Word: thyroid
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...like most people, you've never given your thyroid a second thought. Shaped like a bow tie and wrapped around the windpipe at the base of the throat, the thyroid helps regulate your body's metabolism much as a thermostat controls the temperature in your house. But if you're female and 50 or older--or love someone who is--you need to consider whether the old thermostat is still working. Last week the American College of Physicians, a conservative arbiter of treatment standards, recommended a blood test for thyroid disorders at least once every five years for all women...
...summers now, we have been playing the informal "alternative band name" game whenever we get together. To play is simple. Listen closely to everything you and your friends say. If you're quick enough, you'll pick out odd phrases that put genuine alternative band names--like Perfect Thyroid, Infamous Gnomosexuals, Accidental Groove and Burning Spear--to shame. Our list of outtakes from purely casual speech includes classics like Extraneous Stomach, Sneaky Bucket, Vomitous Swan and, my personal favorite, El Nino Lips...
...thyroid gland controls the body's basal metabolic rate--the rate at which it consumes energy while at rest. When the thyroid hormone is produced in excess, the body consumes energy faster than it can be supplied. The result is a haywire combination of anxiety, tension and fatigue. The body wants to go, go, go--and it does, even when it isn't going anywhere. This type of things can wear you out, even if you haven't been exerting yourself...
Detection of thyroid disorder and Graves' Disease has proved to be a difficult science: everyone feels anxious, tense, emotionally up-and-down, irritable, impatient, distractible, overactive and depressed to one degree or another. Especially on a college campus, especially at a school like Harvard, the average student probably feels any number of these ways to a large degree on even the most average of days. Add to this the fact that stress itself may be a precipitating factor in the development of hyperthyroidism, and overachieving Ivy League undergraduates suddenly become poster child candidates for Graves' Disease. In fact, the closest...
Currently I'm on medication to suppress my overactive thyroid gland. The hope is that by taking my medication regularly and by doing my best to regulate my lifestyle, my thyroid gland will quickly begin to regulate itself as well. I figure my metabolism has to slow down eventually. After all, my Harvard experience will be going into remission starting in about two weeks. That might be just the thing my Graves' Disease needs to head into remission along with...