all thyroid patients, but a lot of the people with thyroid antibodies do not tolerate iodine whatsoever. If you start detoxifying them, there’s something offered by Standard Process Vitamins called Iodomere, and that has 200 micrograms in a whole food type of vitamin.

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.

You know, basically, iodized table salt doesn’t do squat. It’s poorly absorbed and it’ll prevent most goiters, but that’s about it. So there’s another book, Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It. It’s a good book. (I have a lot of references in my book.)

Buczynski: Who was the author of that other book?

“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. Almost anybody who has thyroid antibodies is going to have trouble.”

“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 are full of fluorine, chlorine, and bromine.”



23




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.

I say if iodine doesn’t resolve their mild adrenal deficiency, then they probably have an infection in their mouth. And I learned how to do muscle testing 10 years ago and I do muscle testing. I used to send off urines, 24-hour urines for the adrenal steroids. I used to send off food allergy testing, and I used to do all sorts of stuff, but I just do muscle testing more these days. And it’s a

“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...”





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whole lot easier to tell what works when you can do kinesiology. I know it’s not accepted and it’s not exactly scientific, but as far as clinical treatment goes, it (muscle testing) certainly has helped me determine what patients need.

And it doesn’t work all the time, like nothing works all the time, but it certainly helps keep my cell phone from ringing. And I see a whole lot of sick people and I just went on vacation for a week and I think I only had one or two problems the whole week.

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.

“If iodine doesn’t resolve their mild adrenal deficiency, then they probably have an infection in their mouth. As far as clinical treatment goes, muscle testing certainly has helped me determine what patients need.”



25




Buczynski: How about diet? Is there anything that you would say about diet and treatment?

Starr: Well, the most important thing is that they get plenty of good fats.

Buczynski: Okay, and what would you consider good fats?

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: You talk about magnesium in your book.

Starr: Yes. Yes, magnesium’s extremely important. One of my friends is Carolyn Bean. She has a book, The Miracle of Magnesium. Magnesium helps, gosh, you can get depressed from just being magnesium deficient, and have heart disease and high blood pressure.

There are 300 enzymes in the body that are magnesium dependent. I often see people with bad stomachs. I have a topical magnesium oil or gel. I can’t think of the company right now, but there’s some good topical magnesium because if you take too much orally, especially if you have a bad stomach, it cause diarrhea, like milk of magnesium…so giving it topically is a good choice for a lot of the sick people I see…

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.

“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... then it’s able to heal itself. It’s a whole lot easier to help the young before they get to be so severely ill .”

“The single celled marine tidal plankton is extremely well absorbed... high in good fats and probably the most nutritious stuff on the planet.





26


Starr: Right. And if you’re magnesium deficient, then your heart is much more irritable, and when you give patients desiccated thyroid, they can have an irregular heart beat, or atria fibrillation, so you have to be careful.

You have to give the patients magnesium as well as the iodine, and glandular adrenal support before you start your thyroid (treatment). Or even their T4 and T3—even Hashimoto patients need desiccated adrenal and other support things so they can tolerate the synthetic thyroid.

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?

Starr: Well, I have a list of practitioners, but there aren’t that many, because a lot of them don’t want to be on the list. They want to stay under the radar. It’s difficult. That’s why I moved away from friends and family—not from choice, from necessity, to be able to 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.

“Magnesium’s extremely important. There are 300 enzymes in the body that are magnesium dependent.”

“It’s not good to detoxify somebody when they’re extremely ill—their liver’s not working, their kidney’s not working very well, and their circulation’s poor.”



27




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.

Starr: You’re welcome, glad to be here.

Buczynski: And you take care… goodnight everyone.





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References:

Barnes, B. (1976). Hypothyroidism: the Unsuspected Illness . HarperCollins.

Barnes, B. (1976). Solved the Riddle of Heart Attacks. Fries Communications.

Brownstein, D. (2009). Iodine: Why You Need it, Why You Can’t Live Without It. Medical Alternative Press.

Dean, C. (2007). The Magnesium Miracle. NY: Ballantine Books.

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..

Tennant, J.L. (2010). Healing is Voltage: The Handbook. CreateSpace.



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Hypothyroidism Type 2: The Epidemic

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Dr. Mark Starr graduated from the University of Missouri Medical School in 1990. He finished his residency in Physi-cal Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Missouri, Rusk Rehabilita-tion Center in 1994. For the following two years, he studied in New York City with several of the world’s premier pain specialists. In addition to continued study, Dr. Starr received treatments for his chronic back and neck pain. During this time, Dr. Starr also studied with Dr. Sonkin, a re-nowned New York Hospital-Cornell Med-ical Center endocrinologist, who worked closely with Dr. Kraus for thirty years.

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