Imagine you are tired, have gained weight, have dry skin, cold sensitivity, and your hair is falling out.
Your friends and social media tell you that you have symptoms of low thyroid function. In this imagined scene, you then go to a health fair screening people with these symptoms with a thyroid blood test and 30 question survey of symptoms.
What would you find out?
Well, in the first scenario it was good that you were screened, because on the lab test your TSH was high enough to warrant treatment.
Being prescribed thyroid hormone treatment improves your symptoms and you feel better, but in most cases not all the symptoms go away.
An odd observation. The amount of improvement with thyroid medication does not correlate with the change in lab values. The medication works, but the lab numbers do not predict how much better you feel.
Another Scenario
In the second scenario, with the same symptoms, a low thyroid function did not show on the lab test.
In this case, if you were to get thyroid hormone treatment, you most likely would not feel better.
Now, let’s compare the two versions of you when your thyroid lab values had normalized.
The Symptoms Survey
The symptom survey on its own could not predict if you actually had low thyroid function.
Specifically, no single symptom, no high number of symptoms, and no combination of symptoms could predict this.
But the version of you with low thyroid treated with thyroid hormone most likely would have worse symptoms even after treatment than the version of you who started with the same normal thyroid lab values.
I am not making this up, in 2013 Gay Canaris actually did research at a Colorado Health Fair and drew these conclusions. See the PubMed research article here.
What would you do?
Feeling tired, being cold sensitive, having brain fog, gaining weight with dry skin and hair falling out is miserable. I know.
It affects your quality of life. Plus you wonder what other aspects of your health are failing.
We do not – never, never, never – dismiss these symptoms just because a lab test falls in the normal range.
We do not blame them on aging, or allow them to become your new normal that you just live with.
We look further
Often, I see patients who think they have the wrong thyroid medication. They may have been to doctor after doctor to get their dosage right, or switch to a medication with fewer fillers or a more natural form.
In a few cases, it makes a difference, but it is not an indication to stop looking further.
One key place to look is for an autoimmune condition of the thyroid.
I have seen thyroid antibodies in patients whose thyroid panel was otherwise normal. I have seen thyroid antibodies show up in lab results of abnormal thyroid function. And I am told that thyroid antibodies might not show up on the lab test, and they can still be in play.
The fact is that thyroid antibodies can cause some of these miserable symptoms on their own!
This is one place further investigation and treatment can make a big difference in someone with classic low thyroid symptoms. Treatment involves the immune system, which is very responsive to lifestyle medicine.
Another look
Another area of investigation is body iodine status.
Before iodine was used in some processed foods, feed for animals we use for food and in multivitamins, there were people in areas of the world who truly had a deficiency of iodine, some growing goiters.
The old Health Food Store wisdom was to supplement with iodine when there were low thyroid symptoms, with products like kelp or SSKI. This has persisted even with a lot of iodine in our food supply.
Since then, medicine has discovered that people with a family history of thyroid conditions have a narrower range of tolerance for iodine than other people.
With either an iodine deficiency or iodine excess, their system reacts by resisting the activity of thyroid hormones in their body, creating symptoms, the symptoms of low thyroid. Carefully regulating iodine in these people can lead to a dramatic reduction in symptoms.
Look Upstream
Now, looking further involves looking upstream.
The same cause of thyroid problems can be creating other health issues which create the same symptoms as classic low thyroid symptoms. What is worse, is that these upstream health conditions can affect the thyroid as well.
What could they be?
According to Alan Christianson, NMD, the list includes sleep apnea, atrophic gastritis, fatty liver disease, parathyroid disease, and dysfunction of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
These all warrant investigation and treatment.
Not One-Size-Fits-All
This goes to show that natural medicine is nuanced, both in teasing out your symptoms and finding what will help you.
There are no absolutes. This is why you are not a lab value. Improvement in lab values does not always directly correlate with improvement of symptoms. One medication cannot fix everything.
This is why natural medicine, individualized to you – your particular body, your time of life, your family history, your current symptoms – is an answer that goes further.
This kind of investigation, looking further and further, is the kind of work we do together in Total Health Immersion. In addition, you then see your symptoms as guidance to healing and become able to respond to any acute health condition with confidence.
Call Dr. Cheryl at 928-649-9234 to find out if Total Health Immersion might be the next step in your healing journey.
