As a functional medicine practitioner, and former thyroid patient, thyroid disease, including hypothyroidism, is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. After being diagnosed with Grave’s disease while I was in medical school, conventional medicine gave me three options: take a medication known as propylthiouracil (PTU), which has really awful side effects; use radioactive iodine to ablate (blow up) my thyroid; or have my thyroid surgically removed.
I initially decided to take Propylthiouracil (PTU) when I had Graves’, however, it devastated my liver. I was confined to bed rest until my liver healed. It nearly cost me my life and medical school. I eventually made the decision to have my thyroid ablated, a decision I still regret to this day. If I would have known what I know now, I would have made a different choice. Conventional medicine failed me, and it is my mission not to have it fail you too!
More than 12% of the U.S. population will develop a thyroid condition in their lifetime. An estimated 20 million Americans have some form of thyroid disease, and up to 60% of those people don’t even know they have one. What’s even more alarming is that women are 5 to 8 times more likely than men to develop thyroid disorders. While those statistics can seem frightening, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Managing Autoimmune Thyroid Disease
I’ll talk about functional medicine’s approach to hyperthyroidism in a later post. Today, I’m going to tell youwhat can go wrong with your thyroid — specifically Hashimoto’s and hypothyroidism — a few of the root causes of thyroid disease, the importance of thorough testing, and how the hypothyroidism functional medicine approach can help reverse your symptoms.
To understand what can go wrong with your thyroid, it’s important to know how the thyroid functions. Think of your thyroid gland as your body’s power generator. It sends energy to every cell in your body through the hormones it produces. These hormones determine the energy level and reproduction of each cell, keeping your organs powered up and managing your overall metabolism. This process of creating, regulating, and delivering these hormones begins in your brain.
Your hypothalamus, which is responsible for managing hunger, thirst, sleep, hormones, and body temperature, among other important functions, monitors the level of thyroid hormone present in your bloodstream. If it determines energy levels are low, it sends out Thyroid Releasing Hormone (TRH) to your pituitary gland. Your pituitary gland, a pea-sized gland at the base of your brain, releases Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) directly to the thyroid.
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Your thyroid is then prompted to produce thyroid hormone using an amino acid called tyrosine and iodine. It converts tyrosine into thyroglobulin and attaches between one and four iodine atoms, creating T1, T2, T3, and T4, respectively.
The primary output of your thyroid is T4, thyroglobulin plus four iodine atoms — a storage form of the hormone. It is circulated throughout the bloodstream and stored in tissues so it’s available when needed. A much smaller percentage of the hormones produced is T3, the active form of thyroid hormone. T2 and T1 make up an even smaller percentage, and although we now know T2 is involved in metabolism rate, researchers are still unsure of what role these two hormones play.
When each local area of your body determines that it needs active T3, it converts the storage T4 to active T3 using an enzyme called deiodinase. This enzyme strips one of the outside iodine atoms off of the T4, turning it into Free T3 (FT3). Your body also uses a portion of the T4 to create Reverse T3 (RT3). This is done by stripping away one of the inside iodine atoms, creating another inactive form of thyroid hormone that can attach to Free T3 receptors.
Clinical Aspects Of Thyroid Function During Ageing
The T3 enters cell membranes with the help of cortisol and regulates how much energy your mitochondria produce. Your mitochondria are the “power plants” of your cells and there are trillions of them in your body. Free T3 acts as a gas pedal for the mitochondria, revving up power production. Reverse T3 acts as a brake pedal, slowing down the power.
These micro-level reactions are a part of your endocrine system and work to control important metabolic factors such as heart rate, fatigue, weight regulation, brain function, and more. When your thyroid isn’t functioning properly it can affect any or all of these separate systems, creating
The most common form of thyroid disease is hypothyroidism, which is when your thyroid is underactive and does not produce enough thyroid hormone.
Grave's Disease: The Other Autoimmune Thyroid Condition
This can happen because your pituitary gland is malfunctioning and not sending enough Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) to your thyroid, or your TSH levels are normal, yet your thyroid isn’t producing enough T4 and T3 to adequately fuel your cells.
I’ll explain how you can read your thyroid test results and what tests are done to check thyroid function later. Before that, though, let’s go over the signs of hypothyroidism.
The underproduction of thyroid hormones leads to a decrease in your metabolic rate, which leads to a myriad of symptoms such as:
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One of the most common causes of hypothyroidism is Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease where your immune system attacks your thyroid. Actually, most patients’ thyroid disease is triggered by an autoimmune condition. Autoimmune disease occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks your own cells.
Many doctors who suspect a patient has something wrong with their thyroid only check their thyroid hormone levels, which indicates if the patient has hypo- or hyperthyroidism. They will likely not determine if it is caused by an autoimmune disease.
To get a complete picture of a patient’s thyroid health and medical needs, I recommend a doctor order all six tests listed below. It’s important that the results are read for optimal levels, not “normal” levels.
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Managing your thyroid levels through thyroid medication is only part of the process. The real work comes in identifying the underlying factors that caused your thyroid disease and making healthy lifestyle changes to remove them. I call this The Myers Way®.
This proven approach is a lifestyle that relieves and reverses your symptoms of thyroid disease, helps you get off your harsh medication, and enables you to live a healthy, energetic, and pain-free life.
This approach rests on four pillars, each of which has been tested through extensive research and has seen amazing results with thousands of patients over my own years of practice as a physician and while empowering the world to achieve optimal health through Amy Myers MD®.
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Your gut is the foundation of your whole body’s health because 80% of your immune system is located there. Without a healthy gut, you can’t have a healthy immune system. Without a healthy immune system, you’re open to infections, inflammation, and autoimmune disease. I use the 4R approach to healing your gut:
Leaky gut puts you on the autoimmune spectrum, which is why healing your gut is the first pillar of The Myers Way®. Once you’ve healed your gut, it’s time to make lifestyle and diet changes to put you on the path towards optimal health. One of the best ways to do that is through diet and eliminating foods that are causing inflammation and damage to your intestinal tract: gluten, grains, and legumes.
Pillar III addresses and reduces your exposure to toxins, a poison or any substance that’s dangerous to the human body. That includes heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and cadmium, industrial chemicals and pollutants, and pesticides.
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Unfortunately, toxins are also in common products such as home cleaning products, body products, even makeup. Every day, we are exposed to thousands of toxins through the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the products we put on our bodies.
Each exposure to toxins adds to your body’s toxic burden. Think of your body as a cup, and toxins are drops of water: if your cup is already full because you have leaky gut, a poor diet, infection, and stress, those small, cumulative toxic exposures cause that cup to overflow.
The best thing you can do to lighten your toxic burden is to prevent the toxins from getting into your system by drinking clean water, buying clean food and body products, and filtering your air.
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When a patient isn’t getting better on the first few pillars of The Myers Way®, I always consider the possibility that an underlying infection could be at the source. Once you have a virus, the inflammatory immune response damages tissue, which then causes more inflammation and a stronger response from the immune system. Autoimmune disease develops from that chronic state of inflammation.
The relationship between stress and infections is complex. Your immune system responds to stress by producing inflammation, which is ordinarily a good thing as it produces cortisol to gear your body up for a challenge. However, when you have constant stressors in your life, your immune system never really gets to turn off. Your inflammatory immune response is activated for too long and eventually goes rogue, attacking your own bodily tissues. Pretty soon, your stress hormones try to suppress the response yet go overboard, leaving
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