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Opening of This week, my staff and I opened The Lowe Clinic and Research Center. My core staff, Tammy Lowe and Maureen Donahoe, and I are excited about being in the new facility. Our
Purposes Diagnosis and Treatment. The main purpose of the clinic, of course, is to continue my main work of the last twenty years: diagnosing and treating patients for health problems underlain by abnormally low metabolism. To make accurate diagnoses, we'll continue to use the most advanced methods for identifying physiological and biochemical abnormalities. And for treatment, we'll keep using the methods that my ongoing research and that of others shows to be effective. Clinical Detective Work. Scores of years ago, clinicians generally used a more scientific approach to solving patients' health problems. The typical doctor first interviewed and examined a patient. The purpose of the interview and exam was to form a hypothesis as to the cause of the patient's problem. Then the doctor tested the hypothesis. He or she did so by either giving the patient a particular treatment, or by using whatever technological means, such as lab tests, that were available at the time. Nowadays, most conventional doctors do little in the way of interviews, exams, and hypothesis forming and testing. The reason is that for the most part, corporations now run conventional medicine, and they've imposed tight financial and time constrains on doctors. As a result, it's easier for most doctors, in cookbook fashion, to take another approach: largely bypass interviews and exams and first order tests. Of course, far more tests are available today than in the older, more scientific days of medical practice. However, patients don't proportionally benefit. The reason is that doctors don't typically use the tests within a scientific, hypothesis forming and testing approach. Instead, they hope the test results will tell them what's wrong with the patient and what treatment to prescribe. If the test results fail to tell, the doctors either refer the patients to other specialists, or they just send the patients away without solutions to their health problems. I'm sure this is part of the reason for a sad commentary on conventional medicine: as Nobel-Prize winning Harvard physician Bernard Loan points out, mainstream medicine fails to help 75% of the patients who turn to it (Lown, B.: The Lost Art of Healing: Practicing Compassion in Medicine. New York, Ballantine Books, 1999). Like a growing number of alternative or natural medicine doctors, I use the old approach of hypothesis forming and testing. I've done this throughout my clinical career, but for me, this orientation goes deeper. It is part of my long obsession with deductive logic and a rigorous, uncompromising commitment to using the principles of science, unfettered by conflicts of interest. This orientation to problem solving long ago led me to focus on a special group of patients—those who chronically suffer because the causes of their health problems have defied discovery because of the approach of conventional medicine. To help these patients, I'll continue to use the basic logical and scientific approach to problem solving: forming and testing the most plausible hypotheses of the cause of the patients' problems. And when the testing shows some hypotheses to be false, I will reformulate the hypotheses, as many times as needed, until I form ones that accurately describe the causes of patients' health problems. Then, understanding the causes, I can help patients engineer treatment regimens that enable them to improve or recover their health. Clinical Research. Another purpose of our new facility is to function as a dedicated research center. In serving this function, we'll continue to collect and analyze data from patients under our care, and we'll publish the study conclusions we reach. We're presently working on several research projects that I'm eager to conclude so that we can publish the results. For example, we have enough measurements of patients' metabolic rates and their TSH, free T3, and free T4 levels to have learned something extremely important: the lab tests don't reliably predict patients' metabolic rates. This is important because it shows that the lab test results have limited value in patient care. We're also studying the usefulness of the voltage of the QRS-complexes in patients EKGs as an indicator of too little thyroid hormone regulation of the heart. The relevant research question is this: Is the voltage of the QRS complex reliable enough so that clinicians should regularly use it as a physiological tool in diagnosing and treating thyroid patients? We'll also soon analyze the relation between three measures: patients' resting metabolic rates, their basal body temperatures, and their salivary cortisol levels throughout a 24-hour cycle. Our intention is to learn whether these three measures correlate. If so, we'll also determine whether they correlate well enough to reliably predict one another. If they do, the predictions may prove useful in clinical practice? As with other studies I've conducted through the years, my purpose is clear: to improve the ability to help patients recover faster and more fully. And, of course, my hope as a scientist is that my research findings will also help other clinicians to serve their patients better.
Our New
Location On Pearl Street in downtown Boulder, it's well known that it's often tough to find a parking spot. And even when our patients found one, they faced the threat of parking tickets while they came into the clinic for their evaluations. Another benefit of the new location is that parking is underground. To get to our previous location downtown, patients had to walk to the clinic through snow, ice, and cold wind in the winter. The chilling effects on some patients made it necessary to take long times to warm them before their metabolic evaluations. With the underground parking, this will no longer be necessary. At the old clinic in downtown Boulder, patients had to climb up a flight of stairs to get to our office. The effort required of some patients again made it necessary to take extra time to get them in a resting state before doing their metabolic exams. Our new building has an elevator to carry patients from the garage to our floor. They can ride up and, because of that, they can relax more quickly for their metabolic testing. Tammy, Maureen, and I are happy to announce these benefits of our clinic and research center. You can trust that we'll make every effort to serve you well, and we believe our new location will help us do that.
Your Thyroid Hormone Product
and Dosage: Troubled hypothyroid patients on T4-replacement often hear the same refrain from their conventional doctors: "Well, your TSH is in range. That means your aches, fatigue, mental fog, depression, and cold hands can't possibly have anything to do with your hypothyroidism." I know from one of the studies I mentioned in the section above that this refrain is a false one. The TSH level is simply grossly unreliable for gauging whether the thyroid hormone product a patient is using, or the dose he or she is on, is working well for him or her. For too many patients, the product or dose is failing to provide the patient with normal metabolism, body temperature, brain and heart function, and relief of symptoms. The father of rational thyroid hormone therapy was Dr. Broda Barnes. He wrote that the best way to tell how a thyroid hormone product or dose is working for you is to measure its effects on tissues—not its effect on the TSH. The TSH tells us nothing about how a thyroid hormone product or dose is affecting anything other than one group of cells: those in the pituitary gland that produce TSH. By contrast, measurements such as the resting metabolic rate, the basal body temperature, the Achilles reflex speed, the number and intensity of hypothyroid symptoms, and the R-wave on an EKG do tell us how a thyroid hormone product or dose is effecting the patient. We provide assessments of all these gauges at The Lowe Clinic and Research Center. If you can come to our office, we'll assess some or all of these gauges for you. If you can't come, we'll work with you long distance. We'll teach you how to properly use the gauges available to you. By doing so, you can come to understand how your thyroid hormone product and dose are affecting you. That understanding will be far better than that provided by your TSH, free T3, and free T4 levels. Our Menu of Services: Long-Distance Consulting, Metabolic Evaluations, & Treatment by Tammy Lowe We have put together a menu of my husband's clinical services and fees. We put the menu together so that you can avail yourself of some or all of the services, whichever best fits your budget. If you want to talk about Dr. Lowe's services, you can reach me by phone at 603-391-6061. If you prefer, you can email me at Tammy@drlowe.com. However, we also have a webpage where we describe the menu of services: Your Options for Metabolic Evaluations and Treatment. The Lowe Clinic and Research Center © 2007 John C. Lowe. All rights reserved. This email newsletter may be copied and distributed subject to three conditions: (1) All text within the full document or any section copied must be copied without modification with all pages included. (2) All copies must contain the following copyright notice: "© 2007 John C. Lowe." (3) Neither this full document nor any section of it may be published or distributed for profit. |
