Your first job will be to find a physician willing to accept this timehonoured test and not relegate you to the rat-bag category. Actually, it will be the doctor who belongs with the rat-bags, as this test has been in the Physicians’ Desk Reference (the reference book all American doctors use) for many years, and is known as the Barnes Basal Temperature Test. Long before blood testing for thyroid conditions was used, this was the test doctors used, in conjunction with the symptoms reported by patients. If your physician doesn’t know who Broda Barnes, MD, was he should; this man was the number-one researcher and acknowledged authority on the thyroid gland for fifty years. As Stephen E Langer, MD, author of a superb book on the thyroid, Solved - The Riddle Of Illness, said in his Acknowledgments, “I know of no one else in the world who has done so much as a medical doctor, writer, lecturer and talk show guest to alert millions to the often hidden causes of illness, as well as to simple ways to stay well for life.” Many prestigious medical journals have printed papers on this test and I find it extraordinary that doctors are not taught about it in medical schools. After all, it is logical when you consider that if the metabolism is low, the temperature is also low. As Dr Langer says, “More than a hundred years of research has established a definite relationship between sub-normal temperature, no matter how slight, and hypothyrodism.” If you have found a physician who is willing to prescribe thyroid medication on the basis of this test, as well as symptomology, congratulations – you have passed the first hurdle. Next is to convince your physician to prescribe the right kind of drug. This can be tricky, because most of them are wedded to the synthetics. After all, they were taught this way in their medical schools, which are financed by the companies who are making billions selling synthetic thyroid hormones. Unfortunately for our thyroid health, these synthetics contain only what is known as T4. A healthy thyroid gland, however, produces not only T4, but T3, reverse T3, three kinds of T2, T1, T0 and calcitonin. An under-active thyroid gland cannot be brought back to health if all of the nine thyroid hormones it requires are not supplied. Dr Barnes, and all of the enlightened physicians who have followed him, think that nature knows best what is needed for the body, and man, with all his synthetic chemicals, can only guess and throw a monkey wrench into the works. Armour thyroid, and the other porcine, desiccated thyroid hormone medications, come closest to providing these exact hormones that your body would make if it could. They contain all nine of them, naturally; they are not added.