HORMONIOUS
HORMONIOUS is your go-to podcast for hormone optimization, functional medicine, and total-body wellness. Hosted by Catherine Brigger, CRNP, a functional medicine nurse practitioner, this show dives deep into root-cause healing, metabolic health, and the science behind feeling your best.
Whether you’re struggling with fatigue, weight gain, brain fog, or hormonal imbalances, we bring you expert insights, patient success stories, and actionable strategies to take control of your health.
HORMONIOUS
Thyroid Crisis: Why Your Doctor is Missing What's Making You Sick
Welcome to HORMONIOUS, the podcast where we uncover the truth about hormones, functional medicine, and total body wellness. I'm Catherine Brigger, CRNP and functional medicine nurse practitioner. And I'm here to help you cut through the confusion, take control of your health and restore balance to your body. Whether you're struggling with fatigue, weight gain, brain fog, or stubborn health issues that just won't go away. This podcast is your go-to resource for science-backed solutions, expert insights, and real patient stories. So grab your coffee, take a deep breath and get ready to feel empowered, educated and Let's dive in. Welcome to Hormonious, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of functional medicine, hormone health and wellness. I'm Catherine Brigger, nurse practitioner. And in today's episode, we are going to discuss a game changing topic. Your thyroid is ruining your life, and your doctor is ignoring it. This one's going to be a game changer for anyone who's ever struggled with fatigue, weight gain, brain fog, depression, or kind of just feeling like your doctor is missing something.
In today's episode, we're going to discuss the shocking truth about mismanagement and underdiagnosis of thyroid disease in America. We'll discuss how the conventional medicine world grossly undertreats and undertests for this and how functional medicine gets it right.
Here's the hard truth. Thyroid disease is one of the most mismanaged conditions in modern medicine. Millions of people are walking around undiagnosed, undertreated, and the worst part is that their doctors aren't even looking at the right tests to discover what's wrong with them. Today I'm going to expose the real numbers behind undiagnosed thyroid disease. We're gonna talk about why your doctor is running the wrong tests and what tests they actually need to be running.
We'll talk about why functional medicine gets it right while traditional medicine seems to keep failing at this topic. The truth about thyroid medicine, and let me tell ya, spoiler alert, it ain't levothyroxine or synthroid. We're gonna talk about how the thyroid and the brain, the heart, the metabolism, and breast health are all connected. This episode is packed with eye-opening information, so.
Settle in and get ready to take control of your health.
Welcome to Hormonious, the podcast where we uncover the truth about hormones, functional medicine and total body wellness. I'm Katherine Brigger, crnp and functional medicine nurse practitioner, and I'm here to help you cut through the confusion, take control of your health and restore balance to your body. Whether you're struggling with fatigue, weight gain, brain fog or stubborn health issues that just won't go away, this podcast is your go-to resource for science-backed solutions, expert insights and real patient stories. So grab your coffee, take a deep breath and get ready to feel empowered, educated and harmonious. Let's dive in. Welcome to Harmonious, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of functional medicine, hormone health and wellness. I'm Katherine Brigger, nurse practitioner, and in today's episode, we are going to discuss a game-changing topic. Your thyroid is ruining your life and your doctor is ignoring it. This one's going to be a game changer for anyone who's ever struggled with fatigue, weight gain, brain fog, depression or kind of just feeling like your doctor is missing something. In today's episode, we're going to discuss the shocking truth about mismanagement and underdiagnosis of thyroid disease in America. We'll discuss how the conventional medicine world grossly undertreats and under-tests for this, and how functional medicine gets it right. Here's the hard truth. Thyroid disease is one of the most mismanaged conditions in modern medicine. Millions of people are walking around undiagnosed, undertreated, and the worst part is that their doctors aren't even looking at the right tests to discover what's wrong with them. Today, I'm going to expose the real numbers behind undiagnosed thyroid disease. We're going to talk about why your doctor is running the wrong tests and what tests they actually need to be running. We'll talk about why functional medicine gets it right while traditional medicine seems to keep failing at this topic, the truth about thyroid medicine. And let me tell you spoiler alert, it ain't levothyroxine or Synthroid. We're going to talk about how the thyroid and the brain, the heart, the metabolism and breast health are all connected. This episode is packed with eye-opening information, so settle in and get ready to take control of your health.
Speaker 1:How bad is thyroid disease in the United States? Well, let's get started with some shocking numbers, because thyroid disease is far more common than most people realize. Here are the statistics 20 million Americans have thyroid disease, but 60% of them are undiagnosed. Women are 5 to 8 times more likely to develop thyroid disease than men. Up to 90% of hypothyroidism cases are actually an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto thyroiditis In the Great Lakes region, better known as the goiter belt, thyroid disease is significantly more common due to historically low levels of iodine.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, when the glaciers melted and created the Great Lake, it rinsed the iodine out of the soil in this region. As such, most people in this region are iodine deficient. However, rarely do we see people tested for iodine deficiency. And another spoiler alert table salt that's iodized is not going to do it for you. Another spoiler alert table salt that's iodized is not going to do it for you. That means that millions of Americans are walking around feeling absolutely awful. They go to their doctor, they tell them their complaints and their doctor just keeps telling them your thyroid is fine. Because they only ran a TSH, maybe a T4. There's more on that in just a minute. A TSH, maybe a T4. There's more on that in just a minute.
Speaker 1:A big problem with thyroid disease is that the symptoms present much like a million other diagnoses. Sometimes people are sort of shot down. When they make these complaints, they're told oh, it's just due to stress in your life. You must be depressed. Here's your antidepressant. You're just getting older. Here's your birth control. That'll solve the bleeding issues. But if you're struggling with any of these following symptoms, pay attention.
Speaker 1:Here's the top 20 symptoms of thyroid dysfunction and I'm going to put the top three that I see in clinical practice first. Number one fatigue. I'm not talking like I'm kind of tired, I'm talking like I slept 11 hours and still couldn't crawl out of bed. In the morning I could lay my head down and take a nap at any given moment. After lunch I can barely stay awake anymore. This is fatigue that is persisting beyond any type of normalcy. Number two would be weight gain. Oh, the patients I see coming in complaining of weight gain. Is it always their thyroid? Well, no, not always, but a lot of the time that is playing a big part of why they can't lose weight, despite perfect diets, regular exercise, all the things eating less and exercising more. The number three complaint that I see in clinical practice would definitely have to be hair thinning, and this isn't like a couple strands of hair following out every day. This is like every time I shower I get fistfuls of hair.
Speaker 1:Some other symptoms include brain fog and memory issues they can't remember why they walk into a room. Depression and anxiety. These are often misdiagnosed. These are kind of missed a lot. These often aren't thought of as thyroid symptoms, so patients will go in. They'll talk about how they're tired. They don't find any interest in things and they're given an antidepressant. That's not really what they need. They needed something done with their thyroid. Dry skin, brittle nails, cold intolerance, even in the summer, chronic constipation. I mean, these people have tried everything to go every day. It's just not working. Joint pain and stiffness, puffy face or swelling in the hands, feet or legs.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes with these symptoms we see an association with Hashimoto hypothyroidism. Patients' heart rate will be slow, and I realized that for years and years and years, we have been told that a low heart rate equals health. That could not be further from the truth. That's about as good of information as don't eat salt If your heart rate is low. That tells me that your thyroid function is also low, and oftentimes there's an association made between professional athletes having low heart rates. So if you have one, that must mean you're healthy. No, that means that they're over exercising and their thyroid's trying to slow them down. It's begging for them to stop.
Speaker 1:So a hoarseness in your voice, and this isn't associated with becoming sick or hormone changes. It's just all of a sudden your voice sounds kind of raspy, ventral irregularities, and I would have to say that most often I see heavy bleeding, the shorter cycles where there's bleeding in between cycles, but every now and then you'll see people that are skipping cycles as well. Muscle weakness and cramps, infertility struggles, much related to the menstrual irregularities, high cholesterol or high blood sugar levels this is just an indication that your metabolic rate is low. So if you're somebody who hasn't changed anything about your diet or your exercise and suddenly your cholesterol is coming back elevated and your blood sugar levels are coming back elevated in fasted states, probably you should look at your thyroid. Patients can complain of a loss of the outer third of their eyebrows. So are you penciling your eyebrows on? Believe it or not? That is not normal. Carpal tunnel syndrome, flow, wound healing and decreased sweating Do any of these sound familiar? If you're not, keep listening, all right.
Speaker 1:So we're going to talk about the wrong labs versus the right labs. So here's kind of where the traditional medicine world fails patients. So providers are taught that if they don't know how to fix something in the event that it comes back abnormal, they should not test for it. They're taught that it's a liability. Unfortunately, in the conventional medicine world we're taught to test thyroid function. You look at a TSH and maybe a T4. Now the next line I'm going to say is probably the biggest take-home message of all from this entire podcast Tests that focus solely on TSH levels or we'll even say TSH and T4 levels levels, or we'll even say TSH and T4 levels they're an outdated metric.
Speaker 1:They do not provide complete pictures of health and they do not provide your provider with the information they need to develop a treatment plan that's going to help you. Hey, I'm going to say it again TSH, even TSH and T4, is inadequate. As far as thyroid panels are concerned, that's looking at about a sixth of what we want to look at when we look at an actual complete thyroid panel. In the functional medicine world, we really put an emphasis on comprehensive testing. So we want to include the TSH and the T4, but we also want to look at things like your free T3 levels, your reverse T3 levels, iodine levels, tpo and TGA, thyroid antibody levels, and we need to look at micronutrient levels. We need to look at vitamin D, zinc and selenium, just to name a few.
Speaker 1:So, before we go any further, I think it's time to take a brief journey and discuss the anatomy and the physiology of thyroid function, if you're one of my patients, there's a good chance you've already heard this anatomy and physiology lesson, because I give it to almost everybody that comes through my door with thyroid disease. Sorry, it's the educator in me coming out. All right, so you have some major thyroid hormones. We're going to kind of simplify this a little bit, but hopefully in an effort to sort of make it make sense. All right, so we start with the TSH.
Speaker 1:Tsh stands for thyroid stimulating hormone. This is a hormone made in the pituitary gland, so it's actually a brain hormone. It's not a thyroid hormone. It comes from the pituitary gland and it signals to the thyroid telling it you either need to pick up the pace and make more thyroid hormone, or we are sensing that there is enough thyroid hormone in the body, so slow it down a little bit. So if the TSH is high, that means that the thyroid isn't producing adequate amounts of thyroid hormone or that you're not taking adequate amounts of thyroid hormone replacement. If the TSH is low, that means that you're taking adequate amounts of thyroid medication or the thyroid is producing adequate amounts of hormone. All right.
Speaker 1:Next come the hormones that the thyroid produces. So we're going to kind of simplify again, but we're talking mainly about free T4,. Free T3, and reverse T3, all produced by the thyroid gland, all measurable through blood work. So let's talk about what each of those does. Your free T4 is an inactive thyroid hormone. It has to be taken in by the thyroid or the cells of the body, have one iodine molecule removed from it and then it turns into either free T3, which gives us energy, or reverse T3, which slows us down. But until free T4 has that one iodine molecule removed from it, it does absolutely nothing in the body. It's an inactive hormone. So can you already start to see why measuring a brain hormone PSH and an inactive hormone free T4, is not looking at a complete picture of thyroid?
Speaker 1:All right, free T3, as mentioned, is your active thyroid hormone. This is like the golden thyroid hormone. It's responsible for energy, metabolism, weight loss, focus, getting rid of that brain fog all the good things that everybody wants and then reverse T3 is exactly the opposite of that. So this is an active thyroid hormone, but it slows everything down. It's going to block the effectiveness or the T3 from its ability to actually work in the body. So if you have a high reverse T3, but your free T3 looks good, well, that free T3 is only looking good on paper because the reverse T3 is going to block the free T3 from really doing anything in your body. And then we have to discuss an honorable mention to iodine. Iodine sort of plays into your thyroid and this particular mineral is going to allow your thyroid to function properly.
Speaker 1:So in a perfect world, a patient would a hypothyroid patient will say who's taking T4 medication, synthroid, libothyroxine. In a perfect world they would take that T4 medicine, the body would soak it up, it would remove an iodine molecule from it and it would convert that free T4 into free T3, or energy. Unfortunately, that is not usually what happens. What typically happens, and especially in our female patients, is that that T4 is immediately converted into reverse T3, which then makes patients feel worse than they felt before they even started meds. So we talked about how, in the conventional medicine world, looking at a TSH and maybe a T4 is common. That's considered the golden standard.
Speaker 1:Anytime I talk to providers in the conventional medicine world and I'm not really knocking them because I was one of them, I'm not really knocking them because I was one of them they don't understand why we're looking at a free T3 or a reverse T3 or antibodies or iodine levels. But by neglecting those additional hormone markers we're not really able to make an accurate diagnosis or to develop an effective treatment plan. Again, tsh is a brain hormone. It's not even a thyroid hormone. So why are we putting all this emphasis on it?
Speaker 1:Free T4 is an inactive thyroid hormone. It doesn't do anything. Reverse T3 and free T3 are the active thyroid hormones. Tpo and TGA antibodies look for autoimmune types of thyroid disease, and then iodine levels are essential for proper thyroid function. What's the reason why providers don't test all of the thyroid panel? Well, truth be told, they really weren't taught how to treat anything beyond using T4 medication. Even endocrinologists rarely prescribe T3-containing meds because it's just not part of their training. Unfortunately, training unfortunately. Now, if those providers give their patients T4 medications and then don't monitor their reverse T3, there's no real way of knowing if the patient's really getting better or not by just looking at a TSH and a T4. I'd have to throw an honorable mention in here to the fact that taking a holistic, whole-body approach is also essential. We're going to talk in just a few minutes about why other organ systems play into thyroid function.
Speaker 1:But you can't treat patients in silos and unfortunately that's the reality of the conventional medicine world right in silos. And unfortunately that's the reality of the conventional medicine world. Right, you go to your primary care doctor, you give them your complaints. If they take your complaints seriously and they don't know how to fix them, oftentimes they're going to refer you out. They'll send you to a specialist, right. So you go see a specialist for your thyroid. That specialist probably isn't talking back to your primary care doctor.
Speaker 1:So then let's say, fast forward a few months, you go see your primary care doctor and today your complaints are of heavy menstrual cycles. Well, they don't deal with that. So they send you to gynecology. So you go see the gynecologist, who doesn't talk to the endocrinologist, who doesn't talk to the primary care provider. Okay, then let's say you go in with complaints of headaches and nothing your primary care is doing is really resolving these headaches. So maybe they send you to neurology, who doesn't talk to gynecology? Who doesn't talk to endocrinology? Who doesn't talk back to your primary care doctor. They treat your symptoms in silos, they treat their particular organ system, but nothing beyond that. And that's not how the human body works. All of our systems play together. So if we don't take a full body approach, we're not going to make people feel better.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes I will have patients that go back to their providers their primary care, their endocrinologist and they ask them to please order a complete panel to look at everything. Oftentimes, unfortunately, they're shot down when they're asked to do this. They tell patients that those numbers aren't important or they don't mean anything, or the TSH is the only thing that matters. Sometimes I even have providers try to scare patients about the medications that they're taking with us, even though, for the first time in 30 years, they finally feel good. I've heard everything from your heart's going to explode to you're going to have broken bones or brittle bones, or it's going to cause cancer. I've heard it all.
Speaker 1:Honestly, this lack of desire for providers to go out and learn more beyond their last day of medical school unfortunately keeps millions of people undiagnosed, undertreated, because the providers refuse to look at free T3, reverse T3, iodine, selenium, zinc, vitamin D and thyroid antibodies. So then, conventional medicine providers know one type of thyroid medication to give to patients. That's really all that you're taught in your training. So they learn about T4-containing-only medication. So these are your Syntheroids, your Tyrosines, your Levothyroxines of the world, and the assumption is that T4 only medications like Synthroid are adequate for all patients, which grossly ignores the reality that most patients cannot convert the T4 into active T3 hormone. So failure to recognize the need for comprehensive testing leads both the practitioner and the patient wondering why symptoms aren't resolving. There's not a lot of continuing education available on updated thyroid treatment protocols and unfortunately the College of Endocrinology has protocols that are so unbelievably outdated. So that leaves providers relying on outdated guidelines, and the end result is that millions of people are undiagnosed and undertreated.
Speaker 1:So we talked briefly about how other organ systems work with the thyroid, or even against the thyroid. So it's time for us to sort of talk about what the thyroid gland itself regulates, which is metabolism, right, so that includes your heart rate and all kinds of body functions. The interaction between the thyroid and other hormones, like estradiol, which typically comes from your ovaries, is crucial. So you have these patients, particularly women, who have crossed the finish line. They're in menopause and they that's our patient population, I would say that struggles the most with thyroid medication. So they have a thyroid condition, their thyroid's underactive. Maybe they have an autoimmune condition to go with that, maybe not, um, and they're also in menopause, right, right.
Speaker 1:So symptoms are stacking up. You're tired, you're gaining weight, you have hot flashes, you have night sweats, you can't sleep at night, but you wake up feeling exhausted. You feel as though you're losing your mind. Maybe you have mood fluctuations. So then, on top of all of that, these patients are the ones if anybody's going to do it they develop cardiac arrhythmias, which is common in any patient that's in menopause.
Speaker 1:So you have on your heart this node which is called an SA node, and your SA node requires estradiol to be present in order for it to control the rate of your heart, so how fast your heart is beating. So when estradiol levels dip off and that SA node is no longer able to detect estradiol in your system, it starts sort of acting really wonky. It isn't able to control the rate of your heart, monkey, it isn't able to control the rate of your heart, and the end result is a racing heart rate, maybe an arrhythmia, things that definitely don't feel good, right? So if you weren't already feeling anxious now, you definitely feel anxious. So for this read, then we have to be considerate of this stuff.
Speaker 1:Patients in menopause taking estradiol hormone replacement therapy do very well with thyroid replacement therapy. If I give a patient who's in menopause a T3-containing medication, but I don't give her estradiol, I can almost guarantee that within the first few months she'll wind up in the emergency department complaining of a racing heart rate, maybe some chest tightness symptoms that they associate with heart attack. Right, so you couldn't blame them for going to the ER by any means. So what needs to happen is that these patients unfortunately probably aren't going to take up T4 medication very well, fortunately probably aren't going to take up T4 medication very well, convert it into free T3, and start thriving. The reality is they usually need T3-containing medications to feel better and if we don't replace the estradiol first, then T3-containing meds are stimulatory. They go in there. They do increase your heart rate. That's a normal side effect of these medications. But they shouldn't increase your heart rate. That's a normal side effect of these medications. But they shouldn't increase your heart rate to rates that are, you know, considered an arrhythmia, tachycardia, abnormal, abnormal heart rate. It is going to go up some. However, if we put estradiol in the system, that that's going to help a lot with weight, with rate control.
Speaker 1:I mention this because I often have women in menopause who will go see their gynecologist or go back and see their primary care doctor or whoever, and they're told oh, hormones are bad, they cause cancer, why did you get on hormones? You can't be on hormones for more than five years. I mean just absolute nonsense. And these providers are telling patients this stuff like it's gospel truth and scaring the ever-living hell out of these patients. So what do they do? They go home and they get rid of their estradiol. They stop it abruptly, right, and so now I had them on estradiol. We got them going on t3 meds. They were feeling amazing, but their doctor scared the shit out of them. So they stopped the estradiol and guess what? They wind up in the er in no time flat because their heart rate accelerates, they feel, feel it in their chest and they know something's wrong.
Speaker 1:So that leads us to the different types of thyroid medication. Right, there's three main types. There's T4 containing not so stimulatory because, remember, t4 doesn't do anything in your body until you convert it into something else. T3 and T4 containing medication these are your natural, desiccated thyroid hormone medications. All right, so this is pig glandular thyroid hormones. So they take this directly from the pig. You're going to get a mix, really, of T1, t2, t3, t4, and a little bit of iodine with these, but for the sake of this podcast, we're just going to talk T3, t4 in these. Okay, so it's a combination. And then there's T3 only containing medications. So the T4 only medications are your synthroids, your levothyroxines, your tyrosines.
Speaker 1:One big fallacy that I'm going to dispel for you today is that if you're taking a generic T4 medicine, chances are if it's not working, then switching to a brand name T4 only medication also is not going to work. Save your money With the T3 and T4 containing meds. We're talking about your armor thyroid, your NT thyroid, your thyroid with parentheses that say pork. Okay, every different pharmacy kind of picks their own, but they're all very similar. These are going to provide both T4 and T3.
Speaker 1:But what I will say about these is that because the T4 is coming directly from a pig, and pigs are so much like humans that it seems as though this type of T4, which is not synthetic, it's more bioidentical is absorbed and turned into free T3 more readily. At least in my clinical practice, that's what I see. And then there's T3 only meds, and this is leothyronine and cytomel, and these provide free T3. So this is like energy, metabolism, weight loss, thought clarity and a pill right. And then sometimes we have patients that don't just take one of these categories. They'll take two of these categories, so it could be like T4 only, with maybe T3 only, or maybe we're looking at like the T3 and T4 meds, but we need a little bit more T3, so we'll sprinkle in some Cytomel. That's also pretty common, so we'll sprinkle in some Cytomel. That's also pretty common.
Speaker 1:Beyond the thyroid medication themselves, we also have to worry about nutrients like iodine, which gets replaced in almost all of our patients that start thyroid meds, selenium and vitamin D. We also kind of like to keep close tabs on zinc, because we know that this plays a big role with thyroid function. So ideally, a patient's going to get these nutrients and elements to support their hormone production through diet. However, in a lot of regions of the world, that's just not reality. For example, in the Great Lakes region, you're probably not going to be getting enough iodine in your diet and you're definitely not going to get enough vitamin D from sunlight exposure, because the amount of sun we have in this area is not good not good at all all. So we've talked about what thyroid hormones need to be monitored, but we haven't discussed what the ideal or what the functional medicine standards are where we like to see people fall for those different lab tests.
Speaker 1:I will attach a patient guide that you can take with you to your doctor's office in the show notes. Feel free to download it. It's going to have the normal values or the optimal values where we like to see these hormone levels fall, where we know people feel their best. Sometimes that works. It's just a conversation that you need to have with your provider and fortunately, oftentimes it falls on deaf ears. So I want to sort of point out to you that it is not your job to educate your provider. If you really like your provider and you want to stay with your provider, then by all means use the guide, as you know. Use the guide, use the podcast, use whatever you have to empower yourself and then go in and ask the right questions.
Speaker 1:But I also want you to realize that, again, it's not your job to educate your provider. So if they're not going beyond what they know to help you or, even worse, if they're telling you that the help you got elsewhere that made you feel human again is dangerous or bad because you saw somebody that wasn't them, then you should probably run for your life and find a new provider. So what I want for you to know is the steps for effective thyroid treatment. Moving on right, what are your take-home points? All right?
Speaker 1:So first, tsh is not enough to diagnose thyroid disease, nor is it enough to develop a treatment plan. Not even TSH and T4 is enough. Okay, most providers, unfortunately were not trained to test properly or to prescribe T3 medication. So if they're not willing to listen to what you are bringing to them, just find a new provider. Don't drive yourself crazy trying to get them to help you. The thyroid iodine, estrogen and overall cellular health all matter. Okay, we can't treat the thyroid in a silo. It's not. It doesn't play all by itself. It plays with the whole rest of your body. So again, if you have a provider that's not willing to look at the rest of your body systems, then you have a problem, because if we don't fix all the systems, you're not going to feel right.
Speaker 1:And if you still feel awful on Synthroid, it is not in your head. Okay, this is a very real thing. Patients come to us all the time on Synthroid. They tell me my doctor said that my numbers look good, and when we go back and look at what numbers were run. They look at a TSH, maybe at a T4. All right, sometimes I see that the numbers were run and I will even see them come back abnormal and patients are told it's all in your head, your numbers look fine on paper, so seek comprehensive thyroid testing beyond a TSH. Okay, consider both T4 and T3 medications.
Speaker 1:You may need to switch to a different type of medication. I want you to ensure that proper monitoring and adjustments of whatever your medication are are happening. Providers shouldn't see you send you home on a new thyroid medication and then not see you back for six months. That's absurd. All we need is about six weeks for that medication to get inside of the body and do what it does. Right, if you see us, you will see us at your first visit, where we are going to review all of your labs and your symptoms. We're going to develop a treatment plan. We're going to send you home with that treatment plan and then, six weeks later, we are going to have you go for more blood work and then follow up with you regarding those labs. Chances are we'll see you back in about three months after that. We are going to see you pretty frequently until we get things stabilized and we get you feeling good.
Speaker 1:Make sure that you're addressing nutritional deficiencies, particularly iodine, selenium, zinc and vitamin D. They're all super important to support your thyroid health. And then I just want you to remember to prioritize a whole body approach to health. I don't care if it's your thyroid or something else. It's important to consider the whole body plays together. You deserve better thyroid care. You do. Let's fix this together. You have to be your own advocate. All right, some other take-home points.
Speaker 1:So often I see providers see patients in the office and draw labs from the patients during their visit. I get that that's a convenience, that hey, you have them there. You might as well get the blood work right, because what are the chances that patients are going to go to the lab and get the labs drawn? Well, that doesn't work with thyroid management. So prior to any testing, we tell all patients to hold all thyroid medication and all iodine for 24 hours prior to having their labs drawn. So say they go on a Tuesday for blood work, they don't take their thyroid meds or iodine on Monday and they don't take it on Tuesday until after the blood work is drawn. T3 meds will stay in the body for hours, versus T4 meds which will stay in the body for days. Tsh is always going to come back low. If you're taking adequate amounts of T3 medication, that's normal. So if your primary care draws your blood work, when you go in for your annual exam and they say, oh my God, you're on too much thyroid medicine, stop it immediately, your TSH is suppressed. You fire back and you say I'm taking T3 medication. It's normal for my TSH to be low. And also, I didn't know you were going to draw blood work so I wasn't fasting and I didn't hold my meds like I'm supposed to do prior to blood work. Make sure whoever is testing you is looking at your free T3, your reverse T3, and your iodine at the bare minimum every single time they do your blood work.
Speaker 1:There's tons of resources all over the place that you can use for help and for support. There's online platforms. There's social media groups. You can consult functional medicine providers. There's podcasts. There's tons of literature on the internet. Just make sure that where you're getting your information is a reliable source and make sure that if you've been told that your thyroid is fine, but you still feel awful and you're experiencing the symptoms we discussed, keep digging. You deserve better. Subscribe to Hormoneus for more deep dives into functional medicine and hormone health. I promise this won't be the last time we talk about thyroid management. We'd love for you to join us on social media. Hopefully it allows you to stay informed, empowered and connected. You can follow us for wellness tips and exclusive updates. If you'd like to schedule a visit with us, visit us at hormoniustherapycom.
