As I wrote yesterday, I have reached another chapter with my hashimoto battle. I’d been doing everything right, but I was still having “thyroidy days” 3-4 days a week. My blood tests were also doing weird things (in the most recent case, coming back with low TSH AND low T3 and T4) and so the doctors were just shrugging at me and ushering me out the door. I thought I was at a dead end.
Which was driving me MENTAL But then. I delved deeper. And I made some VERY EXCITING discoveries that I think will help many of you out there who write to me about your similar frustrations. Many of the principles will speak to anyone with an autoimmune disease, too.
I’ll be writing a few posts on some of the things I’ve found. To kick off, I chatted with Chris Kresser during the week. He’s had his own battles and understands frustration. He runs The Healthy Skeptic and is a practitioner in integrative medicine and acupuncturist (and has a wife with thyroid disease). Anyway, he’s come to specialise in hashimotos. And his info is sound and generous.
Listen in:
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In the podcast we cover (and I’m outlining the details below cos it’s all very DENSE info):
The three reasons why your thyroid medication might not be working.
Primarily it’s because hashimotos is an inflammation disease, not a thyroid disease as such. But only the thyroid gets treated (with a band-aid fix – the medication)…causing the other factors involved to continue on. So
- Medication doesn’t address the damage done by inflammation to the hypothalamus-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis, which is key to hashi.
- Medication doesn’t address the damage done by inflammation to thyroid hormone receptors. If there aren’t enough receptors, or they aren’t sensitive enough, it doesn’t matter how much thyroid medication we take. The cells won’t be able to use it.
- Medication comes in the form of T4 (this is what thyroxin is), which our bodies are meant to convert into T3 (which is the active form required by our cells). BUT if your system is stuffed (by inflammation), it can’t make this conversion. Which is just so dumb (and the reason why I supplement my thyroxin with a compounded T3, since the drug companies don’t make it in this format…yes, DUMB!).
The six situations that might explain why your thyroid might be playing up
…and what to do.
As you listen to the six scenarios, we’ll be referring to a bunch of blood tests that will help you work out which scenario might be yours.
Below I’ve outlined the blood tests you’ll need to have on hand to do this. If you’re feeling like crap, I suggest you go to your doctor/therapist and ask for all these to be done at once.