Anthony Williams on thyroid medications

For centuries, it was a popular belief that if a part of your body was sick, you cured it by consuming that part of an animal's body. For example, if your leg was sick, you could eat a leg of lamb to cure it. If your brain or kidney was in trouble, it was believed that you should eat a brain or a kidney, respectively. If someone had an eye problem, they were advised to consume the eyeball of an animal in some way, shape, or recipe. By the way, this was not limited to folk medicine. This was prevalent medical knowledge that doctors studied at the most prestigious medical universities during their training.

The problem with this treatment was that it never worked. The leg, brain, kidney, eye, or other part of the body would continue to deteriorate unless you found another way to treat it—not that it was ever acknowledged. The theory seemed so logical at first glance that it continued to be trusted throughout the Middle Ages for hundreds of years. ( And believe it or not, it still holds true in today’s world of nutritional supplements, where the belief still exists that if you swallow a capsule containing brain material or liver bile, it will somehow help your own brain or liver. ) By the time goiter was becoming a widespread problem in the population due to the Industrial Revolution, it was still a theory that doctors used in their toolkit of treatments. So one doctor decided to see if giving a patient with a goiter dried and ground up pig thyroid would reduce the swelling of the thyroid gland. For the first time in the history of treating human body parts with animal body parts, it worked. In the 19th century, dried thyroid became a common remedy for goiters that you could pick up at the pharmacy. No one knew why this remedy reduced goiters, but they were happy to accept it.

Was it really a miracle cure? No! Thyroid consumption only worked for these early patients because the goiters of the time were caused by a severe iodine deficiency ( due to industrialized food processing, which stripped food of nutrients ), combined with toxic overload from a polluted environment, and pig thyroid offered them a rich source of iodine to balance their health.

Over time, widespread iodine deficiency paved the way for the first wave of the early, evolving Epstein-Barr virus to target the thyroid gland—though the virus was still so weak that only a small dose of iodine, an antiseptic, was needed to kill the troublesome EBV, and the dried pig thyroid provided just that.

Over time, EBV mutated and became stronger, and people developed bigger problems than iodine-deficiency goiters and the less aggressive, low-grade viral goiters—they developed the symptoms of EBV that we discussed in the articles on thyroid diseases . And yet, it seems that the desiccated thyroid made a difference in many of these patients. Why? Not because the medication offered them T4 or T3—that has nothing to do with thyroid hormone replacement. Rather, it was because with the desiccated pig thyroid, medicine unknowingly stumbled upon its first steroid compound. The concentrated hormones in the animal thyroid acted on some patients as an immunosuppressive, anti-inflammatory drug, reducing the swelling of the thyroid gland, reducing other viral symptoms, and making the person appear to get better. In reality, the concoction caused the immune system to stop responding to EBV.

The truth about thyroid hormones

Today's thyroid medications are not far removed from the old ones. Some of these medications are actually still made from dried pig thyroid. Others are synthetic. Either way, current thyroid medications act like steroids just like the ones from the beginning, although many doctors don't realize it, and no one knows that the steroid effect is why some people may experience a little more energy, clarity of mind, and improvements in sleep when they start taking thyroid medication. This is only partial relief of their low-grade viral infections.

Another common reason why some people experience relief or weight loss while taking thyroid medication has nothing to do with the medication itself. As mentioned earlier, the vast majority of people who see these improvements are those who, along with taking the medication, have also changed their diet, switched to supplements, and/or started exercising more. It is this elimination of EBV ’s favorite foods, combined with immune-boosting nutrients and lifestyle changes, that changes these people’s health for the better. ( Taking thyroid medication for years contributes to a sluggish liver and, since the medication is a steroid, to an underactive adrenal gland. These factors usually lead to weight gain in the abdomen and other areas of the body .)

The medical community mistakenly attributes the above improvements to thyroid hormone replacement—when in reality, it has nothing to do with replacing hormones that the body has difficulty producing or converting. Whether animal-derived or synthetic, the hormones in these medications are not bioidentical to human thyroid hormones, meaning they lack key yet-to-be-discovered chemical compounds that distinguish human thyroid hormones. ( In addition, the thyroxine in thyroid medications essentially tricks the pituitary gland into thinking that the thyroid is producing enough of its hormones to meet the body’s needs. )

Think of the difference between synthetic thyroxine, dried animal thyroxine, and human thyroxine as the difference between feeding a baby formula, cow's milk, or breast milk. We now have enough research to know that while some outside sources come close, breast milk cannot be adequately replaced. One day, research will reveal the same for human thyroid hormones. ( The only source that can replace these hormones comes from within the body—a special mixture that the adrenal glands produce to compensate for an underactive thyroid. ) When someone has a bad reaction to thyroid medication, and thousands of people do, it's because their body is so attuned to this difference that it can't tolerate hormones that come from a nonhuman source.

What we need to keep in mind is that whether a person feels better, worse, or the same when taking thyroid medication, they are not prescribed for the thyroid itself – they do not cure it. Many patients are not aware of this. They think that because they went to the doctor and got a prescription to treat thyroid symptoms, the prescription cures the problem itself. In the meantime, EBV can continue to damage the thyroid ( and cause other worsening symptoms ), and the thyroid disease can continue to progress. If you are taking medication for hypothyroidism, you will still have hypothyroidism and you will still have EBV unless you take the express measures that Anthony William discusses in Part III, "Thyroid Resurrection," of his book , The Medium Healer: Thyroid Healing , to get rid of the virus and take care of your thyroid.

This explains why you may continue to gain weight, suffer from hair loss, feel tired, and generally suffer even after you start taking medication for thyroid problems. It's a common experience for millions of people: They diligently take their medication every day, and even though these medications result in thyroid test results that show normal hormone levels, their thyroid gets worse over the years because no one knew to look for the underlying problem and address the real cause.

There are people who have had their thyroids removed and who have not taken any thyroid medication who feel great after getting rid of EBV. There are also people who have taken thyroid medication, with or without a thyroid, and who have not yet gotten rid of EBV who feel terrible. If the better feeling was solely due to thyroid hormones, none of these scenarios would exist – people who have had their thyroids removed would need thyroid medication to function, and everyone who is on thyroid medication would be recovered and healthy. The reality is that it all has to do with the thyroid virus – Epstein-Barr . When EBV is present and active, it will adversely affect someone’s health, regardless of whether they are taking thyroid medication.

Remember the adrenal hormones we covered in the article "The Truth About Thyroid" ? Since the adrenal glands produce adrenaline-like compounds that replace thyroid hormones when they are underactive, your body is essentially making its own medicine. While they are close enough to real thyroid hormones that your body uses them in the same way, they are subtly different enough that blood tests will not pick up on these compounds as thyroid hormones. As a result, doctors will prescribe thyroid medication without knowing that your endocrine system is producing a dose of its own prescription to replace the thyroid's tasks. Where the body really needs help is when we need immune system support to lower our viral load.

While you are taking the steps in this book to get rid of EBV, if you really want to support your thyroid hormones, you can make your own thyroid tonic by following the instructions in Chapter 25, "Thyroid Healing Techniques."

Thyroid medications and TSH readings

It is important to understand the true relationship between TSH readings and thyroid medications because it is often misunderstood.

Here's a common scenario: Your blood test results show a TSH reading of 10.0, which your doctor considers the beginning of a hypothyroid problem and so prescribes medication. After you start taking the medication, you go back for another blood test and this time your reading is in the 4.0 to 5.0 range. It's easy to think that this means your thyroid is healing.

In fact, all that's happening is that the thyroid hormones in your body from the medication are tricking your pituitary gland into thinking you're producing enough hormones, so the pituitary gland will produce less of its own thyroid-stimulating hormone. This lower TSH reading gives you a false sense of security; your thyroid gland itself isn't getting any relief from the medication. According to the way your body really works, your TSH level should still be 10.0. The medication is just masking it.

Over time, because EBV is left untreated and is still highly active in your thyroid, possibly due to triggers in your life, your thyroid function will continue to deteriorate. This means that after a while you will go back to your doctor on medication and those TSH levels will have risen again. It is very likely that your doctor will prescribe you even higher doses of medication. ( If you are someone who does not experience many triggers in your life, your thyroid medication doses may remain stable for a longer period of time before being increased. ) After years, your TSH reading may again reach 10.0 – meaning that without the medications that are clouding the results, it would really be 20.0. Hypothyroidism is not treated with medication, it just appears that way.

This effect of thyroid medication on TSH readings is like putting a Band-Aid on a deep, dirty stab wound. The wound will continue to fester unless it is properly cared for—unless someone says, "Hey, why are you walking around with an infected stab wound?"

Or think of the effect of medication on TSH readings as removing the battery from a smoke detector: while it may be reassuring because the beeping stops, all you've done is turn off the alarm system, not put out the fire.

Thyroid atrophy

It's good to know about one side effect of long-term use of thyroid medication that is completely unknown to medical research and science: in some people, thyroid medication can cause the thyroid to reduce its hormone production, so that the gland slowly atrophies and shrinks over time. Essentially, the medication dulls the thyroid gland.

Just as your muscles need to be used to stay strong, your thyroid needs to do its job regularly to stay in shape. It’s like when a snowstorm keeps you indoors—at first, you might feel frustrated. But if the storm goes on for a while, day after day you get used to the enforced laziness. Staying in your pajamas all day feels more and more comfortable and natural, so when the storm passes, the prospect of getting up and going back to the outside world seems too much. That’s what can happen to your thyroid over time with long-term use of thyroid medication. The thyroid loses some of its desire to produce hormones—it feels stifled, in effect—because the medication tells the pituitary gland that it’s producing enough T4 and T3, so the thyroid doesn’t get the TSH signals to keep it going.

Not that you need to worry. This type of partial thyroid atrophy only happens to some people who have been overtreated with prescription thyroid hormones for several years—it’s not like it happens to everyone who takes thyroid medication. And even when the thyroid medication slows down its work, it will fight back and produce some thyroid hormone regardless. Plus, the thyroid’s radiofrequency, which monitors and promotes homeostasis, will continue to function in the atrophied state. ( Remember, the undiscovered thyroid hormones R5 and R6, which play a role in these frequencies, are virtually impossible to deplete .) Still, it’s one of the possible side effects you should be aware of.

As we have noted in a number of articles, your thyroid is resilient. So you should also know that when you start taking steps to tame EBV and revitalize your thyroid, it brings the intelligence of your thyroid back to life. Your thyroid’s high-tech database is able to overcome the state of atrophy and your thyroid returns to functioning the way it should.

What you need to know about stopping thyroid treatment

If you have made a decision to reduce or stop taking thyroid medication together with your doctor, you need to know some key points.

First, when someone takes a medication, such as a prescription for thyroid medication, the liver automatically absorbs and processes it, as the liver is the body’s protector against all foreign substances. The higher the doses you’ve taken, and the longer you’ve been taking them, the more medication your liver has absorbed and is still holding onto. This is not something that is measured in the doctor’s office – medical research and science still ignore this fact. If you took the liver of someone who had been taking thyroid medication for many years, squeezed it out, dehydrated all that medication that you squeezed out, and put it into capsules, you could fill hundreds of bottles of thyroid medication.

If you’ve just started taking thyroid medication, your blood tests may not register any difference in your hormone levels at first because your liver absorbs most of it very quickly. As a result, over time, your doctor may prescribe higher doses, which will likely continue to be absorbed by your liver. At some point—everyone is different; it could take up to 10 years—the buildup of thyroid medication in your liver can become toxic and burdensome for the organ, and it will slowly start releasing the medication back into your bloodstream, sometimes in intermittent bursts because it’s overwhelmed. When this happens, it will confuse your blood tests, making your doctor think you’re producing more thyroid hormone than you actually are—another reason why they’re just “guess tests” and doctors find themselves constantly having to adjust protocols for many patients.

In many cases, doctors will see that thyroid test results come back with better levels and think that this is due to the thyroid working better, when in reality the reason is that the liver has reached its limit of filling and has started releasing medication back into the bloodstream. However, the medication that is released back into the bloodstream is not as active or potent as it was when you first took it. It is only about 5% of its strength, acting like a band-aid on the body.

And because it is returned to the bloodstream, instead of being swallowed, broken down in the stomach, and absorbed through digestion, your body can have an adverse reaction and you can develop an intolerance to your medication. This can often lead to feeling like you are allergic in some way, such as feeling bloated or having a pounding heart, or having trouble sleeping when you have never had this problem before. When one of these reactions occurs, you often have to switch from synthetic to natural combination medications or vice versa, or even be forced to stop taking your thyroid medication altogether because your body has become too sensitive to it. Even without this spillover effect, thyroid medications taken for an extended period of time — some people take them for more than 20 years — can put additional strain on a liver that has already become sluggish and sluggish from EBV , which over time can lead to more weight gain, among other symptoms.

If you have been taking thyroid medication for a long time, you may want to talk to your doctor about lowering your dosage to allow your liver to detoxify. Be very careful with this and don’t make the decision on your own. Sometimes people decide they want to stop their thyroid medication all at once, which leads to withdrawal episodes. The effect can be overwhelming, with symptoms like fatigue returning immediately. People often conclude that they need the medication, so they go back on it, feeling like they will be addicted for life.

Here's what's really going on with these symptoms: First, there's withdrawal. When someone has been taking steroids for years, the body goes into shock when those drugs suddenly disappear, and the result can be serious physical discomfort. For this reason, doctors know to wean patients off other steroids very slowly, and they shouldn't treat thyroid medications any differently.

Second, when you stop taking thyroid medication suddenly, the liver gets an immediate sense of liberation and releases the old thyroid medication it has absorbed over time back into the bloodstream, often very quickly. With all these hormones suddenly in the bloodstream, the body can react adversely and cause symptoms that people mistakenly label as thyroid medication dependence, but are actually detox symptoms. For someone who has only been on thyroid medication for three months to a year, detoxing may not be as scary—you may only experience a day or a week of feeling a little tired, depending on the dose you were taking. If you have been taking thyroid medication for more than a year, it is especially important to taper off your medication slowly so that you do not overtax your body. This liver detoxification is ultimately beneficial because it helps unclog your liver and prevents you from gaining more weight.

When considering how long a patient’s weaning process should take, doctors should always consider how long someone has been on thyroid medication – this has a real impact on the patient’s health and well-being when they are tapering off their doses. If someone has only been on thyroid medication for two to five years, the dose should be reduced by a quarter at a time over at least two months. If someone has been on thyroid medication for five to ten years, the tapering process should last at least four months. If someone has been on thyroid medication for 10 to 20 years, the tapering process should last at least six months. And if someone has been on thyroid medication for more than 20 years, the tapering process should take at least a year. It is very important to know that regardless of how long patients have been on thyroid medication, their sensitivity should be taken into account. Someone may already be experiencing neurological fatigue or another neurological symptom or condition caused by EBV , which may increase that person's reaction to stopping the medication. If you are a patient who wants to reduce your doses, talk to your doctor about what is best for you.

In the meantime, your thyroid is still producing some of its own hormones, and your adrenal glands are also producing those hormones that don't show up on your tests as a backup. To support them, your goal should be to become proactive in getting EBV out of your system and restoring your thyroid health using the tools in this book so that your thyroid can regain its balance and produce the levels of hormones it was designed to produce. This will support you as the medications leave your system so you have the best chance of feeling great.

Disclosure levels

Some progressive medical professionals have come to understand the limitations of thyroid testing. They have seen patients who have classic symptoms of hypothyroidism and whose tests are within normal limits. These doctors still prescribe thyroid medication to their patients, and sometimes the patients start to feel better. The fact that they are finally being taken seriously and heard in this way is a step forward for patients with thyroid problems.

This is a far cry from the days when a woman would go to the doctor with chronic, mysterious symptoms and be told that everything was fine. "You just need to exercise more," was the advice they received. Or, "Get a hobby. You just have too much free time." This is the kind of misdiagnosis that can make a person lose all confidence in their perceptive abilities.

The new approach is also more enlightened than when a woman went to the doctor with pain, heart palpitations, weight gain, hair loss, memory loss, and confusion and was told it was all due to a hormonal imbalance and that she was going through menopause or perimenopause. This type of diagnosis has led countless women to feel old long before they need to and to believe that suffering is a natural part of aging. (It's not!)

When the thyroid is included in a doctor's assessment of a patient's chronic health problems, that's progress. When that doctor acknowledges that the thyroid may be involved even if tests don't show a problem, or that compounded medications are better than synthetic ones, that's even more progress.

Yet these revelations are not yet fact. These are achievements for the history books. The truths we’ve just uncovered—about how EBV is the real cause of thyroid problems and much more, about what your symptoms really mean, about how thyroid tests work, and about how thyroid medications completely miss and bypass the root cause of your illness—are important to your life right now. The revelation that your thyroid is a messenger, not a problem, is the expert-level knowledge you need to secure a brighter future.

As you progress with your health, it can be easy to get distracted. New theories will emerge, old ones will be updated and reworked, and you may wonder if the thyroid information you hear on TV or read in the latest literature is what you really need to listen to. Remember this: as long as a thyroid theory blames you, your body, or just triggers, it is not correct. Until a treatment goes after the underlying virus, it will not solve anything.

To arm you against so much competing and confusing misinformation, we turn your attention to Part II of Anthony William’s book , “The Healing Medium: Thyroid Healing,” about common misconceptions about chronic disease. By learning about these fundamental misconceptions that hinder the progress of medicine, you will gain new clarity, confidence, and freedom so you can finally 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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