Today’s doctors are afraid that if they connect your weight with your thyroid, you may become a drug-seeker, looking for drugs inappropriately — in this case, looking to get thyroid drugs or taking too many thyroid drugs as a way to lose weight. They fear being lumped into the old category of the diet doctors.
Another reason doctors don’t want to connect thyroid disease with weight gain is that they simply don’t understand very much about nutrition, metabolism, and the thyroid. They know the basic symptom list, they know how to do a thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) test, and they know how to write out prescriptions. But they don’t know about nutrition. You’ve heard the old bromide about how most doctors spend about an hour on nutrition in medical school. Well, in addition to that hour, they spend a couple of hours on thyroid disease, and that completes their education on nutrition and metabolism. The complexities of the endocrine system, the delicate interplay that goes on between hormones, the brain, the stomach, the appetite, and the ability to store and burn fat, are not topics most doctors have studied or even understand.
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