Thyroid diseases - how it all starts

In the late 19th century, the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) was still a relatively new virus and not very common. Back then, the pathogen wasn't very contagious or aggressive—you had to have direct contact with someone who had an active EBV infection to get infected, and those active infections were quite rare. At the time, EBV could live in a dormant state in someone's entire life without causing any problems or symptoms.

That's because EBV started out as a productive virus. Modern medicine is only now beginning to document the possibility of beneficial viruses. In the future, researchers will find that this is much more than a possibility—it's a reality. That's right! Just as we have "good" bacteria that help keep us healthy, there are also "good" viruses. These are docile, beneficial pathogens that we carry around with us and that help keep our immune systems functioning optimally. EBV was once one of them. In its early stages of development, before it had undergone any mutations, EBV was a benign virus that was on our side and did no harm. In fact, it even helped remove toxic waste from our bodies. Before the late 18th century, the waste in our bodies was mostly a byproduct of natural bodily functions; the rest came from the food we ate, plus some heavy metals in their early, unaltered forms. EBV used to be our friend, cleaning up toxins throughout the body, including in and around the liver, spleen, intestinal tract, lymphatic system, and even the bloodstream, so they wouldn't harm us. But then EBV turned to the dark side—though the virus wasn't to blame.

Two waves of modernization transformed EBV into what it is today. First came the Industrial Revolution. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, humanity began manipulating chemical compounds as never before in its history, using toxic heavy metals in new ways, generating powerful chemical reactions that were then burned and discarded, releasing various pollutants into our air and water supplies. As these toxins entered our bodies, EBV found new food. The virus had still been docile and helpful, cleaning up toxins to protect us, but these new toxins of the Industrial Revolution began to poison it. To protect itself, the virus secreted them in an even more toxic form, because viral processing increased their potency. EBV cells entered a cycle of re-consuming these poisons, and it became a survival of the fittest. EBV cells that are able to withstand the processed and re-consumed toxins survive and multiply, while weaker viral cells die. While it still tries to be on our side, EBV has now had to fend for itself, making it stronger than ever.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a wave of experimental fungicides, herbicides, and antibiotics (preceding the discovery and boom of penicillin). They contained hazardous ingredients like arsenic, copper, lead, and petroleum. These early, crude chemicals, newly synthesized in laboratories for industrial use, as well as fungi and molds grown on petroleum waste from the oil and gas industries, turned out to be just the fuel to breathe new life into EBV . Some of the crude antibiotics became early pharmaceutical drugs. You never learned about this in history class or medical school because it’s not public knowledge, but it took decades of reckless, failed lab experiments with toxic compounds to finally discover penicillin. Barrels of dangerous chemicals were literally dropped off for free on farms across the country, rather than being sold in stores or advertised in the media. Although these facts remain undocumented, they mark the beginning of the mass spraying of every food grown in the field. (This was well before the Green Revolution in industrial food production; this unknown chemical era predates even the early phase of Green Revolution research and development by 50 years.)

Although it was hidden from them, people's exposure to these chemicals was widespread - their food, medicine and water sources were contaminated, and as a result, EBV in their bodies got what it needed to grow in waves, and with it other pathogens, such as the first variant of EBV's cofactor - streptococcal bacteria . In other words, these dangerous chemicals gave the virus exactly what it needed to "go wild" and wage war on the immune system, initiating the first cases of infectious mononucleosis, or so-called glandular fever. Suddenly, not only did individual cases of EBV go from harmless to problematic as EBV developed a taste for industrialized, laboratory-developed chemicals, but now the amplified, mutated virus was spreading through the population at a much faster rate. Like a friend turned against us, EBV had become our enemy.

It took decades for the effects of this change to manifest themselves on a large scale. Because of EBV’s ability to lie dormant for years, where it can spend years quietly replicating while waiting for the perfect trigger to make its next move, the time it took for these early, unproductive strains of EBV to manifest itself was considerable. A few cases of thyroid swelling from still-weak EBV combined with iodine deficiency led to the identification of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis in the early 20th century (not that scientists had identified EBV as the cause). It wasn’t until the early 1940s that people began to suffer from the hot flashes, aches, brain fog , mysterious infertility, hair loss, and chronic fatigue that EBV typically experiences when it wakes up from its hibernation. Around 1950 EBV symptoms are reaching epidemic levels – what Anthony William calls epic – because of the enormous impact on society and public health. The sufferers are people born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when EBV was gaining momentum in the population. They are now experiencing its effects without knowing the real cause.

Women were flocking to the doctor in search of answers. Yet medical research and science didn't have the diagnostic tools or framework to explain to themselves or their patients what was happening. It was a terrifying time. No one could understand why so many middle-aged women were suddenly feeling so unwell, leading to misdiagnoses like "confused woman syndrome" and scathing accusations like "it's all in your head"—echoes of the "hysterical" that women had been stigmatized with for thousands of years.

As the women's mysterious symptoms continued to accumulate and progress, it became increasingly difficult to dismiss their suffering as laziness or an overactive imagination. Coincidentally, pharmaceutical science was beginning to focus on hormone research at the time, and so experts began to connect the two. In some women, they misdiagnosed EBV symptoms as hormonal imbalances caused by menopause. In others, they misdiagnosed the same symptoms as thyroid hormone imbalances. In some women, both diagnoses were made.

Despite these diagnoses, because they didn’t provide the real answers, their treatment didn’t improve the women’s condition. In the years that followed, the mysterious symptoms in the population continued to pile up, with new diagnoses emerging to explain them: multiple sclerosis , perimenopause, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome , which at the time was called “yuppie syndrome,” fibromyalgia, and more. Now chronic disease experts are trying to solve the mystery by claiming that the thyroid was the problem everyone was looking for. But that’s not the case. As we now know well thanks to Anthony William, the cause all along was the Epstein-Barr virus .

In most cases, your doctor will not be able to identify EBV as a problem because current medical information still states that if a test does not detect active EBV in your blood, then the virus is not to blame for your illness. Even if EBV is detected, it is likely that it will not be identified as the source of your health problems because the medical community has not yet learned what all the symptoms of EBV are. So far, they have been able to identify the flu-like symptoms of mononucleosis, such as fatigue, fever, and swollen glands. They do not yet have a complete list of EBV symptoms that appear after the mononucleosis stage because they do not even suspect that there are symptoms after mononucleosis. They have no idea that your health problems are related to this virus.

It is very common to hear that your blood test results show antibodies, proving a past EBV infection and that therefore the virus is no longer a problem. Don’t let this fool you. EBV tests simply aren’t yet sophisticated enough to detect the virus after it has progressed to the post-mononucleosis stage, which is when the virus really starts to cause problems. You can read more about the stages of EBV in the article “THE TRUTH ABOUT THE THYROID GLAND” .

Yes, the thyroid epidemic is real – millions of people around the world struggle with conditions because their thyroid is compromised. But that doesn’t explain why these people are suffering. It doesn’t explain the myriad of symptoms that cause people to live lives that are incomplete. Rather, the thyroid problem is a big, giant arrow pointing to a much bigger problem: EBV. The thyroid, in this situation, is the undeservedly blamed victim.

If people knew that it wasn't their thyroid that was to blame, they would have a much different view of their body's ability to perform miracles and their prospects for healing. Instead of focusing their anger on their thyroid, they would appreciate it even more.

This is extremely important information to keep close to you, because modern medical explanations for hormonal imbalances and thyroid disease leave countless people feeling like they can’t trust their bodies. It’s also very common for patients with compromised thyroids to suffer from a host of health problems, leading them to think that something is fundamentally wrong with them because they haven’t yet realized that EBV is at the root of it all. They feel betrayed, defective, weak, when in fact it’s the exact opposite. Your body is fighting for you. Your body is on your side. Your body loves you unconditionally. What you’re experiencing is that it’s facing a devastating adversary in the form of EBV – although it can be tamed with the approach you’ll find in The Healer Medium’s books .

Realizing this truth, and all the knowledge you have gained so far about what thyroid disease really is, how it occurs, and how it works, is a huge step toward healing from any such condition and its associated problems. You did not cause the disease yourself. Your body did not fail you. You are not to blame for this. You can move forward. You can heal yourself.

The article uses materials from Anthony William's book "Healing the Thyroid Gland" . More articles on the topic are coming soon to our blog!

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