McCall McPherson explains why doctors say your thyroid is fine when you feel terrible: labs use reference ranges that are too wide because they average sick people into the normal population. Modern Thyroid Clinic uses narrower ranges based on actual patient symptom improvement.
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Why does your doctor keep telling you your thyroid labs are normal and you still have every hypothyroid symptom that there is, and you still feel awful? Let's talk about it. So, first thing is, mainly, clinicians are trained to screen people and treat people according to their tsh. This is grossly not enough information to do an adequate job of treating people with hypothyroidism. I give the analogy of if you're using someone's TSH to treat their thyroid, you are throwing dart boards at a dartboard blindfolded. So if you want to know what labs you need, tune into my last video. It's all there. However, let's move on from that. The second big reason that people are not getting answers and real information on their their labs based on how they feel is clinicians are trained to use whatever lab results they ordered from, say, is normal, meaning they are scanning the paper and they are seeing if anything is in bold or off to the side. If not, it's presumed that everything is fine. Okay, the problem with that is huge. One, we assume, clinicians assume, patients assume that these lab ranges that we're using to compare people's data, that it's standardized. It's not standardized. So basically, LabCorp, for example, down the street from my house or my office, takes a bunch of their patients in their database and they create averages to say what's normal versus not normal. They average people in their system. The numbers that they come up with are different than the LabCorp down the street and the Quest Lab down the street in the local hospital. So they all end up with different averages. Couple other issues with this. One is the people that are going to get their labs drawn, they're not healthy people. They're people who are looking for answers to health problems. Okay. So secondly, they're not taking out people with hypothyroidism when they're formulating these averages, meaning they are not isolating people with the condition that we're trying to rule out from the database population, if that makes sense. They're averaged in. What does that do? It leaves our normal ranges way too incredibly high. Okay. At Modern Thyroid Clinic, we started almost 10 years ago with much more narrow ranges, narrowing out 20% on either side. However, every 18 months since then, I've narrowed down our ranges more and more in our patients based on data that I get back from our own patient population about where do these people feel good, where are they not symptomatic? And what we've ended up with is ranges that are so incredibly narrow compared to ranges that are as wide as the rooms that we're sitting in. So I'll release these ranges to you guys over the next few weeks for sure. So stay tuned. Subscribe Like Follow Favorite thank you.
