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Being a Proactive Thyroid Patient

Sharing Knowledge and Personal Experience

Sep 10, 2009 Jim Lowrance

Thyroid patients can benefit a great deal from the experiences and basic knowledge shared by other patients and being proactive can be done in-balance.

Being a pro-active thyroid patient simply means one is actively involved in following the best plan for better health that comes from knowledge received through search and treatment experiences. It also means a patient is being fully cooperative with his doctor and offering the input needed that can help him receive best possible treatment.

Partnering with Your Doctor

Recently the U.S. National Institutes of Health has been airing a radio commercial, recommending that patients with treated health conditions become more proactive in their own medical care. Their advice includes becoming a partner with the doctors by being as communicative with them as possible, being fully descriptive about any changes in symptoms or concerns that might arise in regard to treatment. They include the suggestion in the ad that patients take notes and carry the notes with them to their doctor office visits.

Unfortunately, some opinions you find online and elsewhere contradicts this opinion and rather suggests that patients place all responsibility for their health care upon their doctors and that they should offer no input as a treated patient. Common sense says however that it can only be a benefit to both the patient and doctor if a patient offers a reasonable amount of input in regard to his case and this can only be done if there is a degree of education on the part of the patient in regard to his illness and the treatment being administered for it.

Helping Educate Other Thyroid Patients

Each January is “Thyroid Awareness Month” and patients are encouraged to help get the word out about thyroid diseases, their symptoms and the tests that can diagnose them. The American Thyroid Association (ATA) for example, that offers resources for both patients and doctors, offers educational brochures for patients that can be printed and shared or that patients can share the online links to. This campaign has a number of medical societies involved including the ATA and the American College of Endocrinologists (ACE) and has as its goal, the better educating of the general public about thyroid diseases and disorders.

The reason these medical societies see the necessity of this campaign, is due to the fact that they have estimated that up to half of people with thyroid disease remain undiagnosed. The two reasons this occurs is due to a lack of public education and a lack of detailed communication by patients to their doctors. In addition to Thyroid Awareness Month, the ACE has also published an online magazine available free to the public called “Power of Prevention” (POP), in which they help the public become better educated about endocrine diseases, with some of the segments being designed for educating children.

Sharing Your Story and Basic Knowledge

Thyroid patients benefit from hearing a fellow-patient’s story because it is someone they can relate-to, having gone through similar experiences to theirs. Some thyroid disease cases can present with severe symptoms and some require surgeries to correct and these aspects can make patients feel somewhat isolated in their experience from their healthy family, friends and co-workers. A feeling of support can come from reading other patients' stories that include their symptom struggles, difficulties adjusting to treatments and their treatment successes. This is especially true in patients who have cases of thyroid cancer.

Sharing basic knowledge a thyroid patient has learned can be done on thyroid disease patient-forums, in online articles and in printed books. This presents the question as to what a patient can reasonably write about when sharing their knowledge in articles or forum posts. The answer to this question would be that any information that can be well-confirmed should be acceptable between thyroid patients sharing knowledge and that they may offer to the general public.

Obviously if information is basic and found on many sources easily confirmed by search, these type articles should not require confirmation of the facts. If however a point is made in an article that involves areas of controversy or that includes more advanced medical knowledge, confirming sources should be cited that are reputable and reliable. If even the basic points in a thyroid patient article require confirmation, this can add unnecessary length to it and actually serve to confuse the reader. It should therefore be determined as to which information is basic enough to be easily confirmed and that which is more complicated and in need of citing confirming sources.

The copyright of the article Being a Proactive Thyroid Patient in General Medicine is owned by Jim Lowrance. Permission to republish Being a Proactive Thyroid Patient in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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