Hashimoto's Part 2, Thyroid Testing, & Thyroid Physiology

Speaker 1 (00:03):

Autoimmune thyroid problems to some degree autoimmune problems in general, but I'm going to kind of try to keep it to Hashimoto's on this video. But how do they develop? What goes wrong? Can you do anything about it other than just replace hormone? Can you reverse it? Can you get back off thyroid hormone once you've been taking it? Let's tackle those issues in today's video. So I did a video previously about Hashimoto's. What is it? How you test for it? What are the criteria for diagnosing it? I'll put a link to that onto this one, but otherwise, just go back through my blog. You'll find it. It should be posted very close to when I'm posting this one. The intention is to post that one in the following week, post this one, so it shouldn't be hard to find, but assuming you remember all that or you took notes or you've just watched it.

(00:51):

Let's talk about how something like Hashimoto's would develop Hashimoto's. Again, quick reminder, it's antibodies to the thyroid peroxidase enzyme that assembles your T four or loosely. It could just be any kind of antibody toward your thyroid. Something like that will give you the diagnosis of Hashimoto's. With or without low T4. You have low T4 Hashimoto's hypothyroidism. So what do you do? How did it come about? How'd you get here? It's not directly genetic, and by that I mean there's not a Hashimoto's gene that we know of where if you have this gene, you have Hashimoto's, and you'll pass that onto your kids and they'll have Hashimoto's. It's not that simple, but for example, you could have a genetic predisposition to developing a gluten reaction that could be passed down to your children, and then if they consume gluten and develop that gluten reaction, they would have an increased risk of autoimmune problems in general.

(01:51):

Hashimoto's being one of those. So it can have a genetic component. Let me simplify this, and this is an analogy I use regularly in the office. I've used it in other interviews, so you may have heard it before. If I was to set a pistol here while we're talking a gun right here, as long as it sits there and neither one of us is messing with it, nothing's going to happen. It can't hurt anybody. It's just going to sit there. However, two things have to happen in order for that gun to do any damage. Number one, it has to be loaded. Number two, somebody has to pull the trigger. If those two things happen, there's damage where that damage ends up being determines the name of the autoimmune problem. So if your immune system is loaded, and that typically happens genetically, but nobody touches the gun, it never goes off.

(02:41):

There's no autoimmunity. If your immune system is loaded and you fiddle with that gun in the right way and you pull the trigger and it goes off, it could hit you in a place where you have lupus or you have Hashimoto's or you have Sjogren's or you have rheumatoid arthritis like MS. The list is long of autoimmune disorders. That's just where the gun shot you. The mechanism of the gun going off is pretty much the same for all autoimmune disorders, okay? There are antecedents things that load the gun and then triggers things in your environment. For example, the antecedent might be having the genetic predisposition for a gluten sensitivity. The environmental triggering activity could be eating gluten. So you put those two things together, gun goes off, you end up with an autoimmune condition. In this case, we're discussing Hashimoto's. Now, understanding that setup or that analogy, if you stop fiddling with the gun, it won't go off.

(03:44):

It's more difficult to go change whether or not it's loaded. Those are genes. We really don't change genes, but we can change how you express those genes by changing how you're interacting with that, changing how you're interacting with that gun that's sitting on the table. In this case, we would prefer you just not interact with it. Leave it alone. Right? Now, to really kind of stretch this analogy a little bit, that gun is your immune system. Remember that it still serves a purpose. If some bad guy were to come rushing in here, I would still want to be able to pick up the gun and get something done, right? That's the whole purpose of that gun, and it needs to be good at it. It needs to be responsive, and I need to be good at using it, right? That's defense. That's your immune system.

(04:28):

However, I don't want to just sit here and absent mindedly play with it like a fidget spinner. I'm going to cause all kinds of damage. So if I render it useless, like if I'm taking something that just shuts down my immune system, true, I can fiddle with it now and it'll be harmless. But that also means that if I need to use it, if I need my immune system to be responsive, it can't be. So the idea here would be from a functional medicine standpoint, don't just stick a big wooden box over the pistol and say, okay, now you can't touch it. That works. If your only goal is to shut down Hashimoto's, but now you can't defend yourself. So risk of things like infection, cancer, tuberculosis, all that weird stuff, that all goes up. So that's not the ideal way to do it.

(05:19):

It's clumsy, arguably effective. If you just look at the narrow goal, but clumsy, and this is the case with all autoimmune conditions. So the goal, sorry, the goal from a functional medicine standpoint is can we stop fiddling with it, but leave it capable? That's the trick. So you have to look at what fiddles with it. There are several predictable things. I'm going to throw out a couple of quick ones, but I'll have other videos that have full ranges of this in there. But food reactions, intestinal problems, hormonal imbalance, toxicity, infections, those are some basic things that are commonly known to play with a gun to accidentally make it go off. If you can figure out which of those are most active in you or which of those happened around the same time that you developed your autoimmunity. I mean, there are lots of ways to look at it, but if you can figure out which ones of those seem to be bigger issues for you and address those and get them resolved, in a lot of cases, you've just stopped fiddling with the gun.

(06:29):

The autoimmunity stops. You quit doing damage. The level of antibodies drops down below a level, hopefully where you're diagnosable, but at least down below a level where you're doing significant damage. In this case, if you're looking at thyroid peroxidase antibodies through the lab that I use, you'll get diagnosed anywhere over probably 34 or 35, but you're not really doing much damage till you get well up above 200 somewhere. I've had patients come see me where they come in at 800 or a thousand and through some work, we can get them down to where they're consistently in the one 20 to one 50 range, maybe one 60, something like that. At that point, they're probably not doing enough damage to even matter. They're essentially in remission at that point. Okay? So that's how you approach an autoimmune condition like Hashimoto's. Now, let's say you get the antibody numbers down.

(07:22):

Everybody agrees you don't even qualify for the diagnosis anymore. Great. How much damage did it do? Did you require thyroid medication? Did you take thyroid hormone for a period of time? Let's say you did. Let's say you took T four Levitt, Levothyroxin, Synthroid, those are all T4 medications. Now, from the previous video, if you take a T4 medication, you're going to have to convert that into T3 for it to be active. If you are a poor converter, you probably took the T4 and never felt any different than you did before you felt crummy. You took the T4, you felt crummy, nothing changed. That's probably because you didn't convert and they didn't pay attention to that. But if you took T four and thought, oh my gosh, I got my life back. Thank you so much. Okay, once you've done that, probably between six months and maybe a year and a half, six months to 18 months, many times what happens?

(08:12):

You're taking the T4, your pituitary senses that you've got plenty of it. Now, it quits asking the thyroid to make any over time. The thyroid gets lazy, it atrophies. It forgets how to do its job. Now, if you go off the T4 medication, thyroid's not going to produce much at all because it went into retirement. Okay? Same thing happens to guys that take testosterone for a long enough period of time at a high enough dose, their testicles just say, okay, thanks. Thanks. I'm going into retirement, and if you stop taking that testosterone, they're not likely to kick in and help you. They retired, they're done. They're not coming back. So it's a significant decision to go on thyroid hormone. Now, if you went on it for a couple of months to see you felt and got back off, most likely no harm, no foul, it would be rare for that to be a problem, but you're on it for two or three years. People come to me and say, okay, I don't want to take this anymore. Can I get back off of this? It's not all that likely. I've seen it happen. I certainly don't guarantee it.

(09:16):

I don't even normally put it out there as a goal if you've been on thyroid hormone more than a year, maybe a year and a half. I just don't think it's realistic, but I've seen it happen. It's a fuzzy science trying to figure out when that thyroid's going to atrophy and when it's not so possible, but becomes less and less likely the longer you've been on the medication. Can you heal the thyroid? Likely, yes. I mean, our bodies heal all the time. If you quit doing damage, healing should take place. We do some cool things. I mean, not, I don't do peptides. I like them. I understand them, but arguably they're a prescription at this point, and I don't have a prescriptive license, but there are some cool things going on with peptides that would probably speed up the healing process. I haven't seen any research with that to see exactly which peptide would be best for healing thyroid tissue.

(10:17):

But there are peptides that are used regularly for healing injuries, joint tissues, ligament problems, skin issues, things like that. So at some point we'll figure out which one heals the thyroid. Maybe there'll be some topical preparation you can put on. Right now, most of those peptides are used by injection. So I don't know, having a patient go home and inject their thyroid, I don't think we're there yet. I don't think it's too far away, but I don't think we're there yet. I think there's going to be a liposomal topical that you can use, or maybe a topical you can put on and drive it in with ultrasound or PEMF or something. I think we'll get there. We're probably a year or two away from that if I had to guess. But standard process makes supplements like Thytrophin PMG, all of their PMGs are healing factors.

(11:08):

So they encourage that particular tissue to heal and repair. So there's hope for things like that. But the bigger problem is just quit doing damage, quit breaking it down. Then you have people who have their thyroid removed, not going to grow back. You'll always be on thyroid hormone. The question is, what dosage? What kind do you need? T three along with your T4, I mean, you could have your thyroid removed, take a normal amount of T four and still not be able to convert it because that's not a thyroid related problem. Well, thyroid related, it's not a thyroid caused problem. So once your thyroid's been removed for thyroid cancer or hyperactivity, or because there was some giant goiter, I had a patient one time who had, I think it was like an eight centimeter goiter going down into her chest. It was a big problem for her.

(11:54):

She did yoga. Anytime she put her hands over her head or tried to do a handstand, it would come up and cut off her airway. It was a big problem. They had to remove the whole thyroid. So she is taking thyroid hormone, although she doesn't love it, and she'll be doing that the rest of her life. The trick is which one, which brand, which dosage, what timing, what blend. That's the key for her, right? It's not about shutting down autoimmunity. It's not about rebuilding the thyroid. It's just about finding the right dose and monitoring it well and figuring out what activities would put her in a state of needing more or less, so that she can adapt to that with her dosage. So different problems depending on where you are in the process. But hopefully this discussion helped you understand more how you develop an autoimmune disorder, how you would develop Hashimoto's, what the goals would be for treatment, how you would go about that.

(12:50):

Every patient's a little bit different. So I can't just sit here and say, well take two of these and three of these, and it goes away because if you got it because of toxicity, or you got it because of Lyme disease, or you got it because of mold exposure, or you had it because of hormonal imbalance, other places, those are all going to be treated differently. So I can't just throw out a protocol, but I'm working on some information that would probably help you more with that. So follow me, get on my email list and you'll be notified when that information comes out. So anyway, hopefully this helps you understand a little bit more about where the autoimmune problems would come from and what you would do about them. So if you're near me or if you're one of my patients, you want to talk to me about this, fine, call the office, make an appointment.

(13:34):

I do free meet and greets...10 minutes on the phone if we need to, for you to chat with me about your particular issue and see if we're a good match for that. Or find a Functional Medicine doctor somewhere near you. Hopefully there's a process by which you can do a little interview with that doctor and see if you guys are a match before you spend big money. But see if you can find one near you that looks like they're going to be a good fit. Looks like someone that understands this that can work with you, okay? But it's worth handling. The way the medical community handles. This tends to be fairly clumsy and most people just aren't happy with the end result. So it's worth finding a functional medicine doctor and looking into it. Alright, I'm going to shut up. That was a long enough video. More to come. Let me know if there are subjects you want to hear kind of broken down and handled in more detail like this, and I'll do what I can to get those posted. Have a great one. I'll see you in the next video.