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How to
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Dr. Lowe
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Patient-to-Patient Fibromyalgia Research Foundation
The Metabolic Treatment
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Urgent
Alert: For US citizens who want continued access to dietary supplements (such as vitamins, minerals, herbs, amino acids, fiber, and fatty acids) without a prescription, January 31, 2005 is the deadline to act. It is the last day for us to notify the FDA that we object to the agency regulating dietary supplements as prescription drugs. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) recently released a report advising reversal of the exemption of dietary supplements from regulation as prescription drugs. This exemption, however, was guaranteed by Congress in the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). Congress passed DSHEA partly to restrain the FDA in its aggressive efforts to deprive us of unfettered personal choice in the use of dietary supplements. Congress did so after the FDA announced in 1993 that it intended to regulate dietary supplements like prescription drugs. The IOM advised that the FDA—who sponsored the IOM report—to require the same safety and efficacy testing for dietary supplements that’s required for prescription drugs. The safety record of dietary supplement, of course, does not justifying requiring such testing. If the FDA is nonetheless allowed to require the testing, it will raise the cost of dietary supplements to prohibitive amounts. Such testing is one reason, of course, for the extremely high cost of new prescription drugs. The expensive testing will drive out of business the small companies that currently produce and market most dietary supplements. The only businesses able to afford the testing will be major drug companies. These companies will richly recoup their investment; they’ll do so by charging such large amounts for supplements that many people won’t be able to afford them. Having to pay physicians to write us prescriptions for supplements will contribute to the increased cost of using them. Of course, FDA-related people attempt to sooth citizens. Their assurance to us is that the agency won’t move to draconian extremes in depriving us of nutritional supplements. However, the FDA’s well-documented anti-supplement history argues against the credibility of such assurances. The FDA has a long history of overreaching the authority Congress gives it. Its overreaching is always in the service of greater profits for major drug companies, and for the sake of those profits, the agency willfully deprives us of freedoms of choice in health care. The FDA’s history convinces me that if the agency can regulate dietary supplements as prescription drugs, it will aggressively deprive us of progressively more of our personal choices in using them. If you favor free access to dietary supplements at affordable prices, write immediately to the Dr. Lester M. Crawford, Acting FDA Commissioner. An easy-to-send prewritten letter is available for you to use. But if you prefer to compose your own letter, please state that you want the FDA to strictly abide by the stipulations of Congress in its 1994 DSHEA. A prewritten letter—requiring only your name and contact information—is available at the following website: http://www.citizens.org/ If you prefer, please make a toll-free phone call to Citizens for Health: 877-269-0209. Letter
to the Editor In July 2002, Let's Live magazine published an article on our work by award-winning health writer James F. Scheer. In his article, Mr. Scheer explained the relationship of hypothyroidism and thyroid hormone resistance to fibromyalgia—a relationship that our research identified and verified. And he described metabolic rehabilitation, the highly effective treatment we developed and provide, which enables patients to fully recover their health. When Ms. Scheer's article appeared in Let's Live, and for a couple of months after, we were deluged with phone calls and e-mails from patients. The deluge is understandable. Let's Live has a circulation is 1,700,000. By conservative estimate, 34,000 subscribers to Let's Live have fibromyalgia symptoms. Most of those patients have likely experienced the frustration and disappointment of ineffective conventional treatments for fibromyalgia, such as the use of antidepressants. Many of the patients who phoned us told a similar story: They had long been aware that their fibromyalgia symptoms were somehow related to a thyroid problem. Most doctors, however, had dismissed the idea. Now, after reading Mr. Scheer's article, they were enthusiastic and hopeful because our research had confirmed their suspicion. In December 2002, the Editor-in-Chief of Let's Live, Beth Salmon, wrote an editorial as a follow-up to Mr. Scheer's article. In the editorial, she described a Colorado patient who, upon reading Mr. Scheer's article, put on hold her planned suicide and came to the Boulder, Colorado clinic for treatment. She came wheel-chair bound, but after metabolic rehab improved her health enough, she abandoned the chair. The editorial prompted another deluge of phone calls and e-mails from patients. Now, the April 2002 issue of Let's Live contains a letter from a fibromyalgia patient in North Carolina. The patient, Barbara Porell, thanked the Editor for publishing the July 2002 article on the relation of fibromyalgia to hypothyroidism. Ms. Porell wrote that a doctor officially diagnosed her fibromyalgia 10 years ago. Since then, her condition had worsened so much that the doctor added a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome. "I am now 50 years old," Ms. Porell wrote to Let's Live, and had given up hope until I read your article linking hypothyroidism and fibromyalgia . . . Now, I am coming to life. I have been on Armour Thyroid, recommended in your article, for about two months and am taking hydrocortisone and DHEA for my failing adrenal glands. I am about 50% improved." Ms. Porell also wrote, "My doctor has not taken me through the metabolic rehabilitation protocol yet, but I have decided if he won't, I will find someone who will, or I will do it myself." She obviously knows how to "do it myself": She explained, "I will get a copy of Dr. John C. Lowe's book The Metabolic Treatment of Fibromyalgia. Ms. Porell's letter has set off another deluge of phone calls and e-mails over the last week. We are sympathetic to the suffering of these patients, and we'll help as many of them as possible through a proper professional relationship. And we appreciate Let's Live directing them to us. Please note, however: We cannot merely refer patients to where they can purchase Armour Thyroid.
Jackie
Yellin
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