The Story:
A middle aged lady saw me because of weight loss, palpitations, and high nervous energy.  Going through her medication list, I discovered that she was taking a compounded thyroid hormone and that it was being regulated by checking her body temperature.  Her thyroid hormone levels measured by a scientifically certified commercial laboratory showed her to be chemically poisoned by a very high level of blood thyroid.  Her thyroid hormone level was in the lethal zone where heart fibrillation and sudden cardiac death commonly occur.  Her bone density also revealed severe osteoporosis, another adverse effect of thyroid poisoning.
The Messages: 
a) Compounding hormones that are already available in pharmaceutical grade is morally wrong because the quality of the individually compounded hormones cannot possibly match that of the industry.  The FDA has issued a statement saying that compounded hormones can have too much, too little, or no hormones at all when tested in a scientific laboratory.  There are only two reasons that sanction compounding: 1) If the medicine is not commercially available or 2) If the available medicine is so expensive but can be cheaply compounded for cost containment.  Neither of these conditions were met in our patient's case; indeed, her charges were far in excess of the prices of commercially available thyroid hormones.
b) Measuring body temperature to regulate thyroid hormone treatment is both primitive and morally wrong because it goes against solid scientific evidence.  Moreover, there are no published data that have compared such a practice with the gold standard of blood hormone monitoring as measured by scientifically certified commercial laboratories.