Chronic Fatigue: Understand Your Thyroid

Everybody, Dr. Diane, your Lyme disease and chronic illness expert here. Today, we are talking about chronic fatigue, emotions, anxiety, depression, and how they all fit together. So we're going to go through root causes, we're going to go through things you want to make sure you're remembering and more. Now, I want to remind everybody that Lyme Disease Awareness month is coming up this month of May that is soon going to be upon us. And for really helping everybody and for getting the word out more about the importance of really getting to the root cause of chronic illness, I have a ton of promotional things going on in May, including a relaunch of my book. We're going to be doing a lot of giveaways, hugely discounted things and more. So look out for that in Lyme Disease Awareness Month. Remember, you can take my quiz in order to help you figure out some of the missing root causes of some of your chronic illness. So that quiz will be in the notes below. So make sure you sign up for that quiz so you can get updates on Lyme Disease Awareness Month, of all the cool giveaways, and in helping you with understanding. The purpose of the quiz is to help you understand some of those missing root causes. Okay, so let's get into today's information. So when it comes to chronic fatigue syndrome, when it comes to depression, anxiety, rage, and all of these different types of emotions, we get into a real vicious cycle. So we have certain people that will say, hey, these things going on in the mind will create the body issues. We'll have other people that say, hey, what's going on in the body will create the mind issues. And it gets really tricky to figure out. Certainly I see over and over and over again when people are chronically fatigued and chronically inflamed and there's no energy and no vitality to enjoy life, to enjoy time with family and friends naturally. Depression, anxiety, aloneness, isolation, frustration, rage, all these things happen right when we are inflamed, when we have chronic illness, it is not infrequent that our nervous system gets inflamed. When our nervous system gets inflamed, tiny little stimuli that typically in a healthy individual, you'd be able to brush it off. It's like, okay, that's annoying. No big deal. And then all of a sudden, when your nerves are really inflamed, tiny little things, the saying, don't cry over spilt milk, right? That whole thing of crying over spilt milk, crying over those tiny little things, being upset of those tiny little things happens when the threshold of tolerance of your nervous system, when the threshold of what your nervous system can handle is really lowered. And it's lowered because of the multitude of disease situations that lead to this chronic inflammation and that chronic inflammation really impacting the nerves, right? So there's so many different reasons why we can see chronic fatigue syndrome actually start. There's so many different reasons, right? So the, some of the common reasons I've already talked about on this channel are things like thyroid disorders, right? And so many times people think their thyroid's normal, they've had the standard test, they're told they're fine and they're not because they're not, not a full thyroid panel has been run. So for example, with the thyroid, most commonly we run tsh. And that's where a lot of doctors stop, right? Tsh. What a lot of people don't realize isn't even thyroid hormone. TSH is a brain hormone and it tells the thyroid hormone to work. And so when we basically, when the brain basically releases tsh, it tells the thyroid to then release thyroid hormone. So people, doctors will only run the brain hormone and say, hey, if the brain hormone's normal, then your thyroid must be normal. Problem is the brain can be secreting a good amount of that signal and the thyroid may not be responding appropriately. So we really need a much deeper thyroid panel in order to actually determine if there's a thyroid problem. There's also cases of another thyroid molecule called reverse T3. Reverse T3 is a thyroid molecule. The easiest way of explaining is a thyroid molecule that'll actually block good thyroid hormone from working. So essentially, even if you measure brain hormone and thyroid hormones and everything looks good, you could actually have too much of this reverse T3 that's going to block regular T3 from working. And I've seen many situations throughout my 15 years of clinical work. I've seen many situations where people have normal thyroid tsh or brain hormone, normal thyroid hormone that's going to be free T3 and free T4. And yet they still have all these thyroid symptoms. And we test reverse T3, it's way too high, blocks regular thyroid from working, and actually is a low thyroid situation a hypothyroid, and that's something with chronic fatigue, right? So we really want to make sure one of the take home points always is test our importance. But you have to begin to understand and be an advocate for yourself more and more and more to make sure you're getting the right test run. Because sometimes we're just missing a piece of the puzzle and we're told, told were normal and actually we're not. So and then when it comes to emotions, one of the things that I really want everybody to understand is usually when we have this emotional, say, challenge, right? So that could be anything from a tendency to anxiety to a tendency towards depression to bounce in between the, you know, the two or something else. And when there's, you know, mental health imbalance sometimes. And a lot of the time it is a, it's a post a physical imbalance. So so many people are told it's in their mind, right? So I really encourage you to not believe that essentially it's only. It can, of course, be in your mind, but most of the time if you have physical symptoms, then what's really happening for most people is the physical symptoms and you feel so bad. And of course, like when I was going through Lyme disease and I thought my, you know, I was dying and I had memory loss and all the craz things, I was depressed too. I was anxious too. And you better believe that once those things went away, all of a sudden I feel great in my mental health, right? So we really want to make sure that we're working with this holistically and sometimes using, using support and working with psychiatrists and using things to help your chemicals in your brain to balance can be a good thing. But we always want to remember again to figure out what is that root? What is that root? And that's what we're going to be exploring this month in subsequent videos and more. So make sure you subscribe to this channel. We're going to talk about some of the strange, rare, peculiar things behind emotional health. I want to make sure you get all this information so again, you can find information about me and about the upcoming, amazing, exciting Lyme awareness month we have in May coming up soon. And go and check out my quiz. My quiz is designed to help give insights as to some chronic hidden root causes that might be driving your particular situation and give you insights as to maybe what tests you're missing and maybe what areas you should go further into. So definitely check that out. Please do share this with your friends and family. I want to help as many people as possible and I'll see you soon in another video.