Читать книгу The Healthy Thyroid: What you can do to prevent and alleviate thyroid imbalance - Patsy Westcott - Страница 7

During the writing of the first edition of this book more than seven years ago, there was little awareness – even among journalists specializing in women’s health – of just how common thyroid problems are and of the misery they can cause. A small request for help placed in The Guardian newspaper resulted in a deluge of phone calls: 200 over two days.

Revisiting thyroid problems now, has anything changed? The good news is that there has been a shift in knowledge and attitudes. A great deal more is becoming understood in terms of how thyroid problems are caused and how they may best be treated. And certainly, many more people are now aware of thyroid disease than in 1995.

Part of this new awareness is thanks to a number of books drawing attention to the wide-ranging effects of thyroid problems and the misery they can cause. The advent of the Internet has also done much to fill the information gap. There are now several excellent websites where women with thyroid problems can get information and communicate with others who have the same condition. This is good news for the millions of women living with a faulty thyroid.

However, in other aspects, the changes have been pitifully few. Thyroid disease is still a ‘Cinderella’ disorder, despite being the cause of so much depression, tiredness, discomfort and feeling well below par. Even nowadays, women often soldier on for long periods before anyone takes their complaints seriously – hardly surprising given that the average medical student only has a lecture or two on thyroid problems, if they’re lucky. And although there are more post-training courses for interested doctors, endocrinology (the study of hormones) is still not a core subject in most basic medical courses.

Like their ‘sisters’ in 1995, many of the women interviewed for this new edition had struggled on for months, even years, with crippling symptoms before being diagnosed. Once diagnosed, they had to cope with unsympathetic doctors and endure treatments that were uncertain, took time to get right and sometimes didn’t work at all.

Just like seven years ago, many women also spoke of the dilemmas posed by treatment – how long it had taken for medications to start working, the uncertainty of their effects, the agony of deciding whether to opt for surgery or radioiodine therapy, or whether different forms of medication might be more effective. All related stories of how difficult it was to obtain relevant information and how alone they felt with this unpredictable disease.

Others told poignant stories of how the disease had affected their daily lives and relationships in the face of the pressures of holding down a job while battling overwhelming fatigue, the difficulties encountered with partners, friends and children who did not always understand why the person they loved had undergone such a major personality change, of being overweight or underweight, of the self-consciousness endured because of bulging eyes, thinning hair and thickened skin, and the effects these had on their self-esteem. Some described the heartache of not being recognized by friends they had not seen for some time.

These physical problems are often dismissed as trivial but, in a world where the pressure to look young and attractive is intense, they can become the cause of a huge amount of distress and self-loathing. They can also lead to other women’s health problems such as eating disorders.