Thyroxin Anhang

[Dr. Hyman]

Are you suffering from vague symptoms that you think are normal parts of life, such as fatigue, feeling sluggish in the morning, and having trouble with your memory, concentration, or focus? Do you have dry skin or fluid retention? Is your sex drive not what it used to be? Are your hands and feet cold all the time? Is your hair thinning,

your voice a little hoarse, your fingernails a little thick? Is your cholesterol high? Do you have trouble losing weight or have you gained weight recently?

Are you suffering from depression or anxiety?

Do you have really bad PMS or trouble getting pregnant?

Do you have muscle cramps and muscle pain or weakness?

Most of these symptoms aren’t severe enough to send you to the emergency room, but they do significantly affect your quality of life.

And most of us accept them as a normal part of our lives without really questioning them.

If you do go to see your doctor, he or she probably shrugs it off.

Yes, doctors are experts in acute illness. But they often fail miserably when it comes to addressing subtle changes in your body that affect the quality of your life.

According to conventional medicine, low sex drive is not necessarily a disease. Neither is a little dry skin or constipation or being tired most of the day.

But for you, those problems are significant. So what causes them?

Often, they’re caused by a condition that goes undiagnosed in half of the 45 million people who have it.

It’s called hypothyroidism. What is Hypothyroidism?

When you have hypothyroidism your overall metabolic gas pedal slows down because the master gland that controls it, your thyroid gland, is not functioning at full speed.

If your thyroid slows down, every other organ and system in your body slows down, including your brain, heart, gut, and muscles.

The thyroid hormone is like a master switch that turns on the genes that keep every cell running.

This is one of those gray areas in medicine, but doctors tend to think in black and white — you have it or you don’t, sort of like being pregnant.

Well, you can’t just be a little bit pregnant, but you can be just a little bit hypothyroid.

And it can have a dramatic effect on the quality of your life.

Yet most doctors don’t view it that way.

This problem is further compounded by the conventional belief that you can diagnose hypothyroidism only through one blood test, called TSH, and that you only qualify for treatment if your blood level is over 5.0.

Unfortunately, this view ignores a whole group of people who have what we call subclinical hypothyroidism. It is called that because doctors have a hard time diagnosing it.

Subclinical hypothyroidism may trigger many low-grade symptoms, such as fatigue, trouble losing weight, mild depression, constipation, and more. Yet it causes just slight changes in your blood tests. In fact, it often only shows up in tests that most doctors never perform.

Low thyroid function may seem subtle, but it can have serious consequences.

How Low Thyroid Function Affects Your Health

Hypothyroidism doesn’t just make you a little tired — it can lead to more serious problems, including heart attacks and diabetes.

I see this all the time in my medical practice: Patients come in with vague complaints that alone may not seem too significant.

But when you put them all together, they tell an important story.

I remember the story of one patient who was 73 years old. This woman came to see me because she had been to her doctor with complaints of fatigue, sluggishness, poor memory, slight depression, dry skin, constipation, and mild fluid retention.

Her doctor’s response?

“Well, what do you expect? You’re 73, and this is what 73 is supposed to feel like.”

But I just don’t believe that is true.

I believe that most of the symptoms of aging that we see are really symptoms of abnormal aging or dysfunction that is related to imbalances in our core body systems.

I have to be a medical detective to find clues where no one else is looking and put together a story about why a person is suffering. This gets them the answers and tools they need to get well.

In this case, we tested my patient for a number of things and found that she had a sluggish thyroid. She did not quite meet all the criteria of conventional medicine for hypothyroidism, but she had an autoimmune reaction that caused her thyroid to function poorly.

By simply replacing her missing thyroid hormone, supporting her nutrition, and implementing some simple lifestyle changes, she went from feeling old to feeling alert, energetic, and youthful — and all of her other symptoms cleared up.

I had another patient who was a 28-year-old woman who was chronically constipated. She thought it was normal to go to the bathroom every three or four days.

She also felt quite tired in the mornings and had trouble getting going. She needed coffee every morning. And at night she had trouble staying up and being with her friends and being an active 28-year-old woman.

She thought that this was just sort of a constitutional problem and that she was stuck living like that. No one had diagnosed her sluggish thyroid.

But as soon as we supported her nutrition and eliminated her food allergens (particularly gluten), which create inflammation and interfere with thyroid function, she felt better.

Her constipation resolved, she was energetic in the morning, did not need her coffee, and was able to stay up until 11:00 or 12:00 at night without any fatigue or limitations.

Who is Affected by Hypothyroidism?

This problem affects men and women of all ages.

And it is very common because of all the stressors in our environment, including toxins such as heavy metals and pesticides, nutritional deficiencies, and chronic stress, all of which interfere with our thyroid function.

It’s critical to understand that your thyroid is not just linked to energy and other symptoms that I described here.

It is the master metabolism hormone that controls the function and activity of almost every organ/cell in our body — so when it is sluggish or slow, everything slows down.

But there is good news …

There are clear ways to diagnose the problem as well as to treat it, with a comprehensive functional medicine approach.

The first step is to find out if you have any of the chronic symptoms of hypothyroidism or any of the diseases associated with hypothyroidism. Ask yourself if you have any of the following symptoms:

Sluggishness in the morning

Poor concentration and memory

Low-grade depression

Dry skin

Hoarse voice

Thinning hair

Coarse hair

Being very sensitive to cold and having cold hands and feet

Low body temperature

Muscle pain

Weakness or cramps

Low sex drive

Fluid retention

High cholesterol

After I have asked my patients about all these symptoms, I do a physical examination for clues to a low-functioning thyroid.

I check for a low body temperature. Anything lower than 97.6° F may be a sign of hypothyroidism.

I might also find fluid retention, a thick tongue, swollen feet, swollen eyelids, an enlarged thyroid gland, excessive earwax, a dry mouth, coarse skin, low blood pressure, or decreased ankle reflexes. I might even find that the outer third of the eyebrows is gone.

These are all physical signs that can be put together along with other symptoms to form a story of what is causing the problem.

Once I have done that, I perform specific blood tests that give me a full picture of thyroid problems.

Then I design a nutritional, lifestyle, and supplement regimen and hormone replacement plan as needed to help people regain their health.

LOW THYROID FUNCTION: it affects more than 30 million women and 15 million men. So why are we seeing such an epidemic of thyroid problems? Well, chronic thyroid problems can be caused by many factors …

Causes of Hypothyroidism

1. One of the most important factors that leads to hypothyroidism is exposure to environmental toxins such as pesticides, which act as hormone or endocrine disruptors and interfere with thyroid hormone metabolism and function.

In fact, one study found that as people lost weight they released pesticides from their fat tissue.

This then interfered with their thyroid function and caused hypothyroidism. The toxins created a slow metabolism and prevented them from losing more weight.

This study highlights the importance of overall detoxification. It is quite a significant finding that shows exactly how toxins interfere with thyroid function.

2. Heavy metals such as mercury can also affect thyroid function. I see many people with chronic hypothyroidism and other thyroid problems because mercury interferes with normal thyroid function.

3. The other big factor that interferes with thyroid function is chronic stress.

There is an intimate interaction between stress hormones and thyroid function. The more stress you are under, the worse your thyroid functions.

Any approach to correcting poor thyroid function must address the effects of chronic stress and provide support to the adrenal glands.

4. The next major factor that affects thyroid function is chronic inflammation. The biggest source of this chronic inflammation is gluten, the protein found in wheat, barely, rye, spelt, and oats. Gluten is a very common allergen that affects about 10 - 20% of the population. This reaction occurs mostly because of our damaged guts, poor diet, and stress.

I also think eating so-called Frankenfoods, such as hybridized and genetically modified grains with very strange proteins, makes us sick.

Our bodies say, “What’s this? Must be something foreign. I’d better create antibodies to this, fight it, and get rid of it.”

This chronic inflammatory response interferes with thyroid function — and contributes to the epidemic of inflammatory diseases in the developed world.

5. Nutritional deficiencies play a big role in thyroid dysfunction. Including deficiencies of iodine, vitamin D, omega-3 fats, selenium, zinc, vitamin A, and the B vitamins.

Once you have confirmed that a sluggish thyroid is contributing to your symptoms, the good news is that there are many, many, many things you can do to help correct thyroid problems.

There are so many reasons for low thyroid function, yet I have seen lots of patients with this problem who were just ignored by their doctors.

For example, one young female patient of mine had more than 30% body fat and was unable to change her body, no matter how hard she worked. She ate perfectly, exercised with a trainer every day — and her body still wouldn’t budge. Also had a slightly depressed mood and other vague symptoms.

So I treated her with a low dose of Armour Thyroid, which is a natural thyroid replacement.

What happened?

Well, she not only lost 20 pounds and improved her body composition, but her mood improved and all her other symptoms went away.

How did I know she had low thyroid function?

Once I have asked about symptoms, done a physical exam, and considered all the potential causes of thyroid problems, I do the right tests.

Most doctors just check something called the thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), which doesn’t give a full picture of the thyroid. In fact, even the interpretation of this test is incorrect most of the time.

The newer guidelines of the American College of Endocrinology consider anybody with a TSH level over 3.0 as hypothyroid. Most doctors think that only anything over 5 or 10 is worth treating. Unfortunately, this leaves millions suffering unnecessarily.

Other tests, including free T3 and free T4 and thyroid antibodies are essential.

I also look for associated problems such as gluten intolerance, food allergies, and heavy metals, and deficiencies of vitamin D, selenium, vitamin A, zinc, and omega-3 fats.

There are many things to consider in a careful approach to hypothyroidism.

It is one of the most common problems I see, and treating it properly makes one of the biggest differences in my patients’ quality of life.

Unfortunately, by using the old guidelines and thinking, conventional medicine misses millions who suffer with hypothyroidism.

In fact, in one study, researchers tested everybody who walked through the gates of a county fair with conventional thyroid testing. They found that according to even conservative conventional standards, half of all the people who had hypothyroidism were undiagnosed, untreated, and suffering.

So what’s the solution?

How You Can Overcome Hypothyroidism

I encourage you to take the following steps to rebalance your thyroid:

Make a thorough inventory of any of the symptoms that I mentioned in the previous hypothyroidism blog to see if you might suffer from hypothyroidism.

Get the right thyroid tests including TSH, free T3, free T4, TPO, and anti-thyroglobulin antibodies.

Check for celiac disease with a celiac panel.

Consider heavy metal toxicity.

Check your vitamin D level.

Once you have confirmed that a sluggish thyroid is contributing to your symptoms, the good news is that there are many, many, many things you can do to help correct thyroid problems.

I have developed a seven-step plan to address hypothyroidism:

Treat the Underlying Causes — Identify and treat the underlying causes of hypothyroidism, like food allergies, gluten intolerance, heavy metals, nutritional

deficiencies, and stress.

Optimize Your Nutrition – Support your thyroid with optimal nutrition, including foods that contain iodine, zinc, omega-3 fats, selenium, and more.

Minimize Stress – Eliminate adrenal exhaustion and minimize stress by engaging in a comprehensive stress management program.

Exercise – Engage in thyroid stimulating exercise, which boosts thyroid function.

Supplement – Use supplements to help enhance thyroid function, including all the nutrients needed for proper thyroid metabolism and function.

Heat Therapy – Use saunas and heat to eliminate stored toxins, which interfere with thyroid function.

Thyroid Hormones – Use thyroid hormone replacement therapy to help support your thyroid gland.

I believe a comprehensive approach is needed to address chronic thyroid issues and to diagnose them. Unfortunately, most of the options for healing by conventional care are quite limited and only provide a partial solution. But by following my seven-step plan you can achieve lifelong vibrant health.

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