Iodine Test for Thyroid Function

The iodine paint test is a very controversial measurement for testing and identifying thyroid dysfunction. Biomedical practitioners may use the diagnostic procedure, but this informal test is principally administered by holistic practitioners who are knowledgeable about the micro- and macronutrients on the body and its function as opposed to biomedical practitioners who place their trust predominantly is pharmaceutical and, it must be said, invasive measurements for identifying a diseased state.

The iodine patch test, nevertheless, is said to be able to reliably test the uptake of iodine from an iodine tincture painted on the skin. The iodine must be the tinted 100% solution in order to ascertain how quickly it is absorbed, and the interpretation is based on how quickly the iodine is absorbed into the skin. Rapid absorption indicated iodine deficiency, and a slower rate indicates the thyroid functioning under more optimum conditions. For a thyroid to be functioning in an efficient state, iodine absorption should take between 24-48 hours. The amount less than 24 hours indicates the extent of the deficiency.

My mom and I both had this iodine paint test done at our holistic chiropractor's office. She painted an inch swath on both Mom's and my forearms, my swath was definitely darker as the chiropractor liberally triple painted it. In any regards, 6 hours later my mom's tinted tincture had disappeared. Mine disappeared 9-10 hours later. The chiropractor's interpretation of both of our thyroid functions was pretty much, not desirable functioning but certainly nothing to be concerned about at this stage. I wasn't really concerned, but when she tested our thyroid function with kinesthesiology, both of our thyroids demonstrated weakness, and with both of us having a history of impaired thyroid function, getting not too bad results on this test - albeit somewhat of an informal test as no actual numbers or percentages of TSH, T3 and T4 were proven to be impaired - was positive and yet mildly eye-opening in regard to awareness of an underlying problem. And so now we will look for foods that support thyroid function.

The flip side of the coin in regard to the actual reliability of the iodine skin test is given by a physician, David Derry. In determining the efficacy of a treatment, all sides need to be considered to make informed decisions about the test measurement procedure. Here is his medical opinion:

The "test" of putting iodine on the skin to watch how fast it disappears is not an indicator of anything. The iodine disappearance rate is unrelated to thyroid disease or even iodine content of the body. Meticulous research by Nyiri and Jannitti in 1932 showed clearly when iodine is applied to the skin in almost any form, 50% evaporates into the air within 2 hours and between 75 - 80 percent evaporates into the air within 24 hours. A total of 88 percent evaporates within 3 days and it is at this point that the evaporation stops. The remaining 12 percent that is absorbed into the skin has several fates. Only 1-4% of the total iodine applied to the skin is absorbed into the blood stream within the first few hours. The rest of the iodine within the skin (8-11%) is slowly released from the skin into the blood stream.

 
Other alternative testing for thyroid function include:  

Saliva Testing Saliva testing is growing in popularity with complementary and integrative practitioners. There are a number of companies claiming to provide saliva testing for thyroid function, but only one company seems to be used frequently by complementary practitioners: Diagnos-Techs. You can find out more about saliva testing in this article from Drs. Richard and Karilee Shames.  

Urinary Testing Urinary testing for thyroid dysfunction is not in wide use, and is rarely done in the U.S. It’s primarily performed by physicians in in Europe. Typically, doctors in the U.S. who are familiar with the work of the late Dr. Broda Barnes are more likely to use this test as part of the diagnostic process. Currently, the tests are being processed in Europe, and are fairly costly. More information.  

Basal Body Temperature Testing Typically, basal body temperature (BBT) testing involves measuring the early morning temperature, before movement, over time. In Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness , Dr. Broda Barnes’ groundbreaking book on thyroid disease, Barnes advocated use of this test as a diagnostic tool. According to Dr. Barnes, a basal temperatures consistently below 97.8 was a possible indicator of low thyroid function. A small percentage of alternative practitioners rely on basal body temperature results as their primary means of diagnosis. Other alternative practitioners feel that it may be one criterion among several to consider in diagnosis. Most conventional practitioners do not consider the test useful in thyroid diagnosis.

Most of the information has been borrowed from the following two sites:

http://thyroid.about.com/od/gettestedanddiagnosed/a/othertests.htm

http://thyroid.about.com/library/derry/bl2a.htm

Traveling with Canned Beans

I absolutely do NOT like eating foods out of cans for the main reasons : the foods are processed in ways that I do not approve ... with additives I do not want in my body, with trace additives that are considered too small as to merit being added to the food (case in point, red pepper is occasionally added to tomato paste in order to achieve a redder color but is considered too small an amount to merit labeling the container - my bro is deathly allergic to peppers of any kind so this is lethal to him!), with the likelihood of contamination by industrial cleaners and factory what-not, contaminated with the aluminum tin itself, and then overcooked under high pressure and therefore killing the nutrients that were originally in the food. Sound pretty pessimistic? Well, maybe it is, but it's also reality.

Anyway, I just had a stopover in Hawaii and figured I could survive on my careful diet if I could just get to a grocery store and get a pile of vegies. I had a knife and vegie peeler packed so I wouldn't have to worry about food preparation, but I only eating vegies doesn't give a person much energy. So I looked around for something, and ... wahlah, I spied a brand of black beans that had no labeled food additives, namely citric acid. Citric acid positively makes me sick, but unfortunately and to my knowledge, almost all beans with the exception of some black beans are processed with citric acid. The evil stuff is in tomato anything, sauces, seasoning salts, yep, just about creepy everywhere. So, it was my lucky day! I left the store with a can of black beans (ingredients: black  beans and salt), a package of tuna with the fewest additives, and tons and tons of vegies! Yum, I made a power salad to go with my washed and dried walnuts and almonds, my stack of black rice waffles (they travel really well), and some quinoa-millet energy bars.

Ah, what a salad!

I had a problem with my diet though. I was in Hawaii for three days and lived off a humungous black bean and vegie salad plus the other items mentioned. But oh no, Something was missing in my diet during that time because I started exhibiting signs of "lack of nutrition". For years (since 1998 for sure) I've noticed my arms get bald when I don't have at least one very good balanced meal a day. I know hair loss is a result of insufficient thyroid activity, and I have had a history of Grave's disease (hyperthyroidism). What I didn't expect was that as the time in Hawaii progressed, I started feeling a bit of tension in my right lower jaw in addition to the hair loss on my forearms. A couple days after arriving home, the tension had gotten so great that I thought I would munch on some Brazil nuts because they are extremely rich in trace minerals and sometimes give me a boost of well-being. I was cleaning my mom's freezer so popped three Brazil nuts in my mouth to chew while my hands were busy.

Oh, oh, oh, what pain! The pain in my jaw had been increasing for the past several days but when I popped those Brazil nuts in my mouth, my right jaw dislocated! It stayed dislocated for the rest of the day and only got better when I really forced myself to bite down, and bite down, and bite down, and gradually and painfully the upper and lower sets of teeth were able to kind of fit back together. What happened? Well, for the next couple of days my jaw would pop in and out and the trend I noticed was based on my diet. I desperately needed something beyond vegetable smoothies. I found that beans and brown rice (a complete protein) were good for easing the jaw pain, and I made some wild salmon dishes and they helped a bit too (not as beneficial as the brown rice and variety of beans but I was trying to get a wide variety of nutrition to eliminate nutritional deficiencies. I never did figure out EXACTLY what it was I needed, but eating a wide variety of green smoothies WITH brown rice or quinoa and some legume did work well.

Snack food for the plane. It's OK to travel with vegies, even internationally, as long as the vegies aren't taken off the plane or taken through immigration. Cabbage slabs travel even better!

Written in hindsight - Even for the next few weeks I would get a bit achy in the right jaw on days when I didn't eat two well-balanced meals. Wow! Whoever heard of a jaw dislocating from malnutrition, but there you have it. That's what happened. The good thing about this experience was I found an awesome chiropractor that is extremely savvy about nutrition. She tried to adjust it but there were difficulties of over-correction because my ligaments were very loose and she said she'd never encountered anything like that before ... and she'd been treating dislocated jaws for years. After she said that, I really paid closer attention to my diet, and then realized the connection between my reduced nutrition intake from traveling and having dietary limitations and how I was feeling. Yikes, my system is very sensitive.

As for chiropractic care with this particular chiropractor, wow, she gave me huge amounts of advice and feedback on candida from a very informed nutritional perspective! I think God was instrumental in coordinating our meeting because she raised my awareness on issues that I hadn't really been addressing (blood pH, the merits of raw organic apple cider vinegar for treating candida) ... but more on those later!

Bone Pain and Rib #10

By the end of 2009 I had seen a series of chiropractors for intense rib and thoraccic pain. In December these doctors had started commenting on my odd rib movement, because more and more ribs were moving. So in February 2010 when I was forced to wear a rib belt (and then later, two belts) to prevent rib movement of right rib #10, I went back to the hospital (I had boycotted going since finding out about the steroid) for x-rays of the lower cartilage that I said was breaking. [In fact, tearing. Bones break and cartilage tear, and rib #10 was in fact moving a lot and as a result causing myofascial pain in the right lingual area, the pain of which I was still attributing to the steriod and subsequent inflamed lymph nodes of months before.] Of course cartilage hardly shows up on x-ray so of course nothing to make a diagnosis on could be seen - waste of time, waste of money, what were the doctors thinking? I demanded a CT scan of the rib cage, and then had to go in again for re-taking it (and get loads of extra radiation) because the technicians didn't scan the lower cartilage area, the affected area - what were the technicians thinking? The technical report of the scan was "tortuous change to rib #10" but not one of several bone specialists I then went to acknowledged that this was a problem! WHAT WERE THE DOCTORS DOING? NOTHING!

This is my March 12, 2010 copy of my chest CT. By the time I had this CT scan, my rib cartilage was hurting badly in a number of areas. The areas I had complained about for the longest was right rib #4 where it meets the sternum but by this time my chiropracter acknowledged that three of the right ribs and two of the left off the sternum were slightly dislocated (soon afterwards, another left rib off the sternum also slightly popped up). Also, rib cartilage felt crunchy under the right breast so much that I stopped twisting in any way, and when the right rib #10 got so bad that I had to even stop wearing the two rib belts (damn, it was bad) I didn't dare move even a millimeter to the left or the right. Rib pain was on the left too, but that pain was manageable. Because the body has more lymph fluid than blood and both fluids need to be circulated so a person can recover more easily, I did make myself walk outside in the cold every day that I had energy. Exercise is important and walking without swinging the arms in the cold, cold weather seemed to ease some of the pain. [In hindsight, I realize this was what was boosting my vitamin D. Getting the regular doses on my face for 2 or so hours a day is probably what slowly eased the pain and was probably the best thing I could do for myself.]

I've finally decided to go ahead and post my personal information. Maybe someone, a medical student perhaps, will benefit from this. Anyway, note the pieces of something that very much look like cartilage fragments falling under the right rib cage. That was where I hurt, hurt, hurt, and when the doctor (the one who prescribed Xanax for me and told me to see a psychiatrist) didn't address this and it's in the area of my complaint, I asked him what that was. He said, "Artifacts." I asked, "Artifacts from what?" He looked at me like I was stupid and never said anything. He did read the analyst's comment to the CT scan, "Tortuous change to rib #10." That was all. Neither he nor any subsequent doctor ever addressed this as a problem!



I was starting to get more and more aggressive about finding my problem, so early in March 2010 I had already gone to a private clinic and had ordered a hair analysis, a complete nutritional analysis as well as blood work on 6 vitamins: B1, B6, B12, A, D, and E. [This was the first step in me becoming my own doctor.]