As I reported in my post on water, I went on a health quest in the middle 1990s after my father died. One of the things I learned about was the importance of hydration and that people needed between 1/2 gallon to a gallon of water per day.

For years, I had a charcoal filter on my drinking water that I thought protected me. However, what I didn’t know is that right at the time I decided to increase my hydration levels in 1995, the people who controlled the water board decided, against major local protest, to start putting fluoride in the water supply. Not only were they putting this toxin in the water, they were putting it in at a level that was much higher than most water systems.

Had I known they were planning to poison the water, I would have been protesting along with everyone else. But they really didn’t publicize what they planned to do to limit the protests. I knew that the fluoride was a deadly toxic waste that required hazmat handling by the people dumping it in the water supply. That right there should tell you not to drink it or use any product that contains it.

But, I didn’t know they put the fluoride in my water supply. So, I got to experience first hand, the toxic effects of fluoride. You can say this was a real-world, double blind experiment with me being the subject.

I found out the hard way that a charcoal filter is not up to the job of removing fluoride and other toxic elements from the water supply. My water consumption went up to increase my hydration levels and slowly, I was poisoning my thyroid and everything else.

I didn’t realize it at first, because I had always taken care of health, taking supplements and eating healthy. But over time, I started having symptoms that I did not understand.

It was a slow process but after a few years of drinking the charcoal filtered water I was having these symptoms among others too numerous to mention:

• Low basal temperature
• Dry Skin
• Cold hands and feet
• Weak finger nails

There is an extensive list of symptoms associated with Hypothyroidism. However, some of them are contradictory. The most reliable indicator is that recommended by Dr. Barnes which is taking your temperature on rising before you get out of bed or do anything else. The temperature should range between 97.8 to 98.2. Any reading lower than that indicates a Hypothyroid condition.

Well, my basal temperature was in the 96 degree range.

The human body is like a car engine. It has to maintain a specific temperature range to function properly. In a car, the engine has a thermostat; in the human body, we have the thyroid.

Fortunately, there was an alternative health clinic in the area at the time. I went in and got a prescription for natural thyroid but I did not want to be stuck taking this forever; I needed a solution to fix the thyroid and I started extensive research.

The man who was literally a whistleblower on Hypothyroidism was Dr. Barnes. I read his extensive book on Hypothyroidism called:

Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness.

The book was really good and gave a complete picture of all the health issues caused by low thyroid. However, other than taking a thyroid prescription, Dr. Barnes didn’t have a solution to repairing the thyroid. But reading the book is important because you can find out how critical it is to REPAIR the thyroid and you CAN repair the thyroid to return it to normal operation.

So, with my prescription of natural thyroid, my symptoms improved but that is only a short term fix. I continued my quest for thyroid repair.

The first category of repair was found in a couple of excellent books on Magnesium:

The Magnesium Factor by Mildred Seelig and

The Magnesium Miracle by Carolyn Dean.

I read the Magnesium Factor first. It was a good book filled with valuable information but it would probably be too academic and dry for most people. The Magnesium Miracle was more user friendly. Both books are some of the early works on magnesium and are good to read. This was over 15 years ago and now, there are many books on magnesium, some good, many not so good. These two books are solid.

What I discovered was that although magnesium helped the thyroid and was critical to over 300 body processes, it was not the complete solution to thyroid repair. That led me to the works of Dr. Abraham.

Before I move on to the work of Dr. Abraham and the Iodine Project, I want to say that the books on magnesium saved my life. By reading them, I understood why there was a family history of heart disease and how to fix it. My father and his father had died from heart problems and the books on magnesium explained why. So, I had an important tool to make sure I never had heart problems and to this day, at the age of almost 70, I do not. So, I encourage you to read the books on magnesium; perhaps it will change your life as it did mine.

So, thyroid repair. How to do it? Well, Dr. Abraham started doing research on iodine and discovered that Americans only get a small fraction of iodine in the diet which in turn leads to an extensive list of health problems. Since the work of Dr. Abraham back in the early 2000s, much more research has been done and some excellent books published on Iodine.

I got the product Dr. Abraham recommended called Iodoral, took it as directed and solved my thyroid issue. What I didn’t realize at the time is that correcting the thyroid is just one step in the iodine program.

16 years ago, Dr. Abraham’s work was just getting out there. Since that time, much work has been done to define the iodine protocol and I will address that in a future post. Iodine is critically important for health and practically everyone is deficient.