Thyroid Mind Power

One in ten Americans has some degree of thyroid imbalance, and even mild imbalances can cause mental and emotional symptoms. Thyroid Mind Powerpinpoints the connection between thyroid imbalance and conditions such as depression, anxiety, irritability, and more, offering hope for millions who are suffering from improper diagnosis and medication. The authors of the bestselling Thyroid Power, Richard Shames, MD, and his wife, Karilee, a holistic nurse, have been treating patients with this program for over 25 years. Their program shows readers how to:

   • Uncover a hidden cause for mental symptoms
   • Discover the best treatments for each Mind type, such as moody, edgy, foggy, or sleepy
   • Obtain the most effective cure, with recommendations for common prescription drugs (not antidepressants), natural remedies, vitamins, and supplements

Armed with the Shameses' advice and recommendations, readers will be able to participate more actively in their health care and find relief for these common and widespread conditions.RICHARD SHAMES MD is a founding member of the American Holistic Medical Association and has specialized in hormone treatment for over 30 years.

KARILEE SHAMES, PhD, RN specializes in psychiatric and holistic nursing. They have written or contributed to over a dozen health books including two thyroid-related titles Thyroid Power and Feeling Fat, Fuzzy or Frazzled.Missing the Boat on Mind-Body Connections


It is often said: "Low thyroid doesn't kill you, it just makes you wish you were dead."

But, occasionally, it can kill.

Her long-standing anxiety had escalated into uncontrollable panic. The dean's mother was then hospitalized and soon transferred to a mental unit. There, after several agitated episodes, she fell, hit her head, and died.

As dean of the School of Nursing, Dr. Templin requested a case review and autopsy. Only then was it discovered that the reason for her mother's distress was simple untreated low thyroid. Had they originally performed better testing, she might have avoided months of terror, enjoying her family for years to come. Dr. Templin's sadness was evident, as was her guilt.

She later lamented: "If I, as professor of nursing for all these years, missed my own mother's true problem, imagine how many other practitioners might be missing the thyroid diagnosis! Think of all the patients suffering with these terrible mental symptoms that could be better controlled with proper thyroid care."

The dean then invited an assistant professor to coauthor an article on better thyroid diagnosis for a major nursing journal.

The assistant professor of nursing was Karilee Shames, PhD, RN. And that article inspired Thyroid Mind Power.

Thyroid conditions are surprisingly common, representing possibly the largest category of sufferers in the country. How could the most common of all conditions be so frequently mishandled?

By the late 20th century, thyroid hormones had become the most often prescribed pills. In the early 2000s, one particular brand, Synthroid, was the second most commonly prescribed medicine in America.

Thyroid imbalance is a medical condition that often carries with it a variety of well-studied psychological symptoms. Millions of people face emotional havoc due to simple untreated or poorly treated thyroid imbalances. The health consumers of our country deserve better care.

In this book, we discuss an aspect of health care far too frequently misdiagnosed. It may help to save your life, or at least your quality of life, as well as that of people you love.

The Thyroid Gland: Culprit or Cure?

A tiny butterfly-shaped gland at the base of the neck can make our lives heaven or hell. The thyroid, part of our endocrine system, directs our metabolism. It secretes a hormone that drives all of our bodily organs and activities.

Think of your body as a car. The thyroid functions as the gas pedal. It controls the rate and quality of function for every tissue in the body, including the brain. A person with severely low thyroid often has the resulting symptoms of low body temperature, slow movements, low heart rate, slow digestion, slow speech, poor sleep, bad memory, slow thoughts, and low mood.

Thus, thyroid malfunction encompasses aspects of both body and mind. Keeping the thyroid functioning properly can help millions of people feel better fast. Allowing our thyroids to malfunction is wreaking havoc on our world.

Far too many people are living today with low-level or mild thyroid imbalances causing a great deal of chaos in their lives--and wreaking havoc with our lives as well.

To function better as a society, we will need to reorient our focus to enable millions who are feeling tired, depressed, and less than whole to return to a fuller life.

In our view, fixing the thyroid is one of the easiest and best cures for many problems that ail us. It can be inexpensive and all-encompassing and can greatly improve the quality of life for millions.

The Dangerous Mind-Body Split

In centuries past, scientists and clergy made decisions to separate turf by considering the mind and body as separate entities, operating in totally distinct realms.

In today's world, it remains convenient to continue to adopt this perspective. Many doctors, nurses, health administrators, health insurers, psychologists, counselors, pharmacists, and other providers consider that treating a person's body has very little to do with his mind, and that treating the mind hardly impacts the body. The sad result of this thinking is that we now have specialists and medicines for mental problems, plus separate providers and drugs for physical challenges.

This artificial separation leaves a huge number of hormonally challenged people trapped. Doctors give them medicines for physical symptoms, psychiatrists give them medicines for mental symptoms, and each ignores the hormonal action at the interface of physical and mental. This is unacceptable for the millions experiencing mental challenges due to their physical hormonal condition.

Our culture is looking for quick fixes, but not in the right places. Today's medical system readily employs mind-altering drugs to change our behavior or mood. In many instances, however, this quick fix is not the optimal solution for the longer haul.

In addition to fixing symptoms, we must also make advances in treating the root cause of the condition. Otherwise, many will be doomed to ingest heavy pharmacologic drugs for the rest of their lives.

Surely many of our pharmacologic advances are brilliant and can be helpful when we face crises. Not everyone, however, can afford these costly drugs, and those who can might eventually need other drugs that could interfere with them and cause major problems.

Unless we are attempting to replace something the body normally makes but is deficient in (due to sluggish production), or unless we are facing critical illness without the daily ingestion of a medication, it is unlikely to be healthy to take pharmacologic medications forever. Not only do we consider it perhaps unhealthy, but also we often consider it overkill.

Adopting a Perspective of Wholeness

Our goal with our patients has always been to help them gain more confidence in their abilities to heal their own personal pain, to help them minimize the expression of physical pain that can often have psychological underpinnings, and to help them learn to express themselves clearly and effectively.

Our previous books about the thyroid have encouraged people to use their illnesses as an opportunity to learn to heal themselves fully--body, mind, and spirit. We choose to honor the interconnections that make us whole.

Keep in mind that we were young practitioners during the holistic movement of the early 1970s, when the concepts of whole-person treatment were being developed in our country, starting mostly in California, where we live. Richard was a cofounder of one of the first holistic centers in California in the early 1970s. In the mid-1970s, Karilee developed a holistic nursing program there, implementing the concepts of integrative care.

We spend quality time with our patients, inspiring them through our words and personal stories to try our new ways of living. We help them to break free of their fears and to dissociate from the projected fears of their doctors and others less informed. We inspire them to use their own beliefs and intuition in approaching their health challenges. Our central belief honors each person as absolutely the best healer for his or her own health situation. Our way of viewing our patients has been informed by decades of study in sociology, psychology, anthropology and cultural awareness, human behavior, endocrinology, neurology, general medicine, nursing, religion, and various other systems.

Having spent decades thinking as whole-person health professionals, we believe that many of our patients' emotional challenges are best viewed through the hormonal lens. Along with hormone balancing, we have consistently encouraged habit changes coupled with new ways of thinking.

When our first thyroid book came out in 2000, people attending our book signings were upset that we were directing people to get better care from their doctors, because their doctors did not know how to do a good job on thyroid boosting. We realize, sadly, that our way of thinking may not yet be shared by the majority of our colleagues. And herein lies the greater challenge.