On September 6, 2007, I received a question from a woman reader of drlowe.com asking
about a common problem: her doctors failing to understanding a relationship she does
understand: that between infertility and hypothyroidism.

She and her husband have not, despite their best efforts, been able to get pregnant. The
medical literature is abundantly clear about the relationship between infertility and
hypothyroidism, and research studies confirm the relationship. Infertility, however, is a
common result of untreated or undertreated hypothyroidism. Most fertility doctors,
however, appear to exclude this information from their bank of knowledge. They’ve
abandoned proper treatment of hypothyroidism with thyroid hormone. Instead, they
virtually always advise couples to use the more recently developed drugs, ones that are
still under patent and therefore more profitable to the drug companies that sell them.

This approach of another specialty of modern conventional medicine is emblematic of a
major problem of modern conventional medicine. For the most part, the doctors serve as
drugs salespersons. Those who suffer as sacrificial lambs are couples who want to
normally conceive. It is especially women, however, who may suffer severe adverse
effects from the fertility drugs, along with chronic health problems from their untreated
or undertreated hypothyroidism.

Right now, there are probably tens of thousands of women who suspect they may be
infertile because they are hypothyroid. But their fertility doctors ignore that suspicion
and encourage them to use pharmaceutical fertility drugs.

To learn the potential harm of listening to these doctors, I encourage these women and
their husbands to go to the following webpage of PubMed:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez. There, type into the search window the
following search terms (without the quotation marks and period): “fertility drugs and
adverse effects and review.” When I did so this morning, using the qualifier “review,”
302 abstracts of review publications came up; when I dropped the qualifier “review” and
just requested abstract of published studies, 2158 abstracts came up. If nothing else,
read over the review abstracts and consider the cancer risks from ignoring your
hypothyroidism and submitting to the use of pharmaceutical fertility drugs.

To me, through the fertility specialty, conventional medicine proffers to us one more
horrific scheme of inhumane money grubbing through a commercial venture with drug
companies. But alas! Along with some good, such is what conventional medicine
generally offers us. What can couples do? Obviously, you can educate yourselves so you
can make well-informed, self-protective choices. Not to do so (as the study abstracts I
recommend above will show) may mean the ultimate sacrifice by the wife.