Oct 1, 2025 Hyperthryoidism. Hyperthryoidism is a common condition encountered by conventional doctors. But I would believe it is not a common condition encountered by TCM. This is primarily because modern TCM is not associated with actually dealing with real medical diseases. In addition, hyperthyroidism is a sort of low-tier medical emergency. It is not like a heart attack, stroke, acute bleeding or stones that have an extremely short window of treatment. But it is typically the beginning, acute stage of thyroid problems that has to be dealt with or else there would be irreversible consequences later on. Time frame of treatment of course is subject to the severity of the problem. Western medicine tends to monitor and categorize this quite accurately. Unfortunately TCM in modern times is more synonymous with relaxation and pain management than it is with actual medical conditions. This is not to say that relaxation, anxiety and pain problems are not important. But that is too narrow of a definition to put TCM in. When it comes to thyroid issues, it’s usually ‘hypothyroidism’, which is a later stage of the thyroid pathology and is in my opinion harder to treat because the thyroid has effectively been physically damaged, or ‘burnt off’. This is also not to say that modern identifiable medical diseases are anything easy to treat. No they are not. They are very difficult, and it takes a lot of effort and brain crunching to treat these problems. I say this from firsthand experience dealing with such conditions on a semi-frequent basis. There are also lots of factors outside of our control which can derail the treatment such as their lifestyle, diet, stress level etc. The thing is with modern medical diseases, TCM does not necessarily have an equivalent understanding/nomenclature to them. Hyperthyroidism for example is one of those things. There is no recognition of the thyroid gland as an organ in TCM. And this is even though they had dissections back then (yes, TCM had dissections in the ancient times). But TCM does know the importance of the clinical significance of the carotid arteries, which are just beside the thyroid. And enlarged thyroids are a recognized condition in the past, and herbs that contain iodine, mainly of the seaweed and kelp varieties, are used in TCM for such conditions today as well. The other thing is, hyperthyroidism does not always mean a big neck. In fact many don’t have such. Recently I treated a patient over a course of many months who had some kind of unidentifiable thyroid condition along what I would categorize as the hyperthryoid variety. The condition was caught early. Blood test reports confirm it. Patient came to me upon having it not too long, although would be at least a month already. Mainstream doctor adopted wait and see. I told her based on experience we should probably treat it. Because an overworked thyroid will eventually burn itself out and you will be on synthroid for the rest of your life and even then you won’t feel like before. Otherwise, there is the possibility that they will choose to cut off the thyroid; I’ve seen this in a few patients already. Either way, we want to calm down the inflammation and restore the thyroid function as much as possible to avert those possibilities. So she agreed. So how do we approach this? There is no big neck. The eyes aren’t popping out. But ultrasound reveals ‘hypervascularity’ in the thyroid, meaning too much blood going into the gland, which is bound to cause it to swell and heat up, even if the neck isn’t twice the size. Plus thyroid hormones are all out of whack. In TCM there is the idea called ‘treat based on syndrome'---meaning you take all information you get in front of you and you treat that ‘syndrome’, which is the ‘pattern’ of the disease. It’s like a summary of the patient’s problem based on all the information their body is telling you. From that you get what TCM calls ‘8 Gang’(not ‘gang’ in English, but ‘Gang’ in Chinese, roughly meaning parameters). That is yin yang, internal, external, deficiency excess and heat cold, 8 parameteres of disease analysis. These are like XYZ coordinates on the 3D plane. Except 8 Gang is 4D, not 3D, so it’s more advanced even. It then informs you what herbs and acupuncture treatment to do in order to gradually bring them back to coordinate 0, which is the balanced state of all the parameters, the point where all of them intersect. It took a bit of work but gradually we were able to get things back into the safe zone. The good thing about this patient is that she was able to pretty routinely get blood tests to monitor changes in thyroid hormones, which is unfortunately not typically possible for most patients. The results show a gradual improvement in the numbers as treatment went on a weekly basis over time. At this time, the numbers have gone back to normal. Unfortuately, the patient’s doctor did not issue another ultrasoudn scan for the thyroid, which I feel would be even better. This is because blood numbers and physical changes do not always coincide 1:1. One typically happense before the other one shows changes. If you go backwards, it means you need to know both things to completely be quite sure that things are actually subdued or still ‘fomenting’ underneath, waiting to breakout at any moment if the patient is not careful with their lifestyle later on. No, this was not easy in the slightest sense. In fact I had a similar patient a few years ago but I was not able to get their numbers under control and I remember she said she would decide to do surgery on the thyroid (to remove it).
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