I really really cant stand Ray Peat.
The reason I loathe him so is he is such a *brazen* quack. He's worse than Jack Kruse when it comes to spouting total lies and getting away with it.
I've been reading this article @ 180degree health (home of brother in quackery, Matt Stone) for 1 minute and he has already mislead people into believing rhemuatoid arthritis = hypothyroidism, that graves hyperthyroid symptoms = hypothyroidism, and that there are no normal biological values with a wide range as exists for TSH, and that hypothyroid people are actually manic full of energy. LOL.
These kind of outrageous lies depend on the medical ignorance of the reader. An educated reader would spit out their coffee reading Peat. It is so shameful because most readers are simple, uneducated types and trusting Peat hoping to gain insight into their own health problems; they never realize the full extent of the out of this world medical lies Peat spouts w/o a hint of irony because they don't have the background. Let's focus on his discussion of the signs/symptoms of myxedema for a moment:
"The mucousy materials [myxedema] that are overproduced can also cause blood vessel inefficiency and rigidity, and contributes to things like varicose veins. When this material gets in the joints, it causes cartilage deformities. The old textbooks used to show teenagers with deformed joints that caused the same deviation of the bones — at the elbow joint especially, and the knee joint especially, with knock knees for example — but in old people you see the fingers deviating to one side, because the cartilage is getting deformed."
Ignoring for a second the totality of bullshit in this paragraph, I would like to focus specifically on his claim that myxedema causes severe finger joint deformities. This is a typical Peatism - to brazenly misrepresent medical reality to his readers, hoping/praying no one in the audience has a basic medical background.
The "medical textbooks" which feature elderly people's hands with fingers deviating to the side are demonstrating the effects of a specific connective tissue illness, most specifically rheumatoid arthritis, and this sign is called a swan's neck deformity.
It is rather specific for rheumatoid arthritis, and if you see an old person whos fingers are all leaning away from their hand, that person has a severe connective tissue illness like rheumatoid arthritis. The reason this is so is because RA specifically targets synovial joints, and that severity of deformation localized to that area of the body is a fairly specific sign for RA. It can occur in other illnesses affecting connective tissues, but it is *not* a sign of hypothyroidism generally speaking. A person can perhaps have hypothyroid as well as a connective tissue disease (and I assume some patients exist with multiple autoimmune disorders), but one is not related to the other pathophysiologically speaking.
Furthermore, a lot of autoimmune illnesses (including thyroid and RA) tend to strike older individuals, due to poor health/weaker immune systems as part of aging. In example, a large percent of older females will have hypothyroidism (real hypothyroidism, not made up Ray Peat bullshit hypothyroidism)... but very very few young women will have hypothryoidism. Same is true of RA; there is a minority of young people with RA (and it is specifically called juvenile onset RA) but most RA is found in an elderly population; therefore, older people's hands are the ones most of us have observed with this deformity in our day to day lives. This is why Peat slyly says "old people's hands"; he knows most of his readers have only ever observed this in an elderly hand. RA, like all illnesses, is a spectrum of severity illness. Some people with RA you will encounter are bed bound and in chronic pain with all joints contracted and torturous. Others, more commonly, have some mild deformation and pain but are not complete invalids. It's a SPECTRUM disease, and most of us have seen someone who has had RA before whether or not they told us, simply because the hands are a giveaway sign... the swan's neck deformity of fingers.
Bait and switch then occurs for the reader: "I saw it, he said it, it must be true, therefore, everything he says is probably just as insightful!" The bait and switch comes in when Peat presents this as some kind of sign of hypothyroidism, when it isn't at all. The reader trusts Peat thinking he is insightful because it matches their personal experiences, never realizing what a lousy crazy quack he is.
Possessing even a basic medical education would demolish Peat's work without breaking a sweat; I usually reach an exasperation stage about 30-60 seconds into a ray peat article for this reason... it takes him about that long to say something Jack Kruse like in degree + severity of outrageous lie. He is sooo terrible about misleading people medically speaking, but as stated most of his readers are too medically ignorant to catch on. I cry a little bit whenever anyone tells me they read Peat. He's a sigma above Mercola in quackishness, and he's probably much worse than Jack Kruse when it comes to medical lies and deception.
I could continue to humliate this pathetic article. Scrolling down on the Matt Stone joke-site, it appears Peat drones on and on like this spinning lie after lie. Out of all the quacking going on in this extremely long article, I would award Peat the most points for his "Lipofuscin" rant. He attempts to present a case that "age pigments" are the cause of human aging and disease and this is lipofuscin. God, I love it when quacks develop a T.O.E. and arbitrarily peg some novel/poorly understood metabolite or hormone to be the great alien space ship to hale bopp. Kruse's hale bopp space ship was "leptin", Peat's used to be progesterone, but I like the "lipofuscin" alien ship better because it is so poorly understood you can really say anything you want to/attribute it to it, and most people wouldn't know the difference. Including me. Because no one knows ANYTHING about what lipofuscin does or does not do.
Unfortunate for Kruse, and for Peat, we know pretty well now what leptin does, and what progesterone does, so it is very easy to expose these lies for what they are. When Kruse started out, most were less educated regarding leptin. Most women are also very ignorant regarding their hormones / what they do, which gives Peat leverage to advertise the crazy shit he does.
The losers are always the people at home just reading the internet trying to make heads or tails of things. People like Ray Peat are what give the phrase "Don't believe what you read on the internet" real power. Of course the internet can provide one with access to a great deal of information, much more than formal education sometimes; but then on the other hand, there is Ray Peat and Jack Kruse, and Mercola and Matt Stone, and various other fucking assholes. It is inexcusable + shameful more people do not denounce these frauds.
Here are the losers:
180 gullible fools, I guess 1 for every degree of health. Maybe it is 1 degree of temp increase after pigging out at the chinese buffet, huh. Turns out if you want to defeat obesity, just be a naturally thin 20 year old man and eat a lot! Turns out food becomes heat, not body fat!!! It works for Matt Stone!!! It's that simple, lol!180 Responses to “Thyroid Deficiency & Common Health Problems”
Oh and P.S., I find it ironic Peat has a gallery of artistic nude paintings on his website. The women he paints to admire female beauty are classically demonstrating the appearance of high estrogen with very low /brief progesterone exposure. Pale edematious skin particularly of face, arms, hips/legs, with marked diminished fluid/fat retention around waist, very thick hair. This is classic female beauty; all men all over the world are attracted to this because pale skin is a significant fertility indicator, as much so as a narrow waist/flat stomach, and the fatty/edematious arms and legs which are demonstrated by his painting. These changes are only possible from high estrogen, without prior history of extreme progesterone exposure (lack of prior pregnancy).
Peat writes this of his painting:
Painting and science have been closely associated historically, because both used to involve close, intense examination of their subject, generalization based on experience, and imaginative consideration of the possibilities. That has changed but not because of any intrinsic change in knowledge.
...
In the 19th century, biologists were usually competent painters, but as specialization took over at the beginning of the 20th century, both science and painting became "abstract." Mathematics came to be called the language of science, and a science was considered to be more scientific when it was more mathematical. The mathematical habit of mind inclines biologists to see organisms as disembodied information, ultimately as the information contained in the genetic code. Change (they are likely to say) is random, "chaotic," ultimately unknowable. There is no place in this system for a radical critic of the purpose and direction of the system.
He claims he is a student of observed life and this informs his biological/medical theories, meanwhile he is inept to understand the appearance of "healthy fertile female" he finds oh so poetic and riveting, is nothing more than some estrogen, and youth, in the context of low testosterone and naivete to high progesterone. This hilarious tard has a whole webpire dedicated to selling progesterone cream and convincing women high youthful estrogen is "bad" , meanwhile he uses the appearance of females who express the results of that evil endocrine system to advertise his theories. I couldn't make this up.
The quackosphere never stops being entertaining, and they are usually most hilarious when they are dead serious.
