Unseen Thyroid Issues?

Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane, your chronic illness expert here today, talking about chronic illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, and your thyroid. And a lot of people think about fatigue and thyroid being related, and of course they are. But what a lot of people do not realize is the testing that is done is not very thorough to actually determine if you have a thyroid issue. So it's very, very common. People are told that they have a perfectly normal thyroid. It's actually not normal, and it's causing a lot of the issues. So there's a few things to know. One is the most common test for thyroid is tsh. TSH is a brain hormone. It is not a thyroid hormone. TSH is measured, and then we're told that our thyroid is fine or not fine. What tsh, what this brain hormone is supposed to do when it's functioning well is it's released, and it tells our thyroid to release thyroid hormone. So when we need more thyroid hormone, when our thyroid hormone is low, what tends to happen is our brain hormone, the tsh, gets really high because we want the brain hormone to come down at a very high amount to, like, stimulate the thyroid so much to release that thyroid hormone. So that's really important. Now, what is important to. To think about with this is that we need to actually remember, measure the thyroid hormone. So we measure the brain hormone tsh. We also want to measure the thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormones are things like free T3 and free T4. Free T4 is oftentimes measured, but free T4 is a type of thyroid hormone that has no activity, meaning it does not. It does not do anything that we think of when we think of thyroid hormone. It doesn't give us energy, it doesn't help our hair, it doesn't help our bowels, doesn't help our mood. Any of those things we think about with thyroid. This particular form of thyroid hormone does not. Does not do that. Right? It has to convert to something called Free T3 in order to work. So it's common that I will see situations where brain hormones, fine, TSH. TSH looks good. Thyroid hormone, the non active, the free T4, looks totally good. And then it's the free T3, that active thyroid hormone, the one that does all the yummy, juicy things that we think of. With thyroid, it's the free T3 that is not working. So when we consider all of those things, we want to make sure we're getting all three of those tested. But as I talked about in a video earlier this month, when I was talking about some of the root causes of chronic fatigue syndrome. One of the things I mentioned is another molecule called reverse T3. This particular molecule is super important because reverse T3 will block regular thyroid from working. So you can have all the normal amounts of thyroid in your body, but if you have an elevation of this other molecule called reverse T3, your thyroid hormone will look normal in your blood, but it will not be able to work. And so in these cases, oftentimes thyroid hormone levels like they look normal. Somebody is told they have no problem with their thyroid, but they still have cold hands, they still have eyebrows, you know, falling out, right? They still have fatigue, they still have all of these thyroid symptoms. Because just because thyroid is being released doesn't mean your cells are able to use it. And you have an elevation of reverse T3 that will mean your cells are not able to use thyroid hormone. Right? So you want to make sure you're looking at that reverse T3. You also want to look at thyroid antibodies. These are other things that are telling us if your thyroid is under attack or not. And you can have a perfect normal thyroid hormone level, but your thyroid could be inflamed and under attack, meaning it's not working at the level that we need it to work. Right. So all of these things should be considered when we're thinking about thyroid hormone. So with chronic fatigue, always remember that you want to figure out, is it really your thyroid? Because that's a super basic and easy things to fix. Most people are not having thyroid tests done properly, and they're also not having their labs looked at totally right? So remember, when you are evaluating thyroid hormone function, we're considering not just all of these markers, but the reference ranges. And conventional medicine typically looks at reference ranges when they're trying to rule in or out big bad diseases. From a functional optimal standpoint, there's different ways to evaluate these lab values.