How Regulatory Capture Threatens Access to a 130-Year-Old Treatment That Patients Overwhelmingly Prefer

The FDA has moved Armour, NP, and all natural thyroid medicines into the “unapproved drug” category. That doesn’t mean unsafe — many patients have relied on them for decades — but it does create stigma and uncertainty around access.

Dr. Marty Makary has emphasized the FDA’s commitment to pursue the first-ever approval of DTE pending trial results. That’s encouraging, but until approval is achieved, every current DTE remains in a vulnerable position. https://x.com/DrMakaryFDA/status/1955783788040159558

Patients deserve clarity and continuity, not doubt. This step is best seen as a transition moment — one that requires vigilance and advocacy to ensure access is truly protected.]

The Opening Salvo

In what represents an unprecedented overreach of regulatory authority that prioritizes pharmaceutical profits over patient welfare, the FDA has declared war on 1.5 million Americans who depend on natural thyroid medications for their very survival. As Dr. Robert Malone warned in his urgent alert: "You might think that the FDA wanted older women to be disabled with brittle bones, cognitive decline, metabolic disease, obesity, and poor health."[1]

This is the systematic dismantling of a treatment that has worked successfully for 130 years—since 1891 when Dr. George Redmayne Murray first used desiccated thyroid extract to save a woman dying from myxedema, an extreme form of hypothyroidism.[2] The FDA's August 6, 2025 enforcement letters threatening to ban all natural desiccated thyroid (DTE) products—including Armour Thyroid, NP Thyroid, and Nature-Throid—represent medical tyranny designed to funnel billions into synthetic drug manufacturers while condemning millions to unnecessary suffering.

But here's what makes this particularly egregious: natural thyroid is essentially ancestral food—organ meat that humans have consumed for millennia. The FDA is attempting to ban what is fundamentally a concentrated form of dietary thyroid gland, the same substance our ancestors prized as sacred medicine and nutrient-dense food.

The Bioidentical Illusion: Why Patient Experience Is Ontological Truth

Natural desiccated thyroid extract from a porcine source is the most physiologically complete thyroid replacement available. Unlike synthetic levothyroxine's single-molecule approach, DTE provides:

• T4 (Thyroxine): The storage hormone

• T3 (Triiodothyronine): The active metabolic hormone

• T2 (Diiodothyronine): Critical for mitochondrial function

• T1 (Monoiodothyronine): Emerging metabolic roles

• Calcitonin: Essential for bone health

• UNKNOWN YET HIGHLY LIKELY: Yet to be fully characterized indispensable biological co-factors

As Dr. Malone emphasizes, "T3 is the active thyroid hormone responsible for controlling metabolism, heart and digestive functions, muscle and brain activity, growth, and temperature regulation. Its actions are more potent than its precursor T4, and balanced T3 levels are essential for good health."[3]

The Molecular Deception

The FDA wants you to believe synthetic levothyroxine is "identical" to natural thyroid hormone. This is scientifically false. As GreenMedInfo's research has revealed for over a decade, synthetic T4 is produced through a mind-numbingly complex chemical process involving "nitrating L-tyrosine," "tetrazotized and iodized" compounds, and treatment with "aqueous HI in acetic acid."[4] This Frankenstein molecule is then contaminated with up to 6% dextro-thyroxine, a mirror-image stereoisomer that is cardiotoxic and acts as an endocrine disruptor.[5]

One patent describes the dizzyingly complex process of levothyroxine synthesis as follows:

"The process for preparation of Levothyroxine sodium comprises the steps, wherein compound obtained from steps a-g is prepared by conventional methods, a. nitrating L-tyrosine to give 3,5- dinitro-L-tyrosine, b. acetylating 3,5- dinitro-L-tyrosine to give 3,5- dinitro-N-acetyl L-tyrosine, c. esterifying the compound obtained from step (b) to give 3,5- diπitro-N-acetyl L-tyrosine ethyl ester, d. reacting the compound obtained from step (c) with p-TsCI in presence of pyridine to give corresponding tosylate salt, which is further reacting with 4-methoxy phenol to give 3,5- DinKro-4-p-methoxy phenoxy-N-acetyl-L-phenyl alanine ethyl ester, e. the compound obtained from step (d) is hydrogenated to give 3,5-diamino-4-p-methoxy phenoxy-N-acetyl-L-phenyl alanine ethyl ester, f. the compound obtained from step (e) is tetrazotized and iodized to give 3,5-Diiodo-4-p- methoxy phenoxy-N-acetyl-L-phenyl alanine ethyl ester, g. the compound obtained from step (f) is O-demethylated, N-deacetylated, and deesterified using aqueous HI in acetic acid to give 3,5-Diiodo-4-p-hydroxy phenoxy-L-pheπyl alanine followed by preparing hydrochloride salt of same and isolating, drying it h. lodinating 3,5-Diiodo-4-p-hydroxy pheπoxy-L-phenyl alanine HCI salt using methyl amine."

The critical epistemological issue is this: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because current assays cannot detect functional differences between synthetic and natural T4 doesn't mean such differences don't exist. Biological systems are nonlinear and exquisitely sensitive to subtle variations that cascade into significant physiological effects.

The Thyroglobulin Reality: Nature's Infinite Complexity

The image above exposes the breathtaking gulf between natural and synthetic thyroid hormone. Natural desiccated thyroid contains T4, T3, T2, T1, and calcitonin bound to the massive thyroglobulin protein—a 660,000 dalton molecular complex representing millions of years of evolutionary optimization. Each hormone exists in specific conformational states, held in precise spatial relationships, creating an information-rich matrix the body recognizes holistically.

In contrast, synthetic hormone consists of isolated T4 molecules floating in pharmaceutical void, stripped of biological context, devoid of the intricate molecular choreography that defines natural thyroid function.

Levinthal's Paradox and the Information That In-Forms

To understand the true magnitude of this difference, we must invoke Levinthal's Paradox. For thyroglobulin to fold from a linear chain into its precise three-dimensional structure requires navigation through near-infinite conformational possibilities—a journey that would take longer than the universe's age if done randomly. Yet it folds perfectly in milliseconds.

What Levinthal's Paradox teaches us is that biological specificity contains inconceivable amounts of information—but not information as mere data. This is information as that which in-forms—that which puts form into biological matter, guiding the transformation of potential into actuality.

When thyroglobulin folds into its native state, it demonstrates information as a formative force. Each T4 molecule bound to thyroglobulin is literally in-formed by this protein matrix. The scaffold puts form into:

• How the hormone is held in three-dimensional space

• What microenvironmental conditions it experiences

• How it relates to neighboring hormone molecules

• When and how it will be released

• What conformational memory it carries forward

This formative information—accumulated over millions of years of evolution—cannot be replicated in a reaction flask.