Ep 82 - Thyroid

[00:00:37] On today's episode we're going to talk about some of the serious mistakes that doctors make when working with people with thyroid dysfunction or symptoms of thyroid dysfunction.

[00:01:12] It's going to go up if the pituitary is talking to the thyroid and saying, produce more, produce more, but the levels don't go up. So they test TSH and a good percentage of the time it comes back normal or what is considered medically normal, which is not necessarily ideal. So on some of the labs, they consider anything from 0.5 to 4.5 or even five to be a normal TSH.

[00:02:08] Then the person is told, well, all those symptoms you had were thyroid related symptoms, but you don't have a thyroid problem. You have, some other problem, we don't know. So let's approach, let's give you a medication for your depression. Let's give you a medication for your constipation. Let's have you put on some lotion for your dry skin, and let's put you on statins to lower your cholesterol.

[00:02:57] So, TSH is not the ultimate test for thyroid function, because it can be "wrong".

[00:03:37] Right. So these are the problems with just testing TSH. So we know that, and a lot of functional doctors are like, we don't just test TSH, but in medical school they're told test TSH. If it's elevated, then test T4, and if the T4 is low, then put the person on T4. Big problem with that approach as well, because the person may have any number of thyroid dysfunctions. So what's happening is the doctors, the second mistake is, when they see a person with obvious thyroid signs and they've tested TSH, they don't say, huh, maybe the test is wrong. They say, oh, you are wrong. They're just ignoring the person's symptoms.

[00:04:45] What does it look like, is out of balance? And if the tests that we know or we've been taught doesn't work, what other things can we look at? So let's look at a comprehensive thyroid panel. that's not taught in medical school, but it is taught in a lot of naturopathic schools. Right. And a lot of functional medicine training programs.

[00:05:38] 90% of it is the T3. The T4 is kind of an inactive form. It has some function, but not a lot. So what we do is we look at the amount that thyroid's making, total T4. The free T4, which has to do with how much is bound or unbound to the protein, the thyroglobulin protein that can be affected by a lot of things.

[00:06:29] And then there's less available. And so we have more free thyroid hormones and we may see a hyperthyroid situation, right? So we have to look at all these tests. We have to look at free T3. So we look at free T4 and free T3, and we look at the ratio between them. How much of that T4 is being converted to the active form T3.

[00:07:18] We can empower people to take charge. So let me give you a few of those. One is low levels of selenium. Selenium's depleted in a lot of soils. So we can educate people to either eat foods that are high in selenium, Brazil, nuts come to mind if they can't eat. Brazil nuts. There's others. We look up what foods are higher in selenium.

[00:07:59] But the other thing that causes a problem with that conversion from T4 to T3, there's an enzyme called deiodinase. There's 5’ deiodinase, 5 deiodinase. And when we have either not enough or too much cortisol in the system, that deiodinase enzyme doesn't work real well, right? So we're not doing the conversion. And instead of converting T4 into T3, we're converting the T4 into reverse T3.

[00:09:02] But we also have to look at. Why might that be slow? Is it because there's a nutrient deficiency? Is it because the person's under stress and we can do things to help them manage their stress, but is it because there's some hidden infection somewhere or some other reason? The body in its wisdom is saying slow it down, right?

[00:09:44] and unnecessary medications when we're addressing all the other symptoms, rather than addressing the thyroid dysfunction. And rather than addressing that there's a thyroid cellular dysfunction, that the thyroid gland can be perfectly fine. It's producing plenty of that T4 like it's supposed to, and it produces a little bit of T3, but the rest of the body's out of balance.

[00:10:32] Right? It's common because of the food supply. It's common because of the toxic exposures. So we really need to look at helping people to detoxify. So, so far we've looked at, hey, we're trying to solve this person's thyroid problem. Mistakes made are, we're not looking at the right testing. We're not looking at helping them manage their emotions, right?

[00:11:14] Happen in order to help the thyroid function on a cellular level to be appropriate. So see this? So full test just to review. TSH total T4, free T4, free T3. But the other thing is antibodies. Most doctors don't know what to do differently. If a person has antibodies to the thyroid, so TPO thyroid peroxidase, ATT antithyroid globulin, or ATG, we need to test those things because there's an autoimmune process that's causing the thyroid to not function properly.

[00:12:15] But we have to go deeper and really go to the root cause and really fix the underlying root cause. And that's going to involve education, lifestyle changes and nutrients, replenishment of nutrients. Our food supply's pretty depleted. Even if you're eating whole fresh foods and most people aren't, right?

[00:12:56] I want you to look at your patient population, your client population. Look at them differently and say, that person I think does have a thyroid problem. I'm not going to just ignore it. The last one I want to look at is they don't think about receptors. The receptors, getting that thyroid into the cell, into the nucleus of the cell where it's going to take action.

[00:13:40] Are you going to give them five medications? No, you want to go deeper. We want to find out are those hormones getting into the cell and then once they're in the cell, are they working properly? So things that interfere that you want to look at are homocysteine, high levels. I see high homocysteine in a gazillion people all the time, and we want it to be, you know, up to the round.

[00:14:22] And then vitamin A, vitamin A, those receptors, that transport mechanism is a retinol dependent. Process. So vitamin A is super important and we don't look at vitamin A a lot. And you can look at vitamin A from a measurement standpoint, but also from other symptoms, right? Do they have mucus membrane symptoms?

[00:15:03] And then going back to toxins, the toxins affect the receptors and the stress. So too high or too low. Levels of cortisol, especially too high. because, too high, produces cytokines, inflammatory chemicals that affect. The way that the thyroid receptors receive the hormones and get it into the right place. So if we're feeling under stress, we're feeling threatened, we have toxic exposures, those are all going to affect the mechanisms of the thyroid.

[00:16:02] We have to look at all of these factors and we have to educate people, and that's the hardest part of our job, is because people want the magic bullet. They want the easy approach, and we owe it to them to teach them that it doesn't work that way. That's not how their bodies work. And they will thank you for it because suddenly they get their lives back suddenly when they get the thyroid fixed, their cholesterol and lipid problems.

[00:16:52] We put together a really nice little booklet for you if you want to download it if you haven't already. It's at reinventhealthcare.com/thyroid and use it. Use the charts in there. Use the testing links. All the lists of all the tests I mentioned today are listed in that document. So download it, use it in your practice.

[00:17:45] Go to reinventhealthcare.com/thyroid to get the thyroid book. Go to INEMethod.com to learn more about the other ways that we can support you. And there's some links on the show notes page to understand the thyroid more thoroughly. And until next time, shine on.