Conversations Unplugged
with McCall McPherson
At twenty seven, McCall McPherson was already being treated for hypothyroidism, yet she was spending as many as sixteen hours a day in bed. Her thyroid test was considered normal, but she was struggling with crushing fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, hair loss, poor sleep, and a life increasingly dictated by her symptoms. That experience ultimately changed the direction of her career. In this conversation with STEMREGEN Founder and Chief Science Officer Christian Drapeau, McCall shares how getting her own life back led her to build Modern Thyroid Clinic, and why she is now partnering with STEMREGEN to study what supporting the body’s own repair system could mean for thyroid health.
McCall McPherson
McCall was already practicing medicine when she began looking more deeply into her own condition. After finding a clinician who expanded her testing and changed her treatment approach, she says the improvement came quickly. Soon, she began recognizing similar thyroid issues in patients who had come to her for treatment-resistant depression. Those patients shared their experiences online, and within months, thyroid patients made up 90% of the new people coming into her practice. When her first patient flew in from another state, McCall had a realization: “I’m doing the wrong thing. This is my calling.” Modern Thyroid Clinic grew from there, turning her personal struggle into work that now reaches people far beyond her original practice.
That journey has also shaped the questions McCall wants to answer next. She and Christian discuss plans to formally study STEMREGEN in people with thyroid conditions, including its potential effects on thyroid function and other measurable outcomes. One area they are especially interested in investigating is whether there could be changes in thyroid tissue following thyroidectomy. McCall is careful to frame this as something they want to document scientifically, rather than an established outcome. “Getting the science behind it and documenting it along the way will be so incredibly impactful,” she says.
For McCall, thyroid health rarely comes down to one isolated system. She describes the thyroid as intertwined with energy, mitochondrial function, the gut, inflammation, genetics, and other processes throughout the body. That is what makes the regenerative approach so interesting to her: instead of looking at every piece separately, she wants to explore what happens when the body’s own repair mechanisms are supported more broadly. It’s the next chapter in a journey that began with her refusing to accept that a “normal” test result meant there was nothing more to investigate, and continues with a question she and Christian now hope to put to the test.
