There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk about for a long, long time: the difficulties hypothyroid patients experience in getting properly diagnosed in the UK.
Let’s take two hypothetical patients, one living in Canada, the other in the UK. Both feel tired, are overweight, have inexplicably begun losing their hair, while their nails have gone brittle and brain fog has set in. In both countries, your primary care physician or GP would then run a battery of bloodwork tests to see what was going on. Among other things, they would be looking to see if your thyroid markers were off, causing your metabolism and circulation to slow and your energy to plummet.
The only difference is that if you were in Canada, you would get treatment if your blood levels of thyroid stimulating hormone or TSH was over 2.5 - and in the UK, that same blood marker would have to be 4x higher before you would get any help. If you were exceptionally lucky and had a particularly enlightened physician, you might get help if your TSH was only twice as high.
Put a different way, if you felt exhausted and brain-fogged in Canada, you would need to be 4x as tired in the UK before you would be entitled to treatment.
Why is that? Because the reference ranges doctors use in the UK and elsewhere are not the same.
As a matter of fact, the UK is the great outlier when it comes to getting diagnosed with hypothyroidism. Here’s a sampling of the thyroid reference ranges from around the world. See if you can spot which of these is not like the other.
| Country | TSH Reference Range (mIU/L) |
|---|---|
| Australia | 0.3-2.5 |
| Belgium | 0.3-2.5 |
| Canada | 0.3-2.5 |
| Germany | 0.3-2.5 |
| Sweden | 0.3-2.5 |
| US | 0.3-3.0 |
| UK | 0.5-10.0 |
What this table means is that if you are a Brit living in Australia, you will be given treatment for hypothyroidism at a much earlier stage than if you had stayed living in the UK. What is so cruel about this is that your thyroid tends to perform worse in colder climates, like the UK, than in warmer ones, like Australia. But it also just goes to show what a complete crap shoot the health of your thyroid can be. Why should it take blood levels that are 4x higher than in other EU or Commonwealth countries before a patient is treated for their:
exhaustion
weight gain and sluggish metabolism
elevated cholesterol
brain fog
infertility
depression
cold hands and feet
heart palpitations
breathlessness
fainting, dizziness and low or high blood pressure?
As a patient who suffered with this myself, I know the absolute heartache that can come from any of the above symptoms. Having spoken with others with recurrent miscarriages and babies lost as late as 5 months (which means the mother is delivering the baby), this is something we patients need to have addressed now or, at the very least, know about so we can individually get the help we need to recover.
My next article will be on the difference between T4, the raw thyroid hormone and what the synthetic drug levothyroxine is replicating, and T3, the active thyroid hormone every cell in your body has receptors for, and why it’s important to know if you can actually convert T4 into the bioavailable T3.
Have you or a loved one suffered from hypothyroidism and struggled to get diagnosed? Leave a comment below. Only by sharing stories can we help one another to recover.
Photo credit: Hans-Peter Gauster, Unsplash