Before its formal discovery, people were already treating it correctly (with dissecated thyroid from pigs).
In the 70s it was found how to track TSH and T4 hormones in the blood, and in the light of this discovery there was a push to adopt it, and that diagnosis should be based only on that, not in patient symptoms.
Also the manufacture of synthetic T4 started since then.
This resulted in two problems: One, most doctors now use a protocol where you don't treat the person until the blood test show he HAS to (if you read the official guidelines, the ones that doctors use as "confirmed" disease, in the guidelines are instead listed as critical state and you must treat), the second is that for many patients, the problem does not manifest as T4 production, but in the conversion of T4 to something else, and to that people, synthetic T4 obviously don't work.
The personal result to me, was that I struggled 11 years to find a medic willing to treat me and ignore the blood tests, I've been being treated since 1 month and a half ago, and feel MUCH better, and I am sad that I had to go some extremes (including threatening to beat up a medic if she refused to order the exams I thought was needed).
For others, the result is that people created whole associations of thyroid patients, that has as major ethos defend practices of the 1960s, several countries has groups of patients and lawyers specialized in launching lawsuits to force medics to treat them like people were in the past, in hope that this will fix the problem (And whey they DO succeed in the lawsuit and the medic treat them like in the 60s, the disease DO get fixed).
There are lots of information on this site, mind you, despite the at first seemly crazy conspiratorial tone, I must say from personal experience, and from personal experience of all other people I know with the same disease, that this site is absolutely correct, and modern medicine that is wrong: http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/
I plan in writing a blog post in some months, comparing my coding performance before and after taking the medicine (one of the symptoms of the disease is "foggy mind")
