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One of the doctors who spoke at a conference a few years ago went through the history of "scientific knowledge" about the thyroid ~ he pointed out that at one point, the theory was that our thyroid was a BAG OF WORMS in our throat!!
” title=”Very Happy” /> YEP, I’m glad to have been born in this modern age!!HEY everyone! I found this online and copied only a section of the whole document. I believe it was written around the1940’s. I find his very interesting because the onset of my Grave’s didn’t occur until I had been assaulted by my now-ex husband while I was pregnant, then several months later gave birth to my son and he passed away during delivery. I find it intriguing that even back then doctors made the correlation between mental stress and Grave’s disease. Back in the day before modern medicine and technology, people with hyperthyroid and Grave’s disease didn’t have meds or treatments to control their level, so people became mentally insane and developed an array of debilitating mental conditions. Usually these people were put into insane asylums because the lack of knowledge and proven treatments. WOW! Imagine that happening to us now days. Your levels start to rise and before you know it..you hear voices and start seeing things. I am so happy that modern medicine has come so far! THANK GOD. It’s so cool to read about how science is so intricate and amazing. Look at how far we have come. When you’re having a bad day …be thankful you live in this day in age and not back then!
Life Situations, Emotions, and Graves’ DiseaseTHEODORE LIDZ, M.D., and JOHN C. WHITEHORN, M.D.
A relationship between severe emotional shock
and the onset of hyperthyroidism had been
noted by clinicians since the first descriptions of the
disease entity (3, 5, 6, 12). Cases in which the illness
starts immediately after a severe shock continue
to be seen, as exemplified by a Negro who
became hyperthyroid after he had accidentally killed
a white man with his automobile and became
haunted by memories of a lynching witnessed during
childhood, or by a young woman who showed
the first signs of the illness after her fiance was
killed on the day before the wedding with his
funeral taking the place of the ceremony. However,
when it is realized that emotional disturbances can
be just as profound even when not so blatant, it is
found that emotional stresses of considerable severity
precede the onset of hyperthyroidism in over 90 per
cent of the cases. A young woman became ill when
her plan to leave her irresponsible husband and
return to mother, a decision reached after great inner
turmoil, was suddenly disrupted by recognition of
pregnancy; an adolescent finally summoned courage
to run away from his brutal father and paranoid
grandmother to fulfill his dreams of rejoining his
mother, only to find himself rejected by the mother
and forced to recognize that she had never been
interested in him; a middle-aged woman developed
Graves’ disease when abandoned by the nephew she
had raised as a son just at the time that her oldest
sister, who had raised her, was dying. Such relationships
between emotional stress and the precipitation
of Graves’ disease were amply illustrated
in the past, but the careful clinical studies had little
influence upon treatment and investigation, probably
because the concepts did not correlate with the
dominant trends of scientific thought (1, 4, 7, 10).
It is not particularly surprising to find emotional
stress as a causative factor in a condition in which
From the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine, The
Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, Baltimore,
Maryland.
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for
Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, December 2, 1949.
This paper will be published in "Life Stress and Bodily
Disease. Proceedings of the Association for Research in
Nervous and Mental Disease of the 29th Annual Meeting,
December 2 and 3, 1949." Vol. 29, Baltimore, Williams and
Wilkins, 1950.
the clinical picture mimics the expression of fear
and terror, and which has been described as "crystallized
fright." One might conjecture that the thyroid
gland plays a role in the chain of physiologic mobilization
for prolonged stress, perhaps by implementing
the short-lived effects from the adrenal medulla
by sensitizing to epinephrin and by mobilizing
energy for more lasting needs through promotion
of tissue catabolism.
The studies of hyperthyroid patients carried out
according to the concepts of dynamic psychiatry by
Mittelmann ( n ) and by Conrad (2) and ourselves
(
led to closely related findings which carry
beyond the simple correlation between acute emotional
stress and the onset of the illness. Rather
specific regularities have been found as to the type
of trauma or emotional stress which precedes the
onset of hyperthyroidism. Stated in a somewhat
oversimplified way, we have found that these patients
are reacting in a deeply emotional way to
the disruption or threat of disruption of the dominant
interpersonal relationship upon which their
security rests; the adolescent may be confronted with
the loss of the more significant parent; the young
woman may be deeply disturbed by having to
break her attachment to the parental home in favor
of a marital home, with subsequent threat to the
marriage; an older person may be confronted by
the loss or threat of loss of the favored child whose
dependency had been sedulously cultivated. Such
situations are not unique to hyperthyroid patients;
and the catastrophic significance to these patients
is to be understood through the effect of such
traumata upon the precarious personality integration
noted from case to case. It appears that such emotional
crises contribute to the production of the illness
only in persons specifically vulnerable through
personality make-up and perhaps endocrinologically
vulnerable as well.TO READ MORE GO TO~ http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cg … /3/184.pdf
My mother was hyperthyroid in the 1970’s. My father remembers coming home from work and finding my sister and I shivering with blue lips because even though it was winter our poor mother was BROILING! She says she could actually see her heart pounding under her chest. Her doctor’s never called her condtion Graves disease. They just told her she had to nuke her thyroid without trying any other options. Nonetheless, my mother felt better and my sister and I had a happier childhood after that
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AmandaIt seems that most of the articles I have found on the stress and emotional aspects of Graves are pre 1950. Once they figured out the treatment options those options have taken front stage. My wife most diffinately had big stressers in her life and one huge one two years ago. She was diagnosed one year later. Unfortunately she is one of the people that does not want to know anything more about this then absolutely neccesary. Her Endo says her numbers are in line so she is fine. Graves can’t have anything to do with our marraige problems. We are dealing with other family issues as well but who doesn’t. Once again, isn’t that life. I have realized now how emotional dependant both her and I are. This comes on the heals of realizing what emotions are. Not only that but it turns out that I actually have them too. (It’s a guy thing, who knew
” title=”Wink” /> ) As you ladies all know there is no talking to or reasoning with her when she is "in the zone" and the quickest way to get her into the zone is to point something out or swing the flash light in her direction, so to speak. But every bit of information gives me a better understanding and more confidence to try to slay the Graves windmill. It is a fact that women talk three times more then men so if you are going to open your mouth and take on a women with Graves you had better bring your A game or she will school you with one hand tighed behind her back. She may break a sweat because her heart is raising but that’s irrelavent.Maybe you can ~ let her know that you’ve been reading up on Graves’, you’re beginning to understand part of what she might be going through, and you’d like to know what SHE needs/wants, if she can quantify that. Keep it open ended, and I’ll bet she fills in the blanks. Just asking will be an enormous step forward, I’m sure.
And by the way, bless you.
” title=”Very Happy” />Sounds good on paper. I ordered Grave’s Disease in our own words. When I got it and started reading it I was met with, " Isee you bought another book so you can figure out what is wrong with me
" Like I said her Endo says her numbers are in line so she is fine. I hear what you are saying though. It’s time to not take anything personally and stay in fieght. Sticks and stones, she’s lost so much weight it’s not like she can kick my butt or nothing. She is however addicted to crossword puzzles to help her memory so she has quite an extensive vocabulary. Luckily for me I’m Norweign and never really know when I’m being insulted anyway 
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