A medical student's panic attacks and weight loss were dismissed as stress until Graves' disease was diagnosed. After an antithyroid drug damaged their liver, they had their thyroid removed, but turned to functional medicine to address the underlying autoimmunity instead of just the symptom.
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In the meantime, the most important part of my story that I'm forgetting here is that my second year of medical school, I started having panic attacks, weight loss, terrible insomnia. I was a vegetarian at the time, so I was eating Ezekiel whole wheat bread and butter before I went to sleep every night so I wouldn't wake up a pound or two thinner, and eventually got a tremor that took me to my doctor. And she dismissed me and said, oh, you're just learning everything in medical school, or it's all in your head, essentially. And I said, my mother died of pancreatic cancer. I've adjusted from the Peace Corps. I've had some stress in my life and I've never responded this way. I want a full workup. So she called me back a few weeks later and told me I had Graves' disease. I'm quite sure she never apologized to me for gaslighting me and telling me nothing was wrong with me. So I tried PTU, the medication, first, and it gave me something called toxic hepatitis. I started having horrible symptoms. Actually, I did Chinese medicine first, then I did PTU, and then had to get off all the medication because my liver was starting to fail. I Thought I was gonna have to drop out of medical school, but I didn't. And ultimately had my thyroid ablated. So at the end of all this medical school and learning, I really realized through functional medicine, even though conventional medicine really said they solved my problem by just getting rid of my thyroid, they never got to the root of why I had autoimmunity to begin with. And so that really is my journey of helping myself reverse my own autoimmune disease and then helping many others do the same through my books and programs and clinic and things like that.
Wow. Isn't that— it so echoes Thyroid patients in general, but especially Graves', I feel like the vast majority of them get sent to psychiatry for anxiety, for anything except the true physical problem that is causing the upheaval in their entire physiology.
Uh, if you look at my labs from that time, they were not overly elevated. I've just always known my body, and I think that's one of the things that I really teach people and have taught people over the years is how to listen to their body, how to listen to how things affect them.
