Did we see the same show? I don't have a thyroid problem so maybe I don't get it but I thought this was a really good show. I thought Dr. Northrup was terrific. I am not sure why you are calling her a New Age Doctor. I thought she was really smart and gave some great advice.

At least in Oprah Winfrey, it strikes me that what this really is about isn't her thyroid or some new illness or menopause or her being "squashed down and unable to speak her mind" (Oprah? seems unlikely!). It's about her weight.

It's sad, maybe tragic, how many issues (especially relating to women and their health) seems to come down to this one, obsessive issue. We want to be thin, probably thinner than god and mother nature have designed us to be. We can't look at all those media images of thin young girls and not want that for ourselves, no matter how physically unlikely it is...and it gets very complicated when society and the medical community also lay into our weight as the true underlying cause of EVERY illness and disease, essentially blaming the sufferer for her suffering.

Since she is so public a figure, Ms. Winfrey's weight struggles are among the most known. We know she's tried all kinds of diets, like Optifast, only to regain all the weight (just like the rest of us, and the dismal results over all population groups that diets don't work). She famously has a personal chef (with her own cookbook) and exercise coaches, and now some guy with that Best Life diet (a real crock IMHO). I don't think anybody has a stronger drive to be genuinely thin than Ms. Winfrey and unlike the rest of us, she has the billions of dollars to put any plan of action into place, have any kind of professional help, special food, a chef cooking her special diet food, the best help with makeup and clothing.

Yet she's still not thin. Oh, she's trimmer than at her highest weight some years back, but I believe she's supposed to be 162 lbs (give or take) and is around 5'6" or 5'7" -- and if you go by the hard line weight-height tables popular right now, that's the borderline of OBESE. All that work, all that money, all that help, all that starving and giving up the foods you enjoy -- and you are still OBESE. That has to be a real buzz kill.

You can argue she's reasonably in shape for a woman in her early 50s, that she's not hugely fat and she's probably quite healthy overall. And I'll bet my life she'd trade all of that, and every dollar of her vast fortune to be thin. (And we all know what I mean by thin: Jennifer Anniston thin, Gwyneth Paltrow thin. SKINNY.)

If you are not thin in this contemporary world, you are invisible. Yes, even if you are a billionaire on TV each day and who gives away millions to build schools in Africa for disadvantaged little girls. What difference does all that make when you have to wear an evening gown WITH SLEEVES because you don't have those cool, skinny, "cut" arms that are the only kind that look really good in bare revealing sleeveless dresses?

Does any of this matter? Only because her self-hatred is our self-hatred....because if a billionaire cannot get thin, not even by spending all the money she has, then what chance do any of us have? If diets worked, if exercise worked, if personal trainers worked -- then Oprah would be thin. And she's not. And she never will be.

It's no more hypothyroidism than it is space aliens from Alpha Centauri causing her to be heavier than she wants. It's just a way of shifting the blame, and finding a new (hopeless) trend to follow. It won't make her thin anymore than Optifast did, or the Best Life diet or running or having Rosie the personal chef.

You are fighting something bigger than Oprah's billions here. And there is a good lesson in it for all of us, if we would only listen.

My problem with theories on hypothyroidism is that I know many women (including my mother) who have been diagnosed with it and put on medication, and then nothing whatsoever has changed.

I have a mare with hypothyroidism. Before she started taking shots, she had a big fatty neck crest, was overweight, ill-tempered and sluggish, and looked like a stallion. We fed her a tiny amount of food and even tried muzzling her in the pasture to keep her from overeating grass. After her thyroid was treated she lost the weight and perked up. She's like a different horse now.

My mother, after her treatment, is still a fat ass. I'm pretty sure I know why she's a fat ass. It's because she eats portions that are more suited for four or five people. That's pretty much the impression I'm getting from the other people I know whose doctors have told them they have thyroid problems. Every single one of them is equally fat before and after the treatment begins, and they all eat conspicuously too much. They have other vague complaints like "tiredness." These complaints don't go away after the thyroid is treated either.

It looks an awful lot like they have doctors who want to make female patients happy by telling them their weight isn't their own fault.

Now, before anyone jumps on me for being unkind to fat people... I know what it's like to try to lose weight. I know about metabolism. I weigh too much now and I eat much less than I did in my teens. But that doesn't change the fact that my mother, who claims to have a "slow metabolism" and claims that "I can gain weight on 1000 calories a day" actually eats about 5000 calories a day. Of course she's fat, and it's not because of her thyroid, it's because friggen artichoke hearts are not a diet food after you saute them in butter and drench them with cheese. She's capable of saying, "I feel good about myself, I ate a salad for dinner" when she ate a giant, company-sized bowl of salad suited for a party of ten, which included half a pound of feta cheese, plus eggs, olives, nuts, and oily dressing, equaling more calories than she claims to eat in a week.

Is there anyone reading this who has lost serious weight, permanently, after treatment for a thyroid condition?