For those wanting to know a little about our Dr Gordon Skinner

[Guest guest]

Dr. Gordon R B Skinner MD (First Class Honours), DSc, FRCOG, FRCPath, a Short Biography (UPDATED 18th January 2005) http://www.thyroideducation.com/articles.htm

Gordon Skinner was born in Glasgow in 1942 and attended Kelvinside Academy Grammar School where he was dux proxima accessit. Dr Skinner is widowed with a daughter Fiona and two sons Niall and ; his wife Janet was a school teacher who sadly passed away in December 2003.

He graduated in Medicine at the University of Glasgow in 1965 and following house jobs in Glasgow and Midlands of England specialised in Obstetrics and Gynaecology and later in Virology and in 1976 became Senior Lecturer in Medical Microbiology at the University of Birmingham with Consultant status at the Queen Hospital in Birmingham.

His main interest concerned development of vaccines;

A vaccine against herpes virus infection underwent successful Phase III trials in the United States but was somewhat costly to manufacture but his research group have recently developed a more streamlined method of vaccine production and hope to enter Phase I trials within the next eighteen months.

His group have also invented - in conjunction with the Public Health Laboratory Service U.K - a vaccine against Aids using a unique approach which was designed to allow rapid preparation of the vaccine against new strains of virus which might emerge in the global population; safety studies have been completed at the Russian AIDS Centre, Moscow, Russia and his group are now seeking finance for Phase I clinical trial.

Finally his group developed a vaccine against Staphylococcal infection; this vaccine has been manufactured in the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo, Norway and the Phase I clinical trial has (coincidentally) begun on the day of writing (January 24th 2005). Phase II trial is scheduled to begin in 2006.

Dr Skinner’s research portfolio for which he was awarded the prestigious Doctorate of Science by the University of Birmingham can be found in his CV.

His research has extended to the clinical arena. Some ten years ago he was asked by colleagues to see patients who were deemed to have myalgic encephalopathy or chronic fatigue syndrome or post viral syndrome or post viral fatigue on account of his interest in virus disease. He noted that a number of these patients had clinical features of hypothyroidism but had ‘normal’ levels of thyroid hormones which would lead most workers in the field to reject a diagnosis of hypothyroidism. Dr Skinner has since treated and returned to health many patients who were clinically hypothyroid but had normal thyroid chemistry and has reported these results in a preliminary paper entitled “Clinical response to thyroxine sodium in clinically hypothyroid but biochemically euthyroid patients”. He is disappointed that many doctors have little enthusiasm or will to examine this critical shortfall in patient care which in part motivated his book “Diagnosis and Management of Hypothyroidism”.

Other of his books are en route to publication. “The Vaccine Man” is a factual and autobiographical account of Dr Skinner’s life which poignantly describes difficulties in taking important and exciting research discoveries from the laboratory to the global market and thus ensuring their availability towards alleviation of human suffering; the book has not been without its critics not least his lovely late wife Janet who described the work as a masterpiece of astonishing tedium and self aggrandisement.

“Emotional Statistics” is Dr Skinner’’s favourite work which explores the sense and feeling of statistical formulae re-emphasising their importance for a true understanding of statistics; it is his firm view that the modern trend of shoving a ‘package’ into a computer to answer statistical problems is intellectually appalling and few students truly understand what they are trying to do when they apply statistics to a given statistical problem; Dr Skinner has a general belief which was shared in some measure by the great statistician Pascall that the rigid divorcement of physical sciences from ‘heart understanding’ and ‘emotions’ has precluded exciting fields of intellectual discovery; we need to consider for example why we can see or understand three but not four dimensions and the second but not the third differential in calculus where for example the rate of change of the rate of change is graspable but the rate of change of the rate of change of the rate of change is hardly graspable by the human mind.

Other books of a more light hearted nature namely “Exercise for Travellers” and “Rules for Children” which found little favour with his own children and indeed the publication of four somewhat raunchy novels was forbidden by Janet who considered that these works represented a forlorn attempt to revisit lost youth; Janet was the only one who could keep the great man in his place.

Dr Skinner has had long life interest song writing and has composed a number of songs in conjunction of his son who is lead singer in a Glasgow band called The DKARTS and indeed Dr Skinner has prepared a rock opera which is nearing completion entitled “Glasgow Rocks Again”; one of his songs from the opera ”Teddy Girl” is now frequently requested in pubs and bars in Glasgow.

He plays a ‘pretty decent’ round of golf and played chess for Scotland in his youth; he is also a long time supporter of West Bromwich Albion for which our heart felt sympathy.

BOOK

His book the “Diagnosis and Management of Hypothyroidism” has been written to draw attention of the medical profession to a major faux pas of the last two decades This is the obdurate refusal of the medical profession to recognise that patients can suffer from hypothyroidism when the thyroid chemistry is deemed to be ‘normal’ when the free thyroxine or the thyroid stimulating hormone lie between 95% reference intervals. There is a further problem that when a patient is diagnosed as hypothyroid many patients receive too low level of thyroid replacement through servile reliance on thyroid chemistry with (often) cavalier disregard of how the patient feels accompanied by an implicit and bizarre belief that a level of thyroid hormone is a better index of wellbeing than the patient’s own view of his/her wellbeing.

This situation has arisen from the mindless deification of ‘evidence-based medicine’ which usually means laboratory-based-medicine where one chooses the evidence which suits and ignores evidence which doesn’t suit. There is no evidence that the efficacy of thyroid replacement is better correlated with levels of thyroid chemistry than with the initial clinical picture nor clinical outcome and in a small pilot study the author has provided preliminary evidence of this view.

A second issue concerns use of a porcine thyroid extract (Armour Thyroid) which was used extensively in the United Kingdom until introduction of synthetic hormones but was removed from the British National Formulary for reasons which remain unclear. Dr Skinner argues that there is a place for this preparation in a number of patients and practitioners who use all three thyroid preparations namely thyroxine, triiodothyronine and natural thyroid extract (Armour Thyroid) have all seen patients who benefit from Armour Thyroid. It is often posited that the matter has not been put to placebo controlled trial which is true and there has never been a clinical trial comprising different preparations; it is therefore nothing short of presumptuous to proclaim blanket condemnation for a product on the bizarre assumption that if a comparison between this product and another product has never been made the more recently developed synthetic products are de facto more efficacious; proposition that the composition of recent batches of Armour Thyroid is not known seems unlikely given that the product is approved by the notably strict Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) of the USA.

In summary this book reasserts the criticality of clinical evaluation in the diagnosis and management of disease and in particular hypothyroidism. The book is written in a direct style with some humorous asides to alleviate the (aforementioned) astonishing tedium of his literary endeavours. Dr Skinner feels there is little point in fluffing words and not presenting his views in simple language which will be palatable to both the laity and the medical profession.