Dr. Saira Hameed

And that is what patients were injecting.

The issue with the insulin example is that there was an unpredictable potency.

And so if you gave an animal derived insulin, there was a high risk of hypoglycemia because the dose you took yesterday, that could have been fine.

But then you injected the same volume the next day and you overshot and the blood sugar went too low.

And as molecular biology improved, as pharmaceutical manufacturing improved, it became possible to make synthetic versions.

Not only did that lead to much greater predictability in terms of how the hormone would be in the body.

But it also meant that we could produce these hormones in far larger quantities.

Because if you're relying on animal-derived hormones to get enough hormone to serve a population, you're talking about a huge supply of animals that you would require to do that.

The paradigm in endocrinology is as follows.

You can have too much of a hormone, so the gland just starts overproducing that signal, bombards the target cell with the instruction, and the person will develop symptoms.

So in endocrinology, that's case study one.

You've got too much.

So an example would be what we call thyrotoxicosis, otherwise known as Graves' disease.

This is an autoimmune illness of the thyroid gland.

So the body launches an autoimmune strike on the thyroid gland and the thyroid gland responds by churning out unregulated quantities of thyroid hormone.

Thyroid is the metabolism hormone.

So having tons of thyroid in the system means your metabolic rate revs up

you can lose a great deal of weight.

One of the byproducts of metabolism is heat generation.

So you become completely heat intolerant.