Thyroid Issues Explained

The standard treatment for thyroid issues of giving thyroid medication or

iodine maybe one of the worst things that you can do for your thyroid issue

stay tuned and find out why hey I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg with wellness for life and

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to master true health thyroid is one of the most important organs in the body

and one of the most easily missed and one of the most misunderstood why is it

so important well the thyroid is like a thermostat

think of it as the accelerator for your metabolism you have about a hundred

trillion cells in your body and every one of those cells have thyroid hormone

receptors that means the thyroid dictates how quickly every cell in your

body does what it does so when the thyroid slows down everything in your

body slows down let's look at the symptoms if you have a thyroid problem

it usually means that your hypothyroid hypo means underperforming that the hype

the thyroid isn't doing enough and as a result if the thyroid slows down

everything in your body slows down so you're gonna see symptoms like slow

digestion poor digestion because your thyroid is involved with making

hydrochloric acid to break down proteins you will see weight gain you will see

fatigue you see course brittle hair you see swelling and edema even though these

symptoms affect women mostly we find that people without symptoms also have

the the problem of hyper thyroid and in our clinic we see this is equally

rampant among men so these symptoms affect a tremendous

number of people do you even know someone who doesn't have one or more of

these if you do or someone you know it may be related to a hypothyroid so give

us some feedback write down what your experience and

let's see if we can clear that up for you so the other type of thyroid problem

is hyper thyroid hyper means it is revving too fast it's doing too much so

now all the cells of the body are accelerated so now you have things like

anxiety and racing heart and excessive bowel movements excessive sweating

trouble sleeping and on and on and on a typical medical sign is that you have

bulging eyes very often these people also have unexplained rapid weight loss

no matter how much they eat a ravenous appetite but they can't put any weight

on that could also be hyper thyroid so again if you have any questions or you

know someone like that don't hesitate to put down your questions and comments

down below in the comment section and we'll try to address those for you it is

also possible to alternate between hyper and hypo especially if your thyroid is

under autoimmune attack called Hashimoto's thyroiditis so then while

the thyroid cells are sluggish your thyroid slows down and then when some of

those cells die from the attack now they spill their contents which is thyroid

hormone and now you get a burst of thyroid hormones so now you're hyper for

a while until that kind of wears off and the thyroid is sluggish again so

especially in the early stages you can see that we'll talk a little bit more

about Hashimoto's later in the presentation one of the most important

things to understand is that the thyroid does not operate in isolation it is part

of a bigger machinery and when we talk about thyroid function we're not only

talking about the thyroid tissue and its ability to produce hormones we're

talking about all the players all the systems that are involved with producing

and stimulating and modifying and getting that thyroid hormone out to the

target tissue which is all the cells that are going to use it anything that

is not working out of all those pieces is going to create hypo or hyper thyroid

typically hypothyroid so some of the key players are hypothalamus it is the

master regulator of your hormones it controls the pituitary which is the

master gland it manufactures most of the hormones and dispenses distributes

secretes most of those hormones then we have the thyroid who makes the thyroid

hormone and we have the liver and we have the gut so let's look at what each

of those does in a little bit more detail so the whole process starts with

the hypothalamus again it is the master regulator of your hormone it sits deep

inside the head right about here and right below it is the pituitary and

they're only about a half an inch apart so the hypothalamus asks do we have

enough thyroid hormone and if the answer is no it sends out a messenger called

trh or thyroid releasing hormone and it basically says to the pituitary go tell

the thyroid to make some more hormone so the pituitary does what it's told and it

relays the message and it sends out a message called TSH or thyroid

stimulating hormone and it is received by the thyroid that looks like a little

butterfly and sits right under your Adam's apple and TSH tells the thyroid

that it's time to go to work we don't have enough thyroid hormone better make

some and now the thyroid says okay I get the message

let me make some sigh roid hormone and it makes two types of thyroid hormone it

makes one called t4 and one called t3 and even though t3 is the more active

one it makes mostly t4 and then it puts this out into circulation and it leaves

the liver to activate it so the liver gets to determine how much activation

is going on and the liver sits right about here now the liver gets the t4

which is named that way because it has four iodine molecules on it and through

an enzymatic process it takes away one and now leaves three so it's called t3

but not all of this t3 turns out perfect about 60% of it becomes active perfect

t3 20% of it becomes reverse t3 and that's basically backwards it's good for

nothing and the body is just going to get rid of it but the interesting part

is the last 20% which is a inactive form of t3 that can potentially be activated

and it is sent to the gut so this can be a bit of a problem now because the last

20% of thyroid activity depends on how healthy the gut is and very few people

have a healthy gut this thyroid hormone can be activated by healthy gut bacteria

but after all of the antibiotics and all the processed foods and all the sugars

and all the chemicals very very few people have a good healthy flora that is

capable of activating this hormone so as much as 20% can be lost and not

available to the tissues on the other hand if we have a supremely healthy gut

now all of a sudden 20% more of activated t3 can be available to the

tissues so now we need to finish the cycle and see if it all worked so the

hypothalamus sent out a message and now it wants to see if it worked

so it monitors again and it checks how much t4 is available now and if there is

enough t4 available then it backs off it it orders less because there is enough

this is called negative feedback so if there's more available of the end

product it's going to turn off the same that initiated the process and by

reverse if we still don't have enough thyroid hormone then the hypothalamus is

going to ask again it's going to raise its voice and demand louder and more so

now those order hormones the trh and the TSH is going to go up and now we have

what's called hypothyroid now how do they deal with this in standard care and

how has this been dealt with in the last few decades and why are so many people

feeling bad and experiencing so many of these symptoms even though their blood

work says that they're perfectly normal well the first thing is that typically

the only thing that they measure routinely is TSH and TSH isn't even a

thyroid hormone it's pituitary hormone it only measures how many orders were

placed says nothing about any of the other factors that we went over the

other problem is that the range that they're looking at is humongous

typically the range goes from 0.5 to 5.0 so you could be anywhere in that range

and you could have a 0.5 or it could increase tenfold 10 times more and

you're still just normal it's that as if nothing had changed well obviously

there's a huge difference there's an enormous range of varying activity

within that range so the problem is that they only measure TSH and then they

assume that if TSH is high then it must be because the thyroid isn't doing its

job so they supplement you with synthetic t4 called synthroid and it has

a bunch of different names in the market but it's the synthetic thyroid hormone

and now this thyroid hormone the synthetic hormone convinces the

hypothalamus that there is enough thyroid

around so the TSH comes down and looks good on the bloodwork and for some

people this works relatively well at least for a while for others it doesn't

work at all and that's because it's something else that is causing it but if

we only measure TSH then we're missing the real problem one of the most common

things would be that the liver is not converting the t4 to t3 so we have all

this t4 floating around but we have no converted active t3 or very little

active t3 available for the target tissues so now you're functionally

hypothyroid the cells aren't getting what they need even though the blood

work says that there's plenty of t4 and the TSH looks normal so in those cases

sometimes they try what's called a natural thyroid hormone or armorer

thyroid that has a mix of t4 and t3 and this works for some people so now

there's a little bit larger percentage of people who see some symptom

improvement however the single biggest problem with hyperthyroid is that as

much as 90 percent of it today is autoimmune except they don't test for it

for two reasons they don't know what to do about it

and if they found it it wouldn't change anything that they do they would still

just supplement thyroid hormones so Hashimoto's thyroiditis is an autoimmune

disease the thyroid is being attacked for some reason the thyroid is extremely

sensitive tissue it is very sensitive to heavy metals and to chemicals especially

the ones that mimic hormones they're called endocrine disruptors and it could

be anything from hormones and food to plastics or pesticides or chemicals that

in any way look like a hormone and there's thousands and thousand

of those around and if it is autoimmune if it is Hashimoto's then we know today

that virtually all autoimmune disease starts with an unhealthy gut it starts

with unhealthy gut bacteria antibiotics leaky gut allergies inflammation and so

on so that is the thing that we have to fix and the problem with just giving

people synthetic thyroid hormone is that the immune situation continues to

deteriorate and even though the blood work looks good people are getting worse

and worse and worse and they're setting themselves up for further autoimmune

attack and that's something that we really want to avoid one more factor

with Hashimoto's is that now we're kind of playing it by different rules and a

lot of people are making this mistake because Hashimoto's is so common that if

we get a natural thyroid hormone which is supposedly better it could actually

trigger further immune responses further autoimmune attacks and the same thing

can happen for the most common supplement that people take for thyroid

namely iodine iodine can stimulate things in the thyroid that is more than

the thyroid can handle at the time but it can also further aggravate that

immune attack so we have to be really careful we have to know what we're

dealing with so that we can do the right thing for the thyroid and there's one

more thing that we want to understand that we could actually have a

hypothyroid with a high TSH or we could have a hypothyroid with a low TSH and

here is the mechanism if the thyroid is sluggish then the hypothalamus and the

pituitary is supposed to order more so TSH goes up that's the classic hyper

thyroid but what if we have a lot of stress

we have a lot of cortisol in the system do you know anyone like that

now that cortisol is actually going to shut down the production and the release

of trh and TSH so now even though we don't have enough thyroid hormone the

brain is has a little bit of an inflammation so it's not capable of

placing the order so now TSH goes down even though our thyroid

hormone levels are down and this we're seeing more and more and more this is a

TSH that falls just a little bit on the low side it's not crazy crazy low but it

is outside the sweet spot of 1.8 to 3.0 so the optimal range that we're looking

for is 1.8 to 3.0 right in the middle is the sweet spot 2.5 they've developed

some new guidelines because they realize that 5 is a really really high value and

you've got problems long before that so they lowered the upper level to 3 but

they still think it's sort of like cholesterol they still think that if

high is bad then the lower the better right well in this case that's not true

so anything below 1.8 also indicates hypothyroid but now it's probably stress

and inflammation and cortisol mediated good to know let me quickly review that

whole cycle again we have to have proper function from the hypothalamus the

pituitary the thyroid the liver the gut and we have to have a proper feedback

system we have to keep inflammation and cortisol low can you see why it's not

all about the thyroid can you see why it's not as simple as simply putting in

some synthetic hormone until the blood values look good again exactly now

believe it or not but this is the really really simple

version there is something called a Harrower shart and this was published

already in 1932 we knew all this stuff almost a hundred years ago and if you

look at this chart you see how incredibly complex the human endocrine

or the hormone system is almost everything effects everything else so do

you think it's even possible to throw something into the system and think that

you're not going to upset the balance of something else that is what happens the

Nature has taken millions and millions and millions of years with innate

intelligence to perfectly balance and fine-tune this system that's why we

can't just throw things in there we have to help the body re-establish the

balance by addressing the thing that is not working we have to start addressing

the cause so it turns out that the thyroid is almost never the primary

problem it is almost always something else affecting or stressing or attacking

the thyroid the only time that it is primary is if you're truly missing

iodine if you live someplace where the soil lesson provide iodine then you

could be deficient if thyroid doesn't have the raw materials to make the

hormone and it tries to compensate it's it starts growing to have more cells to

do the best they can with what little iodine is available again nature is

incredibly intelligent is the exact appropriate response when you're missing

iodine but that's about the only time that the thyroid would be the primary

problem and then it's super easy to solve because you just take some iodine

and that's it every other case whether it's autoimmune or whether it's thyroid

cancer or there's a nodule that's over producing or something that's keeping it

from producing every other case there's something else that is affecting it and

in every other case we need to address and solve that other thing

before we can fully restore health that is why so many people are feeling bad

because they're not getting the true cause of the problem addressed they're

just supplementing with the thyroid hormone and they're upsetting some other

balance while they're ignoring the real problem and the body can't heal properly

so remember that health is not merely the absence of disease but it is the

optimal function and optimal well-being of the individual and all of the systems

so when we have health we have energy and focus we can do all the things that

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