Exploring Integrative Thyroid Care with Dr. Tatyana Reznik on Voices of Women Physicians (Part 1)

Join Dr. Dana Gibbs as she dives into her guest appearance on Voices of Women Physicians, hosted by Dr. Tatyana Reznik. Dr. Gibbs shares her transformative journey from ENT surgeon to a leading specialist in integrative thyroid care, addressing complex thyroid and hormonal issues that conventional medicine often overlooks. Tune in to learn about Dr. Gibbs’ shift to a personalized, virtual practice that empowers patients to take charge of their thyroid health, especially when traditional tests come back “normal” but symptoms persist.

Episode Highlights:

• Dr. Gibbs’ Journey: From ENT surgery to integrative thyroid care.
• Virtual Practice Insights: Setting up a solo, mostly virtual practice without insurance constraints.
• Why Normal Isn’t Always Normal: How Dr. Gibbs approaches patients with “normal” TSH but ongoing symptoms.
• Integrative Medicine Approach: Using both traditional labs and targeted supplements to support thyroid health.
• Coaching and Mindset: The importance of coaching and community in making a career pivot.

With over 25 years of experience, Dr. Tatyana Reznik is a board-certified specialist in Internal Medicine and Lifestyle Medicine. She has practiced medicine internationally, starting in Uzbekistan and continuing in California, and has worked at Renown Regional Medical Center and the VA Hospital in Reno, Nevada.

As a Certified Life Coach, Dr. Reznik offers personalized 1:1 coaching sessions, helping clients achieve a balanced work-life dynamic, boost self-confidence, and improve time management skills. Dr. Reznik is the host of the Voices of Women Physicians podcast, where she interviews accomplished women physicians who share expertise from their fields. She also leads solo episodes, offering valuable coaching insights and tools to her listeners.

Stay tuned for part two next week, where Dr. Gibbs continues to share invaluable insights on the intersection of thyroid health and integrative care!

Connect with Dr. Reznik  🔔
Website: joyfulsuccessliving.com
Instagram: @joyfulsuccessliving
Facebook: Joyful Success
Podcast: Voices of Women Physicians

Let's connect! 🔔
Facebook - Consultants In Metabolism
Instagram - @danagibbsms
LinkedIn - Dana Gibbs MD
Tiktok - @dana.gibbs.md

✉️ Email Dr. Gibbs at drgibbs@DanaGibbsMD.com or visit https://www.danagibbsmd.com/ for more information.


Thank you so much for listening! Tune in on the next episode.


The medical information provided in this episode is intended for informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding any medical questions or concerns.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome everyone to this episode of Voices of Women Physicians podcast. I am so happy to have with us our guest, Dr. Dana Gibbs. Dr. Gibbs is a board certified otolaryngologist and thyroid specialist, focusing on the integrative approach to complex thyroid and hormonal imbalances. Welcome Dr. Gibbs. Hi, it's so fun to be here. Yes, thank you so much for joining us here today. Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and about what you do. Okay, so I am an otolaryngologist. As you mentioned, I was in private practice for just over 20 years and I was in a group practice which I left in 2022. to start something very specific, which is a solo non insurance based specialty practice focusing on chronic fatigue and unusual presentations of hypothyroidism. So I am running that As a mostly virtual practice. I do have an office that I can go to when I really need to meet somebody face to face, but mostly virtual. And it's been very interesting because at first when I did it, I thought, oh well, I'm gonna be able to do this from anywhere. And it turns out that isn't quite true because the internet isn't quite good enough anywhere I go. So it works much better when I'm at home. But I'm 59 years old. I finished my residency in 99. So I'm pretty close to retirement age. I found coaching during COVID as many of us did 2020, when I was just at my wits end of what was going to happen. And our group practice was losing money and everything was just crazy. And I think it probably saved my life. I don't know what would have happened, but I'm sure glad I did. It's interesting because while I was practicing was when I started getting really interested in thyroid. ENT, we do thyroid surgery, but when you're in residency, you're seeing the super complicated, the super sick. the medullary thyroid carcinoma, the really complicated surgeries in that thing. And when I got under private practice, things were different. The thyroid nodules were coming in and they were a centimeter and a half. They were two centimeters or they'd be more than one. And we do their surgery and they'd come back and it'd be benign. And I'm like, Oh, it's benign. Well, okay. Off you go to the endocrinologist, see if you need to take thyroid medicine. And that's all. And then a year later, they would come back for me to redo their sonogram and see if they had a new nodule or whatever. And they would have gained 30 pounds, 40 pounds. They would feel terrible. They would be even tireder than when they first came to see me. All kinds of problems. And I started going, well, maybe I'm not doing these people any favors taking out these benign thyroid nodules. And I started looking for, okay, what's going on here? And when I was doing that, I don't even remember being taught about Hashimoto's disease. That's the most common cause of hypothyroidism itself. It's the most common cause in the US for multiple nodules in your thyroid. And I was looking at these pathology reports going chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis. What does that mean? And so I'd look it up and it was like, Oh, well that's Hashimoto's disease. I'm like, well, okay, that's an autoimmune disease. Why are we doing surgery on an autoimmune disease? And I started trying to give people thyroid medicine in such a way that it would prevent their nodules from getting any bigger. So when we were. pretty sure it wasn't cancer. It's like, let's not do the surgery if we don't have to. And so I started with that and I was also treating people for allergies and sinus disease and all the other stuff that ENT doctors do. And as I was doing that, I started noticing that a lot of those patients also had those same symptoms. Their hair was falling out, their eyebrows were thin, they're exhausted, they don't sleep. Well, they're sleeping 12 hours a day and still tired. They're gaining weight, all the things. And it was kind of funny. The first time I had a patient come in and she was really needing sinus surgery. I mean, her CT scan looked terrible. And I was like, you need sinus surgery. And she's like, well, I'm a teacher and I can't do it until summer. I'm like, okay, but I think you have thyroid problems. Let's put you on some thyroid medicine now and see how you do. And she's like, okay, fine. And then I don't hear from the lady for like six months. So I thought, well, she's mad at me. Something's wrong. And so I called her up and I said, Hey, why don't you come on back in and have a follow up appointment? And she did. And I was like, when are we going to schedule your sinus surgery? And she was like, Oh, I don't need that anymore. I'm fine. I just need a refill on that thyroid medicine. I was like, dang, what's going on here. It was a crazy thing because her TSH had been fine. And this is what I find. I'm finding all these patients and a lot of them, strangely enough, are physicians, and most of them are women as is typical with thyroid problems. And a lot of them, their labs look normal, but you run down the list of symptoms and they have all of them. And it's like, okay, what's going on here? And one of the times I was at a conference and it was an allergy conference. It was in an environmental medicine conference. And most of what we're supposed to be learning was allergy. But I went into this other room because I was kind of bored. And it was about hormones and the guy listed all those thyroid symptoms. And then he said, and you don't have to have abnormal TSH to benefit from thyroid medicine. And my reaction was so crazy. I mean, it was like I had to pick up off the floor because he was talking about me. I had those symptoms, but I thought you had to be overweight to have thyroid problems. I had all these thoughts about thyroid patients that turned out to not be true. And I went home and asked him. my doctor start me on thyroid medicine and it was amazing and I didn't feel exhausted all the time anymore and I didn't feel freezing all the time anymore and my hair grew back and all this stuff and so I was like okay there's something to this but this guy had not been able to tell me why. And I wanted to know why. And so I started looking for somebody who knew why and I finally found somebody and I incorporated that into my treatment regimen where I was taking care of people. And it really upped the game. It was like, okay, this is a protocol that I can follow, that I can teach to another person that makes a lot of sense. And And no, it's not per thyroidology guidelines, but it helps people feel better. And there's this subset of people who feel bad no matter how much thyroid medicine they're on. And I can take that person and check their labs in a different way and turn around and give them what I use now, usually a synthetic T3 and sometimes also T4. But at the time I was using Armour Thyroid and it was pretty good, not the best, but it was pretty good. But I got more and more of those kinds of patients. And the more I got of those, the less surgeries I needed to do because I was fixing them without needing to do surgery. And it was just like, okay, I blew it. Now I don't have any ENT practice anymore. Now I have a thyroid practice. And when I also got really fed up with taking insurance, it was like, okay, it's time to take this out of this group practice. and do just hormones. And so that's what I did. Such an interesting journey. So can I ask, did you incorporate integrative medicine or functional medicine? Which approach it was? So I use what I call integrative medicine because I am using a lot of mainstream labs. I don't use a lot of the functional medicine labs. So to speak, I use more mainstream stuff that I can get from Quest or LabCorp to help people figure out what's wrong. And if I code things right, then people's insurance covers it. So there's not this big cost of a bunch of functional labs. And almost always, I can get people feeling a lot better without dealing with Lyme disease or mold illness or chronic EBV or those kind of things. And while I think that stuff is valid, that's just not where I choose to focus my attention. But I do use a lot of vitamins and I use a lot of herbal supplements, not instead of mainstream hormonal medications, but in addition. I don't love these supplements where it's like 20 ingredients in there. You've got these two supplements, you mix that, so now you've got 40 ingredients and you don't know what's interacting with what. That really bothers me. And so I don't use multi ingredient supplements, except for maybe like a B complex multivitamin. That's the And the one that I would most of the time say, look, I don't know what you're eating, but it might not be enough B vitamins because our food supply is depleted of minerals and things. And so here, take this just in case kind of thing. So tell us a little bit about how did you start your virtual practice? What were your first steps for those physicians who would like to do the same, but in a different specialty? Sure. So my first step, and I'm going to go back to coaching. My first step was getting my head wrapped around the idea that I could do it. So, so, so, so important. And then the second step was really finding a community of other physicians who really were doing the same kind of things, who had innovative ideas. who were stepping outside of their lane, outside of their box, outside of whatever and starting apps and businesses. And there's a big push lately in medicine. It's like, okay, so I'm going to just grind and grind at my job until I have enough money to buy some real estate. And then I'll have passive income and then I'll be able to retire early. Well, I don't really have a big interest in retiring early. I like medicine. I think what I know is super valuable and pretty unique, and I don't want to quit, but I don't want to do it for UnitedHealthcare or any other insurance company or any hospital or any private equity company or whoever. I want to do it for me and for my patients. And so I originally thought, Oh, I can just do this one day a week and keep my regular job. And then I went to my attorney and she's like, no, no, no, you can't do that. If you have contracts with these insurance companies, it's either on or it's off and you can't go outside of it and charge somebody cash one day and then see them in the NT clinic and charge their insurance. You can't do that. And I was like, well, that sucks. And so I was like, well, maybe I can just have a course and teach people how to do this. So I tried that for a while and I made a pretty good course actually on how to add allergy into your practice. So this is the first iteration. The first iteration was gonna be, I'm gonna do hormones on the side and that got kiboshed and then I was like, okay, what, what else do I know that could be a business that I could do? And I thought I can teach primary care doctors how to do allergy because they can't go to the quad AI to learn allergy. They won't let them in. They can't go to the AOA. That's the ENT society. They won't let them in. Where are they going to get great information on how to do allergy? And I was like, yeah, I'll just start a course. And I did. And the course is really good. But what I realized was that most primary care docs don't have the bandwidth. It's not that they don't have the money to do it. And it's not that it's not a reasonable source of secondary income. It's just that it's a lot of work to learn all that stuff. And not a lot of docs were interested in it. And during COVID, the prices of the serums that you need went up and the reimbursement went down big surprise, because that's what happens in the insurance. And not very many people were interested. And after I'd taught it twice, I was like, you know what? I'm not that excited about this. And about that time was when I was like, you know what? I'm really not enjoying my group practice anymore. It's time to go. And so I did. I went and I told them I was leaving and I sold my shares of the building back to them and use that money to start this practice that I have now. And community and mindset is so, so, so important. And then the rest of it kind of falls in place. This concludes the first part of our interview. And next week's episode will be the second part. Stay tuned!