In March 2013 a blood test indicated I had high calcium which is an indication that one of the thyroid glands in the back of my thyroid was infected. A doctor who was a surgeon and will remain nameless said I needed a major surgery to get to the back of my thyroid gland. Such a surgery would involve an incision along the major part of my neck to get behind the thyroid gland, and would involve significant risk and recovery time.
I therefore started doing some research and found that there were some doctors that could perform a minimal operation that only involved a minimal incision in the front of the neck and only required minimum recovery time. Some of these doctors were located in shopping centers, which made me somewhat skeptical.
However, there was one group of doctors that were located in Tampa General Hospital, which was a highly respected hospital. It was called the Norman Center for Hyperparathyroidism. They also had a very extensive website which was both interesting and informative. It stated that only about one in 800 people were affected by this disease. It had a graph which indicated the age of all their patients. Without getting into the statistical aspects of the graph, what it showed was that the most common age of their patients was about 58 years. It also stated that if not treated, you will not die of hyperparathyroidism, but in 15 or at the most 20 years you will die of some other disease because of the imbalance of calcium.
Then I got to thinking. I thought of all my friends and relatives who died in their early 70s, and there were quite a few. If just some of them had hyperparathyroidism, then hyperparathyroidism must be much more common than just one in 800.
When it came time for my surgery, I was visited by my surgeon, Dr. Douglas Politz. He asked if I had any questions. I said, “When can I start running?” He said, “Tomorrow.” Then I asked him, “Do you want me to tell you why I think hyperparathyroidism is more common than just one in 800?” He said no, he had to get ready for the surgery.
After the surgery he visited me briefly and told me that the surgery only took about 10 minutes, and he presented me with a picture of the enlarged parathyroid gland that was removed. I didn’t bring up the one in 800 issue as he was getting ready to do other surgeries.
However, each day around dinner time he made it a point to call each of his patients that he performed surgery on that day to see how they were doing. After I told him I was feeling fine, I asked him if I could explain to him why hyperparathyroidism was more common than one in 800. He seemed annoyed but said, “Go ahead.” When I explained my reasoning to him his immediate reaction was, “That’s awesome.”
He then gave me his email address and asked me to send him an email with my ideas. He also asked me to copy his partner Jim. Now I was not only on a first-name basis with these two famous doctors, but their nicknames as well—Jim and Doug.
In my communications with Jim and Doug it came out that a big problem they had was that doctors weren’t taking high calcium seriously. My response was that you guys are the cause of that problem. By saying that only one in 800 people are affected by hyperparathyroidism, doctors do not take high calcium seriously. Once you acknowledge that hyperparathyroidism is much more common than one in 800, then this will solve the problem once and for all. That is how our communication ended.
One year to the day after my surgery I went back and looked at their website. The headline read one in 100 people are affected by this disease. I sent an email to Jim and Doug and said, “That’s much better, but I still think it’s a bit too high.” I received no reply.
Five years to the day after my surgery I went back and looked at their website again. Dr. Norman had moved on to work on developing new surgical techniques. Dr. Politz was now in charge. There were more doctors. One was in charge of research. I contacted her.
They now had a large database of treated patients. I suggested that they could now show that patients that had this operation tended to live longer than other people. She replied that since a clinical trial was never done and would have been impossible to do, we would be charged with using anecdotal data. I replied, simply state that we have anecdotal data that may show that our patients tend to live longer. That was the last contact I had with them.
My final thought is that if you have high calcium and are diagnosed with hyperparathyroidism, contact Dr. Politz and settle for nothing less.
