nadinbrezinski and MissyVixen will back me up on this.
I have seen many fat haters on DU say "glandular problems are RARE, ALL fat people are junk-food-eating lazy slobs, metabolism is a simple equation in thermodynamics." Human metabolism is far more complex than simple physics, sorry for you physics majors.
I don't think "at least 27 million Americans" signifies a rare disease. That's more people than have diabetes, and we don't have any research institutions working on thyroid diseases.
This is about the problem with TSH tests. This is used as a test for thyroid function, but it is secreted by the pituitary gland, to kickstart the thyroid. GO FIGURE!!!!
This is from a thyroid list I am on:
The problem lies in the way labs establish their "normal" reference ranges. A reference range is defined to include 95% of the supposedly healthy population living in the particular geographic area served by the particular lab. This means that any given lab can only allow 5% of the people it tests to be outside the reference range, 2.5% of them below the range (in the case of TSH = hyper) and 2.5% above it (in the case of TSH = hypo).
One huge problem with this is that more than 5% of the population has thyroid disease. The American Association of Clinical Encrinologists estimates that 13.5 million Americans are diagnosed with thyroid disease and another 13.5 million have thyroid disease but have not yet been diagnosed and are unaware they have it. Their estimate is that there are at least 27 million Americans who have thyroid disease, and most by far of those are hypo. Yet very little money is spent on research into thyroid disease and treatment, while tons have been and are still spent on diabetes, which affects only about 16 million Americans.
Another huge problem is that of those diagnosed with thyroid disease about 80% are hypothyroid and about 20% are hyperthyroid. But labs' reference ranges can only exclude 5% of people, half of those above and half below whatever numbers 95% of people turn up with. And guess which half ends up with more undiagnosed cases? The method for calculating thyroid reference ranges inherently skews them toward the high end, because only 2.5% of healthy people tested can be included as hypo. So a lot of hypo people are wandering around diagnosed normal in order for labs to meet the 95% criterion that defines normal reference ranges.
Labs do adjust their reference ranges a little bit as the results from their population shift up or down. The particular Quest lab I use has over the years lowered its top number for TSH from 5.0 to 4.5. But I don't think they're ever going to drop it as low as 3.0, because that would take too many out of the supposedly normal 95%.
The only solution I can think of is to get more of the undiagnosed folks diagnosed and removed from the "normal healthy" group on which reference ranges are based. And that would likely take a whole lot more doctors routinely ordering tests for free T4 and free T3 and defining hypo and hyper by those numbers instead of only by TSH.
Slats
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Furthermore, thyroid cannot be absorbed and used properly without proper nutritional support. It cannot be used properly without sufficient cortisol secretion by the adrenal glands, either. And millions of people have adrenal fatigue due to overwhelming stress in their lives. They just poop out and you get to the point where you it a brick wall. I had that feeling of "I can't go on, I can't deal with being around people, it is too stressful to deal with them." I crashed a couple of decades ago and I cannot get any doctor, my internist or an endocrinologist, to take me seriously. They ignore this.
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Assorted links:
http://www.nthadrenalsweb.org/ www.stopthethyroidmadness.com
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/NaturalThyroidHormonesADRENALS/ http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/NaturalThyroidHormones/ http://faqhelp.webs.com/ http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/NTHA-Chat/ http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/RT3_T3/http://www.thyroid-rt3.com/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HypoPets/ 
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