We’re going to be doing a short little talk on the thyroid. And again, we spoke last time about why my thyroid is not working? You know many women and men, but mostly women, are going to be suffering from thyroid conditions, the statistics are pretty staggering. This is going to be our part two version. Just to give you a repeatable, we talked about a short version of what we talked about last time. If you did not read that last article, make sure you go back to that, “HYPOTHYROIDISM – Part 1” And obviously, we talked about the thyroid epidemic. So this is one of our books that I’ve written on why there are so many problems with the thyroid and some of the missed things that are happening in Medical Avenue.

As we talked last time, we spoke about the situation that many individuals specifically women go through as they’re dealing with a thyroid condition, many of them will experience multiple types of symptoms. These thyroid symptoms, not only could be linked to the thyroid. Let’s talk about some of those symptoms again, there could be hair loss, fatigue, weight gain, anxiety, depression, joint pain, digestive issues like constipation or diarrhea, brittle nails are breaking, the outer edges of the eyebrows are getting really thin. So if you’re noticing some of these symptoms, you very well could have a thyroid problem. Now what’s interesting is that you could go to your doctor, your doctor could run bloodwork and they’ll run TSH, but the TSH it’s the main marker analyzed by the medical world to determine if you have a thyroid problem. Is it a low thyroid? Is your thyroid functioning normally?

THE THYROID 10 MARKERS

Many individuals will go to their doctor complaining about these types of symptoms and they run a test and the doctor says your thyroid is normal, everything’s great. Well, if that’s the case, then obviously it’s something else. But many times they will look into whatever else is going on and the individual leaves and continues to suffer from those types of things. We’re not going to talk about that so much today. But just to remind you of the markers that you should be analyzed if your thyroid-stimulating hormone comes back. So if you have a thyroid condition, or actually if you don’t have a thyroid condition, you want to make sure if your doctor is telling you that your thyroid looks normal. You have to expand the labs.

You have to look at other markers, there are 10 markers that should be run. And those 10 markers should be TSH or thyroid-stimulating hormone, T4, Free T4, Total T3. Free T3, Free Thyroxine Index, T3 Uptake, Reverse T3, Thyroid Peroxidase (TPO), and thyroglobulin antibody. Those 10 markers should be run in my opinion. Every single time you’re analyzing someone with a thyroid condition or the possibility they have a thyroid condition that they’re experiencing. So knowing the type of markers that should be run is going to be very important to make sure you play a role in your overall health. So we talked about that last time. I just wanted to do a real brief overview of that.

CAN YOU RELY ON JUST TSH TEST FOR YOUR THYROID PROBLEM?

But today I want to expand that into the next situation. Let’s just say that your doctor has run your bloodwork and he or she ran TSH and your TSH is normal and they’re saying, “Well, the symptoms you’re currently experiencing are not due to your thyroid, everything is working well on the thyroid.” And let’s just say they did run the other thyroid markers, which is very unlikely. And doing this work for almost 15 years now, I’ve never seen anybody run a full thyroid panel of everything I just spoke about. So let’s just say they did run the full panel and everything came back normal. And it’s truly not a thyroid issue. As I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, it could be something else, the symptoms of a thyroid condition can mimic other areas.

So what I mean by that is you may not have a thyroid problem. You may have some other type of organ or underlying problem that is mimicking the same type of symptoms of what the thyroid symptoms look like. So it’s not uncommon for me to have a discussion with a patient. And they’re saying, “Well, my doctor says my thyroid is normal, and I still have hair loss, I still have weight gain, I can’t lose any weight, it’s like really frustrating, I have fatigue, I’m tired all the time, I can’t sleep, my joint pain, constipation, we’re hearing these symptoms. And I’ll run a full thyroid panel on the same thing, I won’t see anything going on there. So it’s obviously something else. That’s the problem. So what that means is that you can’t just rely on these types of tests.

ARE YOU STILL IN THE TRADITIONAL MEDICAL MODEL?

Functional medicine is trying to analyze the individual to see where their body has lost function, which is then going to be the cause of whatever symptoms they’re going to be experiencing. So just because the thyroid is normal, does not necessarily mean that something else could be going on. Rather than a traditional medical model, if you have digestive issues, they’re going to give you medication or recommend something like Miralax, or some other type of product to help you with your constipation. If you’ve got maybe some depression going on, they’re going to give an antidepressant, we start having blood pressure issues, they’re going to give you a blood pressure medication, and so on and so on. The point is, traditionally in a medical model, what they’re going to do is they’re going to give you a pharmaceutical drug for the treatments, or for the symptom.

So it’s one pharmaceutical drug after another, it’s not uncommon for me to see individuals who have come to see me because they have a thyroid problem or think they have a thyroid problem. But they’re already taking so many other different medications because of the symptoms they’re experiencing. So what we want to do with that individual is we want to ask the right questions, we want to listen to their story, what’s going on with them, and really dig deep into what needs to be done and what needs to be analyzed. So we’ll look at other types of analysis, we’ll do hormone analysis because we know hormones, female and male hormones can disrupt the cycles inside the body and can create symptoms like weight gain, create symptoms of depression, anxiety, those sort of things, and other types of symptoms.

WE CUSTOMIZE THE RIGHT APPROACH

I can tell you from experience, that almost every single symptom that is under the category of the thyroid is identical to the adrenal gland, and many times it’s the adrenal gland that is the problem and not the thyroid, from what we’ve seen in our office. So we’ll look at the adrenal analysis, maybe the intestinal tract is not functioning properly. Maybe they’ve got underlying infection patterns that could be impacting their brain function, memory issues, depression, anxiety, it could be causing more inflammatory issues like constipation. They’re creating things like leaky gut problems. But the point of this is, is that we have to expand the analysis to find out what is going on. Because once we can find out the cause, once we know the underlying mechanisms that are contributing to your inability to function then it’s super easy to customize the right approach.

Looking at your body as an individual, and not as a disease process is a huge focus in functional medicine. Once we understand what it is, it’s very simple to put a step by step by step approach in place or protocol. We make sure we give you the right things that are necessary to guide you. We all know that leads to poor quality of health, poor quality of life, and just eventually getting worse. The side effects of the medication caused you to feel worse, you just don’t feel good. You may feel okay initially but over time, as it becomes worse and worse, you just going to feel more crummy. So we really want to make sure we’re focusing specifically on the individual. Well, now we’ve got to expand the analysis, expand the procedures of what needs to be done to start to unwind the problem.

So here’s the deal…

I am going to be doing another article. which will be part 3, there may be a part four as well. I’ll expand upon this topic of why my thyroid is not working. So if this information was worth it, if it was worth your while, and I hope that this was worth your while, please, I’m going to ask you to share this with everyone on your network. This information needs to be out there because it could literally save someone’s life, and at least their quality of life with their family, their loved ones, and being able to do things they want to do for the rest of their life. Like our page to see watch my episodes about these topics. So I hope that this talk was worth your time today.