Thyroid Disorders: TCM Treatment

The Chinese were treating thyroid disease a very long time before anyone had isolated a hormone.

By the 7th century AD, physicians were using the dried thyroid glands of sheep, ram and pig to treat goitre — the swelling in the neck that comes when the gland is working hard and failing. One preparation takes a hundred ram thyroid glands, washes them in warm water, removes the fat, dries and chops them, and rolls them with jujube dates into pills.

It sounds primitive until you notice what is in the pharmacy today. Armour Thyroid, still prescribed, is an extract of animal thyroid gland. Modern thyroid hormone therapy is replacement therapy — and so was theirs. The difference is that we now isolate the compound instead of using the whole gland. The same logic runs through insulin from pig pancreas.

The point is not that the ancients had it all worked out. It is that they were not wrong, and what we do now is a refinement of what they found.

What Chinese medicine adds today is different from replacement. Where the gland is inflamed, where the eyes are involved, where the heart is racing or the fatigue will not lift despite normal bloods, herbs work on the inflammation and the constitution behind it rather than on the hormone number.

Below are the articles we have written on thyroid conditions — Graves’ disease, thyroid eye disease, and the acupuncture used when the eyes are affected.