A medical expert tells McCall McPherson that Graves' disease remission is possible: many patients have stopped immunosuppressive drugs and regained full thyroid function. For Hashimoto's and Type 1 diabetes, early detection and addressing root causes can reduce or eliminate hormone replacement, though extensive damage may limit full recovery.
and tell me, one, is remission possible, right? Is remission possible with Graves? Is it possible with Hashimoto's? And what benefit does that translate to people if it is possible?
So the short answer is 100%. Now there are some caveats. So with Graves in particular, it's always bittersweet for me, but I've helped thousands and thousands of people who were on immunosuppressive drugs for their Graves disease, and they've been able to get off and not need to be on any supplemental thyroid hormone and have fully functioning thyroid, which is incredible. I'll put the caveat on diabetes type 1, Addison's, and Hashimoto's. These are all things that if you catch them right away, which is rare, but if you do catch them right away, that you can typically keep people off of this supplemental hormone through diet and all of the things that we've talked about. But we mentioned in the beginning of this interview, most people are bouncing around multiple doctors, multiple years. So it's very rare that you're finding somebody right off the bat with their symptoms. Symptoms are so much more subtle than they were, say, with my Graves' disease. So in those cases, you may be able to get rid of their antibodies. However, enough damage may have been done. We'll talk about Hashimoto's in specific. So much damage may have already been done to their thyroid that it may never function optimally. You wanna find the root cause because once you have one autoimmune disease, you're 3 times more likely to get another. And not to disparage anyone with thyroid disease, certainly Hashimoto's, but that's one of the more manageable ones. If they're coming to see me or one of your practitioners, right? You can get people to feel really pretty good by just taking a thyroid supplement. Thyroid hormone. And the reason I call it supplemental thyroid hormone is because there are all these influencers all over the internet saying, "I got off my thyroid medicine," and that makes people feel like a failure. That makes people feel like if they can't get off their Synthroid, that they've failed at healing themselves. And I want to tell you, that's not true. If I got off my Synthroid or my Armour right now, I would ultimately die. So you're not a failure. How you can track that you're a success is you don't get another autoimmune disease, you feel better, your antibodies got lowered or went away. So with Hashimoto's, Addison's, and insulin and diabetes type 1, who may need to take some amount of life-saving hormone in one of those 3 conditions. It doesn't mean you're a failure, and you want to get to your root cause so you can get rid of those antibodies and possibly lower the amount of supplemental hormone that you're on or that you'll need in the future, right?
It doesn't mean you don't need medication. And what I love that you frame it this way because look like taking supplemental thyroid hormone prevents you from having to take diabetes medication and high cholesterol medication and all these sequela that happen from even mild thyroid dysfunctions.
