Thyroid Thursday Episode 22: First Thing To Do If You Have Hypothyroid Symptoms
Today I want to talk about, what is the number one thing that you should do if you start to develop hypothyroid symptoms? If you go to almost any blog or web, they are going to say, “These are the things you should do”, and typically it’s going to look like these things, like diet, “You should change your diet. Maybe you should go on an anti-inflammatory or autoimmune particle diet if you start to develop hypothyroid symptoms”, and I agree. Changing your diet is really important. If you are eating a diet that’s loaded with gluten and carbohydrates and is a pro-inflammatory diet, cleaning up your diet can be one of the smartest things you can do to improve your symptomatology.
Most of you who are watching this video have probably already been to your medical doctor and endocrinologist with your hypothyroid symptoms and they’ve said that, “Hey, you just need to eat less”, or, “You need to change your diet”, but haven’t gotten good instruction, or you’ve been to one of the many blogs out there and you’ve tried an anti-inflammatory or an autoimmune particle and you still don’t feel good.
I think most people that I see have already started the process of changing diet. If you haven’t, do that, but that’s not the number one thing.
The next thing you might hear is that you need to reduce your stress. Now, I hear this from patients a lot who have seen multiple practitioners. They have hypothyroid symptoms. They go to their medical doctor or their endocrinologist, their TSH and T4 levels are normal, but they feel tired and fatigued and exhausted and they’re gaining weight, and they are really irritated when somebody says, “Hey, you just need to reduce your stress. You are probably stressed out”.
Not only does that create stress, but they also feel like choking out whoever told them that. So, while reducing stress is important, and I work with many of my patients to reduce the stress load in their life, it is not the number one thing. Again, most people have already tried to address it and when you don’t feel well, that creates its own stress, and then worrying about why you don’t feel well creates stress. For me to tell you to remove your stress, creates even more stress. So, it’s not to reduce the stress. That’s not what I am going to tell you is the number one thing to do, although it is a very important thing to do.
The next is exercise. I can’t tell you how many people come to my office and they’ve seen their medical doctor or their endocrinologist and their TSH and T4 levels are normal, and their doctor tells them, “You just need to exercise more and that’ll fix it all”.
Well, I think exercise is critical to optimal health and I think it’s really important in your recovery stage, but it has to be done right. The other thing is, it has to be done when you can manage it. If you have reduced cellular thyroid status, and that’s what causes your hypothyroid symptoms, is you are not getting appropriate hypothyroid hormone into your peripheral cells. That thyroid hormone helps regulate your cell metabolism to make energy to repair the tissue that’s damaged when you exercise, and you try to just go and exercise harder and harder to lose weight or to feel better, not only is it probably bad advice, it may actually make you worse. So, exercise is important, the right type of exercise is important and exercise timing is important, but that shouldn’t be the number one thing that you do to try and improve your hypothyroid symptoms.
So, the last thing that most patients tell me that they’ve been told by their medical doctor or their endocrinologist when their TSH and T4 is normal, and they have hypothyroid symptoms, is that they probably are not getting enough rest, and I agree that rest is really important. Optimal sleep and getting appropriate amounts of rest are really important for health. The problem is, if you have tissue or cellular hypothyroidism and you’re not getting sufficient thyroid hormone into your cell, not only are you exhausted usually through the day, but you also struggle to sleep. For somebody to tell you that it’s just a sleep issue and if you just slept more, then you’d feel better, it’s really hard to take that advice because you can’t get to sleep or you can’t stay asleep, or that sleep quality is terrible. It’s not about just laying in bed. It’s how do you get that quality of sleep or how do you improve your sleep and rest more when your body just doesn’t seem to want to allow you to do it.
So, what is the number one thing that I think that if you have hypothyroid symptoms you should do? Well, I think it’s this.
I think you should see a person who specializes in functional medicine and especially in thyroid physiology like I do. This is the number one thing I address in my practice. I help people who have hypothyroid symptoms, especially cellular and tissue hypothyroidism, regain their health because of the unique way that I take a look at somebody’s physiology.
If you see somebody who specializes in functional medicine, they are going to take, or they should be taking a different approach than the traditional medical model. Remember, I talked about in a previous video that in a traditional model, treatment and evaluation is geared around when the gland becomes dysfunctional. As long as the gland is making enough T4 and as long as the TSH is within normal levels, in traditional medicine there really isn’t a treatment. Most doctors will tell you that you need to eat less, exercise more, reduce your stress and rest better if you have all the symptoms, but your TSH and T4 are normal. They are not going to take action until the gland becomes diseased and dysfunctional and that’s not when your symptoms develop.
Your symptoms develop when something causes an inability to get sufficient thyroid hormone from the blood stream into the cells. That’s when your hypothyroid symptoms start. So, that’s where we need to take a look at your physiology to understand what is causing your body to not take the thyroid hormone that’s in your blood stream and put it into your cells. That’s the number one thing.
In a traditional medical model, they are not looking at that, but in a functional model, in a strategic model of medicine where we really want to take a look at what’s going on with that unique individual, what is the best way we can help them, we are going to be able to not only determine that you have a tissue or cellular hypothyroid state, but why it is occurring and what to do about it.
Also in a functional medicine model, we typically run a more comprehensive thyroid panel. In traditional medicine it is usually a TSH and T4 because those are the things that they use to evaluate when the gland becomes dysfunctional or diseased.
In a functional model, we want to look at every step of the thyroid hormone and conversion process. We do a more complete thyroid panel; TSH, T4, T3, free T4, free T3, T3 uptake, reverse T3, thyroid antibodies; and then we do calculations between T4 and T3, and T3 and reverse T3, so that we can determine if somebody has tissue or cellular hypothyroidism going on. The other thing we often do that traditional medicine doesn’t do, if somebody comes to see me and they have symptoms of hypothyroidism, I don’t want to just run a thyroid panel, I want to look at a comprehensive metabolic panel that includes inflammatory markers. The number one thing that reduces the body’s ability to get thyroid hormone from the bloodstream into your cells is inflammation and inflammatory states. Shouldn’t your blood work be done to see if there are inflammatory markers? I think so, and you will find that most functional medicine practitioners will do those things.
We want to identify causative factors. I don’t want to just tell you that, “Yes, you have tissue hypothyroidism”. I don’t want to tell you, “Yes, your gland has now become diseased and dysfunctional”. In a traditional model, that’s really what they’re telling you. When your TSH is elevated and your T4 is low, they are saying, “You have primary hypothyroidism and your gland has become dysfunctional, you can’t make enough T4 anymore so we are going to give it to you and we don’t really care what’s caused it”.
The reality is that what causes most people to have tissue hypothyroidism is inflammation and things that drive inflammation; infections, chemical stressors, toxicity issues, blood sugar dysregulation and calorie restriction diets; and there are more factors that do it, but those are the biggies.
We want to understand the mechanisms that are causing the thyroid symptoms, not just give thyroid hormone. We want to know what the cause is because if I can help you identify the cause of your hypothyroid symptoms, then I can help you fix what’s causing the hypothyroid symptoms, and therefore your symptoms can go away and you can get your health back.
Next, we want to provide natural solutions. In traditional medicine, really the only solution is thyroid hormone. At the point you are at when traditional medicine steps in and says, “Yes, TSH is elevated and T4 is too low, we are going to give you thyroid hormone”, they only have a couple of options available and that is T4, T3 or a combination of T4 and T3.
But, I said that hypothyroid symptoms start as a result of an inability to get thyroid hormone out of the blood and into the cells. That can occur for days, weeks, months, or years before the thyroid gland actually becomes dysfunctional. The same mechanisms that decrease thyroid hormone transport into the peripheral cells will be the similar mechanisms or the same mechanisms that will eventually cause the gland to go bad, but that’s downstream and that takes a while for that to occur. So, if you had a hard time getting your own thyroid hormone into your cells naturally, why would we think that just jamming more thyroid hormone into the system would do any better?
We have to look at it this way. If I had a car that didn’t run well, but it had a half tank of gas, there is plenty of gas. Filling the tank up further from a half tank to a full tank isn’t going to make the car run any better. If we have a hard time getting thyroid hormone into the cells, why would we think putting more thyroid hormone in would make it work better.
Many times, it can give some help, but there is a growing population of people who are getting thyroid hormone and it’s not working. Or, it worked in the beginning and then it stopped working. The reason is you never fixed the things that caused the hypothyroid symptoms to begin with at a cellular level. Until that’s addressed, you will never have complete resolve of your problems, and more than likely you are going to have ongoing health problems even though TSH levels may be normalized by medication.
Lastly, we want to prevent further problems. We know and the research clearly shows, that the number one cause of hypothyroidism in the United States is an autoimmune attack against your own thyroid. This is not the first process that occurs. Autoimmune attack on the thyroid and primary hypothyroidism occurs after a period of time. The same mechanisms that decrease thyroid hormone into the peripheral tissues which starts initially are the same mechanisms that eventually wind up causing the destruction of the thyroid gland, this autoimmune attack on the thyroid gland.
If we can catch somebody early, in the state where they just have tissue or cellular hypothyroidism and we can identify the mechanisms that are driving the inflammatory cascade or the cell danger response that is producing thyroid hormone transport into the cells, then we can eradicate those issues. Whether it’s a virus, a bacteria, a pathogen, a food intolerance or food insensitivity; whatever is driving that immune inflammatory process early on that’s causing the tissue hypothyroidism, if we can get rid of that, then we may very well ever prevent primary hypothyroidism and damage and disease of the gland from ever occurring.
These are the reasons that I say that probably the number one thing that you can do when you develop hypothyroidism, or the symptoms of hypothyroidism, is to see a functional medicine practitioner because we are going to start helping you at the earliest stages of symptomatology.
We are not going to wait until the tissue becomes dysfunctional or diseased or under autoimmune attack or develops cancer. We want to help you early on, and if we see the causative factors; there is an infection, there is a gluten intolerance, there are any numbers of factors that can drive decreased thyroid hormone into the tissues. If we can get to those things early, we can not only improve your symptoms, we can also give you your quality of life back.
The number one thing I think you should do if you develop hypothyroid symptoms is to go find a functional medicine practitioner like myself. If this has peaked some interest and you want to discuss your situation with me, below the video is a link to schedule a complimentary 15-minute consultation with me that I typically do over my lunch breaks. If you are motivated and want to find out about getting started in care, you want to become a patient, you can easily just call my office at 610-558-8920 and let me staff know you saw this video and you want to request an appointment for a thyroid consultation, okay? This is Dr Eric Balcavage, look forward to another Thyroid Thursday in the coming weeks. Take care.
