How your thyroid can make you sick, tired and overweight

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Are you one of the 30 million women or 15 million men that have a chronic medical problem that's both under diagnosed and under treated? Are you suffering from vague symptoms that you think are a normal part of aging or life such as fatigue or Maybe you feel sluggish in the morning or have trouble with your memory or trouble concentrating or focusing on tasks or maybe you have dry skin or fluid retention. Maybe your sex drive is not what it used to be or maybe your hands and feet are cold all the time. Maybe your hair is thinning and your voice is a little hoarse or maybe your fingernails are thick and cracking. Maybe your cholesterol is higher. Maybe you have trouble losing weight or maybe you've gained weight recently or maybe you're suffering from depression or anxiety or Maybe you have really bad PMS or you're suffering from infertility. You could even have muscle cramps and muscle pain or weakness. Now most of these symptoms would not lead you to go to the emergency room, but do significantly affect the quality of your life. And most of us accept them as a normal part of our lives without really questioning them. Occasionally you might go see your doctor who shrugs it off. He or she is an expert in acute illness. but they often feel miserably when it comes to addressing the subtle changes in your body that affect the quality of your life. A low sex drive is not necessarily a disease, nor is a little dry skin or constipation or being tired most of the day. And it's not that these are not diseases according to conventional thinking, but for you, these are significant problems. And what am I talking about? I'm talking about a condition that goes undiagnosed in half of the 45 million people who have it. called hypothyroidism. This is a condition where your overall metabolic gas pedal has slowed down because the master gland that controls it, your thyroid gland, is not functioning at full speed. If your thyroid slows down, every other organ and system in your body slows down. Your brain, your heart, your gut, your muscles, the thyroid hormone is like a master switch that turns on the genes that keeps every cell running. Now this is one of those gray areas in medicine. But doctors tend to think in black and white. You don't have to think about things like that. It's not you have it or you don't. You're pregnant or you're not, right? You can't just be a little bit pregnant, but you can just be a little bit hypothyroid and it can have a dramatic effect on the quality of your life. That's why millions of people are untreated and thyroid is such a political hot potato in medicine. Think shades of gray. Now, this problem is further compounded by the view in conventional medicine that you can diagnose hypothyroidism only through one blood test called TSH and that you only qualify for treatment if your blood level is over 5. This unfortunately ignores a whole group of people who have what we call subclinical hypothyroidism. It's called that because doctors have a hard time diagnosing it. I mean this may show up for you with many low grade symptoms such as fatigue or trouble losing weight, or maybe a little depression or constipation, or maybe just slight changes in your blood tests. It often shows up in tests that most doctors never do. So you may not have the full textbook case of hypothyroidism, but you might feel badly most of the time and no one can figure out why. The key is that there is a way to treat hypothyroidism for those with subtle symptoms and make those who are diagnosed and treated with only partially effective medication like Synthroid or Levothyroxine feel even better. Now the problem is that having a low thyroid function doesn't just make you a little tired, but it can lead to more serious problems including heart attacks and diabetes. I see this all the time in my medical practice with patients coming in with vague complaints that alone may not seem too significant, but when you put them all together, they create a significant story. In fact, I remember the story of one patient who was 73 years old. This woman came to see me because she'd been to see her doctor with complaints of fatigue and sluggishness and poor memory and maybe a little bit depression, dry skin, constipation, a little fluid retention, and her doctor said to her, well, what do you expect? You're 73, and this is what 73 is supposed to feel like. But I do not believe that's true. I believe that most of the symptoms of aging that we see are really symptoms of abnormal aging or dysfunction that are related to these imbalances in our core body systems. I find I have to be a medical detective to find clues where no one else is looking and put together the story about why a person is suffering that makes sense and get them all the answers and the tools to get well. In this patient, we tested a number of different things and found that she had a sluggish thyroid. She did not quite meet all the criteria of conventional medicine for hypothyroidism, but she had an autoimmune reaction which is like attacking your own thyroid gland, that led to her thyroid to function poorly. And simply replacing her missing thyroid hormone, giving her some nutritional support, and implementing some simple lifestyle changes, she went from feeling old to feeling alert and energetic and youthful, and all of her other symptoms cleared up. And I had another patient, it was a young 28-year-old woman who was chronically constipated and thought this was part of normal life to go to the bathroom every three or four days. She also felt quite tired in the morning, she had trouble getting going, she needed a coffee every morning, and at night she had trouble staying up and being with her friends and being an active 28 year old woman. She thought this was just sort of a normal constitutional problem and was stuck living like that. No one had diagnosed the fact that she had a sluggish thyroid. And as soon as we nutritionally supported her and eliminated the food allergens she had, particularly gluten, which creates inflammation, which interferes with thyroid function, then she felt better. I mean her constipation resolved, she was energetic in the morning, she didn't need her coffee anymore, she was able to stay up late at night until 11 or 12 without any fatigue or limitations. And this problem affects men and women of all ages. It's unfortunately common because of all the stressors in our environment including toxins like heavy metals and pesticides and nutritional deficiencies as well as chronic stress, all of which interfere with our thyroid function. So what's critical to understand is that our thyroid is not just linked to energy and the other symptoms that I described, but is the master metabolism hormone that controls the function and activity of almost every other organ and cell in your body. So when it slows down and it's sluggish, everything slows down. Now the good news is that there are clear ways to diagnose the problem as well as to treat it through a comprehensive approach using functional medicine and the concepts of ultra wellness. The first step is to find out if you have any of the chronic symptoms of hypothyroidism or any of the diseases associated with hypothyroidism. You have to ask yourself if you have any of the following symptoms, okay? Sluggishness in the morning, trouble getting going, poor concentration memory, low grade depression, dry skin, horse voice, sitting hair, coarse hair, being very sensitive to the cold, having cold hands and feet, having a low body temperature, a low pulse maybe, muscle pain, weakness and cramps, low sex drive, fluid retention, even high cholesterol. So after I've asked my patients about all these symptoms, I do a physical exam for clues to a low functioning thyroid. And once I've taken a thorough review of all the symptoms, I see that, you know, I want to know if there's a low body temperature. I want to know if there's fluid retention. I can check by pressing in different parts of the body. I can look for a thick tongue or swollen feet or swollen eyelids or an enlarged thyroid gland or lots of earwax actually or a dry mouth or coarse skin or low blood pressure. I can look for decreased ankle reflexes. I might even find that the outer third of the eyebrows are gone. So these are all useful physical signs that I can look for in someone that has hypothyroidism. And I can put this together with a story along with the symptoms of what's causing the problem. And once I've done that, then I do specific blood tests that give me a full picture of thyroid problems. And then I design a nutritional lifestyle and supplement regimen and a hormone replacement plan as a patient needs to help people regain their health and address this hidden epidemic of unnecessary suffering. In my next blog, I'll discuss the major preventable, avoidable, and mostly hidden factors that slow your thyroid down that happen without your even knowing about them. To learn more about what special tests I use to diagnose hidden thyroid problems and how specifically to treat low thyroid function, stay tuned to my next blog.