Thyroid Imbalance & Hashimoto's Disease: A Naturopathic Doctor's Approach

Hi, I'm Dr. Nicole Cain. I want to talk with you today a little bit about how a naturopath is different in their approach to thyroid imbalance. Your thyroid is a gland that lives here in your neck, and it is important for regulating every system in your body. It involves metabolism, energy, all sorts of things. And when your thyroid is not functioning well, we can get symptoms like brain fog, fatigue, dry skin, constipation, hair loss, and many other things. So as a naturopath, what we do is we want to look at first, why is a thyroid out of balance? So for each person, that can be very different. While it's easy to give a naturopathic medicine like an herb that can support thyroid or even a conventional medicine like Synthroid to support thyroid, what a true naturopath will do is with an understanding of biology and physiology, we can look and see why, on a root cause level, is my patient's thyroid out of balance as compared to somebody else. So let's talk about one particular example I'm going to share with you of a patient that I have. She has hypothyroidism. And when we dug a little deeper, we found out that she, in fact has Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Hashimoto's is an autoimmune thyroid disease that is characterized by thyroid levels that can often go really, really high and then go really low. We started to investigate that because she had a really difficult time with mood swings. And so by looking at the thyroid, we were able to see, ah, so the thyroid is going up and then down. We tested antibodies, and we discovered that she had Hashimoto's. So while we could give her thyroid medication and try to stabilize those antibodies, the question a naturopath would ask is, well, why do we have Hashimoto's? So Hashimoto's is linked to several things. One, celiac disease. And even if a person doesn't have celiac disease, a gluten intolerance can be a contributing factor, which I've seen dozens of times. Another is vitamin D deficiency. And oftentimes, correcting vitamin D deficiency can actually help your body's immune system function better. Another is gut health. Your gut is so important in regulating your immune system. And so if your gut is out of balance, then your immune system may also be out of balance. And then the last is heavy metal toxicity. Well, interestingly, with this patient, her vitamin D was extremely low, and so we started her on that. But we also did heavy metal testing, and she had high levels of urinary lead so we naturally and safely helped her reduce the lead in her body through use of isopathy, hydrotherapies, diet, nutrition, many different types of things. And then we retested it. We retested her vitamin D as well as her thyroid antibodies, and we compared the data with how she was feeling symptomatically. We found that as she proceeded with treatment, her thyroid stabilized. She felt much better. Her anxiety and her depression was better. And there were other effects of that. She started to notice her brain fog was better, she was thinking more clearly, she felt more stable. She felt like herself for the first time in her life. So a naturopath will look at so many different variables to try to understand the root cause. Don't just stop at medications. You deserve a doctor who will dig deeper to understand why you have the symptoms that you have a doctor who will investigate, read the literature, and find out the answer to your problem. You. You can get better through the support of the body by nutrients, exercise, herbs, supplements, medications, and lots of other things. But truly, with an understanding of how the body works and how to honor it and help it feel well, how to heal itself, you can get better. You can experience transformation.