Throughout my life and studies I have increasingly believed that our human body is a very good adaptive machine, and therefore this permanent drug intake recommendation sounded a bit against what I believed the human body evolution could provide.
This became even more acute some months ago, when an x-ray of this friend's Thyroid gland showed its severe atrophy to about 25% of its normal size. This nonetheless the fact that she has been taking a supplementary hormone for her condition for the last 20 years. I decided to take a look at this problem with a systemic outlook.
Systemic definition
The health problems that are caused through a deficient hormone level in the body, which in turn is caused by an ill-functioning thyroid gland, can be represented as follows in terms of the System Dynamics methodology:
These have a positive relationship since the higher the hormone insufficiency, the higher the health problems, all else equal. In the same way, the more ill-functioning of the thyroid gland, the higher expected hormone insufficiency.
To this condition, the accepted intervention is to reduce the hormone insufficiency through a drug that would allow the body to restore the hormone levels it requires. This creates a Balancing Loop as indicted in the following picture:
This can be confirmed through the following though experiment, and simply by following the arrows and considering the polarities of the relationships between variables (either positive or negative): The Higher the hormone insufficiency, the more health problems that are experienced, which in turn lead to a Higher drug supplement intake.Finally, the higher Drug supplement intake leads to a reduced hormone deficiency, closing the loop and counteracting our initial condition (Hormone Insufficiency level).
Side effects of Drug supplement Intake
My next question was then, "ok, the immediate effect of the drug is indeed the reduction of the hormone gap in the body. Are there any other effects that lead to a DEPENDENCE on the supplement drug?". This effect can be explored though the casual link between the drug supplement intake and the state of the ill-functioning gland, as shown in the following picture:
Hypothesis:
What if a side effect of the drug supplement intake in this case is leading to an ever increasing gland malfunctioning? If this were the case, then the process of drug intake would create a reinforcing loop through its effect in the underlying problem, namely ill-functioning gland. In other words, the presence of increased levels of hormones in the body despite an ill-functioning thyroid gland (increased levels resulting from the drug supplement intake) could be signalling the body that the gland is in fact not required,and the body being an effective system, would then slowly reduce the gland size.
This would indeed explain the small Thyroid gland size detected in my friend.
In a short period of research, I have not found any documents in regard with the effect of increased hormone levels in the body on an ill-functioning gland. I have however come across several examples of bodily adaptations which denote efficiency in body disposition.
- How does an increased level of hormones affect the development of an ill-functioning endocrine Gland?
- Are there any techniques which aim at the recuperation of Gland function?
- What are the economic incentives that would promote the search for Gland recuperation instead of drug consumption?
Nevertheless System Dynamics has allowed me to take a very interesting first look at this problem.
