A landmark study showed that women whose thyroid blood tests showed thyroid function to be in the lower third of the normal range were 69 percent more likely to die from a heart attack.

If you are tired, achy, have weight gain or are cold intolerant, ask your holistic doctor about a trial of natural Armour Thyroid. Besides helping you feel a lot better, it could save your life.

Researchers prospectively studied the association between TSH levels and fatal heart attacks in participants of the Norwegian Nord-Trondelag Health Study (HUNT): 17,311 women and 8,002 men without known thyroid, cardiovascular disease, or diabetes mellitus at baseline were followed for an average of 8.3 years, and 228 women and 182 men died of heart attacks.

Of these, 192 women and 164 men had TSH levels within the normal clinical reference range of 0.50 to 3.5 mIU/L. Interestingly, these researchers recognized over 10 years ago that a TSH over 3.5 represents an underactive thyroid.

Most American labs are still horribly outdated in the science they use, and consider a TSH up to 5.5 to be "normal."

The study showed that women with intermediate (1.14-2.52) or "high" levels (2.5-3.5) of TSH had a 41 and 69 percent increased risk of heart attack death compared with women who had TSH levels in the lower range of normal (0.50-1.4 mIU/L).

Women whose thyroid levels were actually abnormally low had an even greater risk of heart attack.

Cardiovascular disease kills 2,800 Americans every day. Much of this is preventable using natural therapies.

If thyroid medication was patentable and expensive, the drug companies would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to be sure doctors knew the research and used thyroid treatments more often.

Because it is cheap though, I suspect hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Americans will die unnecessarily because of ignorance about the importance of treating hypothyroidism.