Luck Based Medicine: No Good Very Bad Winter Cured My Hypothyroidism

I’ve previously written about Luck Based Medicine: the idea that, having exhausted all the reasonable cures for some issue, you are better off just trying shit rather than trying to reason more cures into existence. I share LBM success stories primarily as propaganda for the concept: the chance any one cure works for anyone else is <10% (sometimes much less), but a culture where people try things and share their results.

I’ve also previously written about my Very Unlucky Winter. My mattress developed mold, and in the course of three months I had four distinct respiratory infections, to devastating effect. A year later I am still working my way through side effects like asthma and foot pain. 

But, uh, I also appear to have cured my hypothyroidism, and the best hypothesis as to why is all the povidone iodine I gargled for all those respiratory infections illnesses.

Usually when I discuss fringe medicine I like to say “anything with a real effect can hurt you”, because it’s a nice catchall for potential danger. In this case, I can be more direct: anything that cures hypothyroidism has a risk of causing hyperthyroidism. The symptoms for this start with “very annoying” and end at “permanent disability or death”, so if you’re going to try iodine, it absolutely needs to be under medical supervision with regular testing. 

All that said…

I was first diagnosed with hypothyroidism 15 years ago, and 10 years ago tried titrating off medication but was forced back on. My thyroid numbers were in the range where mainstream MDs would think about treating and every ND, NP, or integrative MD would treat immediately. 

Low iodine can contribute to hypothyroidism, and my serum iodine tested at low normal for years, so we had of course tried supplementing iodine via pills, repeatedly, to no result. No change in thyroid and no change in serum iodine levels.

In January of the Very Unlucky Winter, I caught covid. I take covid hard under the best of circumstances and was still suffering aftereffects from RSV the previous month, so I was quite scared. Reddit suggested gargling povidone iodine and after irresponsibly little research, I tried it. My irresponsibility paid off in that the covid case was short and didn’t reach my lungs. I stopped taking iodine when I recovered but between all the illnesses, potential illnesses, and prophylactic use I ened up using it for quite a long period.

My memories of this time are very fuzzy and there were a lot of things going on, but the important bits are: I developed terrible insomnia, hand tremors, and temperature regulation issues. These had multiple potential explanations, but one of them was hyperthyroidism so my doctor had me tested. Sure enough, I had healed my thyroid to the point my once-necessary medication was giving me hyperthyroidism. 

Over the next few months I continued gargling with iodine and titrating my medication down. After ~6 months I was off it entirely. I’ve since been retested twice (6 weeks and 20 weeks after ceasing medication) and it looks like I’m clean. 

Could this have been caused by something besides iodine? I suppose, and I was on a fantastic number of pills, but I can’t figure out what else it could be. Hypothyroidism has a very short list of curable underlying causes, and none of them are treated by anything I was taking. 

So why did gargling iodine work when pills didn’t? It could be the formulation, but given my digestive system’s deepseated issues, I’m suspicious that the key was letting the iodine be absorbed through the mucous membrane of the throat, rather than attempting to through the gut. If that’s true, maybe I can work around my other unresponsive vitamin deficiencies by using sublingual multivitamins. I started them in June and am waiting to take the relevant test.

Thank you to my Patreon patrons for their support of this work. 

There is a $500 bounty for reporting errors that cause me to change my beliefs, and an at-my-discretion bounty for smaller errors.