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Recently I took a trip down to Dagobah to meet master Broda. Many think Broda to be deceased, but in actuality, in his mighty Jedi skills, he flew away to a distant, swampy planet. I’ve been there. We hung out. He showed me how to boost my thyroid while standing on my head. And yes I brought my droids with me, T2D2 and T3PO.

Okay that’ll do with the Star Wars metaphors, but come on, the guy’s name was Broda for crying out loud. How was I to resist?

Broda Barnes was a pioneer in the field of endocrinology, but unlike pioneers who paved the way to Oregon, few followed in the footsteps of Broda Barnes. Why? I have no idea. He was the man. He was able to reduce heart disease incidence in his almost 2,000 patients by 90% for starters, a mark few physicians, if any, have ever matched. He did this without counseling on diet, smoking, or any of that. In fact, the only tools he often needed as a practicing physician were a thermometer (for diagnosis), and some dried pork.

Dried pork?

Broda Barnes used desiccated porcine thyroid gland in rather small doses to treat his numerous hypothyroid patients who he was able to diagnose, not through standard blood tests which he found to be useless, but by monitoring the armpit body temperature first thing in the morning. Sound too good to be true? That’s what I thought at first, but after closer inspection, I really think Barnes life’s work is chock full of much-needed wisdom on the link between the thyroid gland, the rest of the body systems, and the disease trends that are being witnessed in the world today.

His loyalists hold him in the highest light, and those who have followed his protocols have apparently had great success. The first time I heard about Barnes was in the book, Solved: The Riddle of Illness by Stephen Langer and James Scheer. I thought it was interesting, but it seemed to me that these two clowns were just spouting off about the beauty of Armour brand desiccated thyroid. Seemed like product propaganda for sure.

I heard Barnes’s name mentioned elsewhere in my studies, and as I began learning more and more about the thyroid’s link to disease (particularly in the work of Robert McCarrison), I began to open up a little bit more to this curious Broda character.

So I reeled in a couple of his books form Amazon ? one on heart disease entitled, Solved: The Riddle of Heart Attacks, and another, Hope for Hypoglycemia. Both of these books were about the relationship between thyroid deficiency and common ailments. You guys, these books are awesome. They are smart, witty, and they present entirely new theories on the most prevalent degenerative diseases. Barnes is like, ?exercise a bunch and don’t eat saturated fat? Whaddya stoopid?? Of course, exercise and saturated fat have about as much to do with heart disease as lack of pirates does with global warming (despite the theories out there connecting the two).

Oh sorry, I lost my train of thought there for a second, Liz the local librarian just called informing me that Broda’s other book on the thyroid just showed up at the library for me to come down and pick up. How cute.

Anyway, Broda aside, the book I just finished reading today, Hypothyroidism Type II by Mark Starr, M.D., is truly an outstanding piece of work. I think every single physician and endocrinologist on the face of the earth should read this book immediately and take it to heart. For lack of a better way to describe it, the book is basically ‘the hypothyroid theory of disease. Barnes estimated that 40% of his patients were hypothyroid during his time. Stephan Langer ?found the numbers running slightly higher. Mark Starr is seeing the numbers explode off the charts in his chronic pain treatment clinic.

Although Starr is a little stuck in the belief that these disorders are hereditary and a result of antibiotics and vaccines disturbing natural selection ? a belief that is easily refutable, much of his theory could really be spot on. He also brings up one of the most significant understandings in the modern world ? the actual mechanisms for Weston A. Price’s ?intercepted heredity. This is mutation of the mitochondrial DNA, a type of hereditary substance that is not part of the 23 pairs of x and y chromosomes we learned about as kids. He links this to many of the changes seen by Price (although he likely has no knowledge of Price) ? narrowing of the dental arch, cavities, respiratory problems, digestive problems, propensity to develop infectious illness, allergies, asthma, behavioral disorders, and so on.

He attributes all of this to lowered active thyroid hormones (something than cannot be tested in the blood ? the hormones are there, but the cells are ?resistant? to them, just like they are with type II diabetics). When the thyroid is lowered, the metabolism is lowered, and when the metabolism is lowered the mitochondria ? the cellular energy currency of the body, slow, reduce, and get damaged. And generation to generation, this mitochondrial DNA continues to become increasingly degraded as we continually bombard ourselves with toxic foods and environmental poisons.

The only question now is does a lowered thyroid cause this, or is there some other hormonal component that lowers it, such as high cortisol levels from stress or infection? Since infection and stress both appear to be tremendously improved by desiccated thyroid supplementation, and having adequate levels of thyroid seem to make one virtually invincible to both infectious and degenerative disease, it is reasonable to assume that the thyroid gland really is the most appropriate site to focus upon in fixing the mess that environmental toxins, poor nutrition, and refined sugar and other poisonous modern substances have caused.

I could go on for days on this, but consider for now, if you think carbs or any other natural food component somehow causes disease, that supposedly?a total of ZERO Broda Barnes patients developed type II diabetes under his care ? a disease that now inflicts nearly one out of ten Americans.