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I had a request to do an updated thyroid testing video, like what's in a proper thyroid panel and why do we do it and what do the numbers mean? So I'm kind of going to just go through the list. Name the test. What are the normal ranges for us, the functional normal ranges, why do we do it? What does it mean? How does it interact with the other tests? So if you have a thyroid panel either from me or from somebody else and you want to pull it up and go through it while I do the video, hopefully it'll help things make sense for you. But I think I've done these in the past. Someone was having trouble finding one, so they asked me to do an updated version. Here it is. So when you do a thyroid panel, the lab mixes it up and presents it in different chunks.

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So I'm going to go through it in the order in which your body makes and processes thyroid hormone from asking for it in the beginning, all the way to active thyroid hormone at the end of this. So you may hav...

Why would you choose a functional medicine approach to autoimmunity? So I think it's a good question. I had a couple of new autoimmune patients in last week. One of them was very aware of functional medicine, but didn't know that I was around so close. And so once someone clued her in, came to the office, we had a great visit. The other patient really didn't know much about functional medicine at all, but a family member had said, please go talk to Dr. Krupka. So we did. So interesting between the two. One, very aware, one unaware. So what is a functional medicine approach to autoimmunity? Well, functional medicine is all about root causes and a lot of other doctors, nurses, people out there, they just say that anything outside of the standard medical approach is just bs. And it's all hype and snake oil and don't listen to it.

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But hear me out, you didn't get your autoimmune disorder randomly. I know sometimes it feels like you did or your doctor told you...

We've got lots of people taking statin drugs these days. Arguably one of the most frequently prescribed classes of medications out there. I know they're right up there with acid blockers. You've got statin drugs, like it's millions of doses or millions of prescriptions every year without a doubt, at least here in the us. So one of the things you need to understand is that sometimes the statin drugs you're taking are just draining your energy and you take 'em, you're on 'em for a while, everything's fine, and then you just start getting more lethargic. You're crashing in the afternoon, you're not making energy like you normally do. Eating doesn't fix it. It's not low blood sugar. It just doesn't seem to make much sense. Sometimes it's because of your statin drug. Now, that doesn't mean you have to go stop your statin drug. That's not what I'm trying to say.

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But one of the things that statin drugs do is they drain your energy, but they do it for a specific ...

Hey there. Alright, I'm going to start by saying something in life, right? I like to have a multi-tool with me. You can get a leatherman, Gerber, whatever. It's like a pair of pliers. It's got three or four knife blades, a file wire cutter, bottle opener. It's got things like that on it, like a modern version of a Swiss Army knife. So I keep one in the truck, I keep one in my backpack. If I go hunting, I have one with me. It's just a really compact way or efficient way to get a lot of different things done if you need to. Well, we also have those in functional medicine, a multi-tool of sorts. We have several of them, but absolutely without a doubt one of them, one of the best and probably one of the better well-known ones, at least as far as functional medicine practitioners go, is berberine.

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So berberine isn't extract of certain plants. You can get it from several different species, but it's an extract of those plants. I would consider it a very effectiv...

So I know you guys are tired of hearing me go on about pills and shakes every morning while we're going through this cleanse protocol, so I'm going to do something a little different this morning.

I had a patient in for, a new patient, for autoimmune issues yesterday, and she suggested, she had been watching some of these, and she suggested that I talk a little bit about what I explained to her yesterday, so I'm going to do that now.

When we have patients come in with autoimmune issues or inflammatory problems, there's a protocol I have. It's called a fix anything protocol, and it's just an acronym that gives us about 11 different areas of concern that we have to deal with if we're going to get the inflammation and the autoimmune issues under control. I'm not going to go through all 11, but I'm going to go through the heaviest hitters, the ones that we see over and over again, the ones that are highest on th...

I had a patient mention to me, she had spoken to her family doctor about doing the cleanse. And, her doctor told her, "That's ridiculous. We have a liver and some kidneys and their job is to detoxify us, and you don't need to take a bunch of pills for them to do their job. It's what they do."

I've heard that before. It's a common discussion that happens. Generally... I have a truck that's designed to drive around and get me to work and back, but if I don't put gas in it, it can't do that. If I don't have oil in it, if it doesn't have transmission fluid or coolant in it, if the battery's not charged. There are a lot of things that need to be in place for that vehicle to do its job the way it was intended.

So, our liver and our kidneys are not all that different. They need certain nutrients, they need certain processes to work the way they're supposed to and to be supplied with lots of things.

Now, if we don't have, like magnesium, for example. Magnesium binds to certai...

Next on our list of the foundational five is vitamin D. I've done videos on vitamin D in the past. Please go find them. Um, they're gonna have more information than I can put in this video here, but I'm gonna give you kind of a, a, a rapid overview on vitamin D. So, vitamin D, anti-inflammatory, anti autoimmune, immune regulating, anti-cancer, um, not directly, but helps our body do all these things, right? It supports our body's natural mechanisms for doing all these things. Um, so very important to have. It's generally considered the most, if not in the top two. Uh, magnesium being the other, uh, nutritional deficiencies in our bodies. Uh, we make vitamin D from the sun. Sun has to hit our skin, not really showing your skin there and interact with cholesterol. And that makes the first conversion that it has to go to the liver, get converted to the kidneys, get converted, then you finally get active vitamin D.

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So it's a multi-step process. Um, and there'...

So next on our list of the foundational five, we've already talked about multivitamins, we've talked about fish oil. This video, we're gonna talk about probiotics. And the next couple of videos we'll handle vitamin D and magnesium. So probiotics, those are the good bacteria that are supposed to be in our gut. Now, a couple of misconceptions about probiotics. Many people feel that when you take a probiotic, you are trying to colonize the gut with what you're taking. I mean, it wouldn't be bad if that happened. I think probably a little bit of that happens. But by and large, the reason you take a probiotic is that on its way through your system, while it's temporarily in there, it changes the environment somewhat. Those bacteria that you put in there, and sometimes nutritional yeast that you put in there, they ferment your food on their way through, and the byproducts of that fermentation set up an environment that's advantageous for your normal flora to kind of gro...