How Do I Know If My Thyroid Diagnosis Is Correct?

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How do I know if my thyroid diagnosis is correct? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Natalie from Instagram asks what is a simple way to check if your thyroid diagnosis is correct. Hey, it's J.J. and I've got Dr. Michael Ruscio with me to answer this question. Now, you might know him from his podcast, Dr. Ruscio Radio, or as the author of the best selling book Healthy Gut, Healthy you. But I also know that he's a bit of an adventure junkie who's a musician in his spare time with a secret dream to paraglide. We'll be right back to answer this question.

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This is such an important question to ask. Why? Because so many patients are being misdiagnosed as hypothyroid who are actually not. Now, this is not just me. Conventional medicine is publishing in the research literature a call to clinicians to be more cautious and how quickly they vector a diagnosis. And the same thing has been found in the journal Thyroid, for example, in 2018, a researcher named Lovatus at the University of Athens and checked a group of patients and they found that 66,0% of patients who had a somewhat ambiguous diagnosis were actually not hypothyroid. Not only that, but we write or I write a monthly clinicians newsletter where I discuss these things. And to date, two other doctors have found numerous cases of this in their practices and they've even gone so far as to write up case studies documenting that they're seeing the same thing that I'm seeing. Said quite simply, patients who are not hypothyroid are being somewhat routinely told they are hypothyroid. Why? Because, and this is getting to the essence of the question, downstream hormones like T3 and reverse T3 are suboptimal. And then the patient is told, this means you're hypothyroid. This is incorrect. 1000% this is incorrect. This is a damaging message that needs to be reformed. Anyone doing this clinically is probably doing it under the assumption that it is correct. So I don't want to lay the culpability on the feet of the clinicians. I think it's a problem at the educational level. But how do you check this? How do you go back and figure out what camp you fall into? Thankfully, this is a fairly easy answer. You need to get the labs that diagnosed you as hypothyroid. Not when you're on the medication, but right before you went on medication, that lab, or maybe you would never even start the medication yet, but you just have that lab from the diagnosis. Just as long as you're not on medication, because medication skews the read. And what you're looking for is the lab range. Don't look at what your provider wrote in or don't look at if they gave you a custom type out. Look at the actual lab range and what you're looking for is the TSH to be in the normal range. Usually it cuts off at about 4.5 and for the T4 to be in the normal range if the TSH is not elevated above the normal cutoff, and if the T4 is not depressed below the normal cutoff, then you are not hypothyroid and you have a very good chance that you can come off the medication. In the same paper by Levadas, they found that the length of time someone was on medication did not dictate if they could successfully come off or not, meaning if you've been on medication for three years, you're not at increased risk for having developed a dependency. Also really important to understand the other side of this issue is that people who are put on thyroid medication who don't need it may actually experience the very symptoms they were hoping to improve from the hormone itself, meaning anxiety, depression and fatigue. If you give someone more hormone than their body needs, it can be problematic. So quite simply, get your labs from before you started medication, the ones that diagnosed you. Air quotes here Hypothyroid and check if the TSH is not flagged high outside of the lab's reference range, and if the T4 is not flagged low, then there is a very good chance that you do not need the medication. Check this with your doctor, or if you don't trust their opinion, get a second opinion and then you have a very good likelihood you'll be able to come off the medication and and not need it.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetoj.com.

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