How Your Thyroid Influences Chronic Health Conditions

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Hi, Laura. So happy to be here.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Me too. We’ve done this before, and I’m glad to have you back. You’re the host of the chart-topping podcast, The Thyroid-Fixer, and you really are this visionary creator and founder of the FIXXR supplement line. It’s crafted to address common challenges like weight management, energy depletion, libido issues, and hormone imbalances. And I really wanted to bring you on here today because you have a way of breaking down thyroid information in such an easy-to-understand way. So we’re going to jump right in and can you tell us how thyroid health really is linked with inflammation and what I would say ultimately the development of chronic health conditions?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Absolutely. So when we’re talking about the thyroid and we’re talking about hypothyroidism, that low and slow function because that’s what we see mostly in individuals is hypo. We’re usually looking at the case of Hashimoto’s which is autoimmune. Now we know as you’ve talked about, your guests have talked about autoimmune is hugely related to inflammation. It’s usually some kind of inflammatory response that turns on that autoimmune switch. Just think of it like a light switch and something comes along and flip side into the on position. That’s when you start experiencing all the symptoms of whatever that autoimmune condition is. So when we’re talking about the thyroid we’re talking about Hashimoto’s in the low and slow hypo end of things, and Graves disease in the hyper end of things. We don’t see Graves disease as much. We see much more Hashimoto’s. It accounts for about 95% of all hypothyroidism and it mainly affects women more so than men, although men can be affected as well because of that inflammation trigger. So whenever the body is.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I just want to ask a quick question, because I mean, you said it’s responsible, did you say 80% of low thyroid is Hashimoto’s?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

95.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

How much of this is Western medicine missing? I just have to ask this question right now because I worked in that arena for many years and all we did was order a TSH agent, a Reflex T4 if the TSH was abnormal. How much of this is being missed?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Oh, my gosh. I mean, I don’t have an actual percentage, but if I had to go from my patient population and take that I hear and see, I would say about 60 to 70% are just flat-out undiagnosed or misdiagnosed because those markers to test for autoimmune aren’t often run. They are not run just like you said. TSH is run but you don’t see TPO, you don’t see TGA, you don’t see those markers that tell us does this person have an autoimmune condition? You don’t see them run with every thyroid lab panel. And on top of that, they can come back as a false negative. So it’s often missed in Western medicine. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. Well, I just wanted to establish that as we keep going and I cut you off while you were about to start talking about the link between inflammation and chronic health conditions and this fizzling out thyroid in most cases or in some cases an overactive thyroid.

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Right. So when we’re, let’s just say we’ll take underactive Hashimoto’s. We’ll take that picture. When we look at that we start digging into a person’s background and we start digging into more testing and we start to see underlying conditions that are lingering beneath the surface that we know are directly tied to that autoimmune condition. So we’ll see things like Epstein-Barr virus either dormant or active and saying hello and it’s in its active state. We’ll see conditions like insulin resistance, high insulin, and high blood glucose that are hugely inflammatory. We’ll see things like heavy metals and mold. I mean, we’ve all been exposed to heavy metals. We’ve all been exposed to mold it’s just now it’s how our body responds to those chronic health conditions. And are those chronic health conditions creating enough inflammation to turn on that Hashimoto’s autoimmune switch? And that’s usually that correlation that we see that I see in my patients.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay, so what I’m hearing is that the thyroid issue is like a switch that can be turned on and off based on the level of toxins and infections. We can get into that too. And then from there, you can have a cascade into a chronic disease. So I always think of like I always think of health like a ladder where you’re at the top of the ladder you are at your absolute best. And then you might start to have symptoms and you start to take a step down the rungs of the ladder. And now in the middle of the ladder, you’re developing autoimmune conditions, thyroid issues, blood sugar dysregulation, and hormone dysregulation. And at the bottom of the ladder if you keep descending, you end up with chronic inflammatory diseases like heart disease, like Parkinson’s, and like Alzheimer’s. Can you talk about the link? So as we’re descending the ladder, why is thyroid important to prevent and keep the descent down the health ladder? We want to go back in the other direction. We want to stop that issue so we can go back up to our peak health. But if we don’t thyroid does play a role in the development of chronic disease, right?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

It plays a huge role and it’s often not looked at enough, it’s forgotten, it’s pushed aside. Be it honestly, in Western medicine, or even sometimes in functional medicine in integrative medicine, we don’t come back to that master gland enough. So when we look at the thyroid, the thyroid is the master gland. It has control over every single cell in your body. Every single cell has a receptor site on it for thyroid hormones, specifically T3. When we look at the body’s processes from the endocrine system, your metabolism, your insulin control, your insulin regulation, glucose control, and your sex hormone balancing we know that the thyroid has an impact on those systems because it’s the endocrine system. Then we can go a little bit deeper, oh my gosh, it has an impact on our GI tract and whether or not we process foods properly. It has an impact on our muscles, on our core body temperature whether we feel hot, or cold. Whether we are freezing while everyone else is comfortable. Our hair growth, our skin cell turnover, our nails, and our eyebrows. It really has an effect on every single aspect of the body. Cardiovascular system, your heart rate, your blood pressure. Everything is controlled by the thyroid. 

So when the thyroid gland isn’t working properly obviously it’s going to have an effect on every single function that I just mentioned. You’re not going to poop every day, you’re going to be cold, you’re going to gain weight, you’re going to be tired, and your hair is going to fall out. All of those symptoms that’s when we really start to pay attention. The problem of ignoring it or not addressing it properly is just like you said, Laura, those rungs at the bottom. So now we start to see Type 2 diabetes. Come on, why? The person can be sitting there going, but I eat well. This is ridiculous. How can I have high glucose, high insulin, and be a Type 2 diabetic when I’m eating perfectly? Well, your thyroid gland says otherwise. Your thyroid gland has control over your pancreas, secretion of insulin, how you utilize your nutrients, and how you control your blood glucose. So, if the thyroid is off, it’s almost like your hands are off the wheel. You have no control over your body and how it’s going to respond to even the best diet, the best nutrition plan.

We also see that Type 2 diabetes, kind of spills into Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, and all those neurological diseases of aging that we’re seeing tied to high insulin levels. So can we go all the way back and say, hey, did this start with the thyroid? Was the thyroid telling the body, hey, your insulin and your glucose, we don’t have control over it. That’s all messed up. And then that leads to those neurological diseases? Quite possibly. We also know that high insulin has a direct impact on cardiovascular disease. That’s a huge driver of cholesterol. It’s not the red meat and egg yolks we’re eating. It’s the high insulin levels that we’re walking around with the high glucose levels, that inflammatory state that we’re walking around in. That again goes back to the first statement that I said, maybe you have control over it and you could clean up your eating a little bit or maybe you need to focus on your thyroid. Because if you go all the way back to the source, you’d go back to the master plan and you optimize that. Now, you have better control all the way down that ladder. All the way and you actually have control of your own ladder.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I love it. Thank you for explaining that so beautifully and playing with my ladder analogy too. And so these discussions that we’re having are all about the silent killers. So silent killers I refer to as toxins, chronic hidden infections, these underlying root causes of autoimmunity of diseases, and what gets our thyroid malfunctioning in the first place. So can you talk a bit about what you’re seeing in your practice in terms of toxins? You already mentioned a couple of them, but I’m also curious about chronic infections, and you did mention some viruses. What else are you seeing that’s kind of underlying this majority of people that have Hashimoto’s?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

It’s almost like an overload. We hear a lot in our community, in the health community about buckets. Is your bucket overflowing? Whether that’s a stress bucket or an adrenal bucket which kind of ties into stress or a toxic burden bucket, environmental toxins, EMFs. We all have these buckets and I talk about this quite a bit. Just like I said earlier, we’re all exposed to mold, we’re all exposed to heavy metals, and we’re all exposed, exposed. It’s how is your body shored up to actually deal with those exposures that are so stressful on the body. So, what I often see is those buckets starting to spill over. So you might have one person that I mean, we all have Epstein-Barr virus. I have yet to meet someone with that negative EBV panel, right? So we all have EBV.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It’s like we all have. Yeah.

Dr. Amie Hornaman

We have all of it. Right? How is your body? Is it resilient enough? Is it resilient enough to be strong against those onslaughts, those toxic onslaughts, or stress onslaughts? And we all know, I mean, we’ve all been there where that feather falls down. You get the phone call that your kid wrecks the car and it’s like, that’s it. That was all you needed to send you right over the edge. And in other people’s world, they would be like we’ll just deal with it. Put in insurance. They’re okay, they’re healthy, and it’s all good. But you might be so stressed out, so toxic overloaded from your environment, so heavily burdened from walking around with Epstein-Barr virus, from walking around with Lyme disease or mold exposure. That’s all it took. That one phone call and your health literally crashes over the cliff. So that’s really what I see with my patients. They did okay for a while. They managed we’ll say and then something happened. It could have been a toxic exposure. It could have been walking into a moldy house that wasn’t theirs and that actually happened to me. I walked into a home that we were going to see to potentially buy, and I got hit with mold exposure and I suffered for a week. Now, a lot of my patients suffer for longer than that. So, it’s how are your buckets? Let’s talk about the stress bucket. I just use the analogy of getting that phone call. You know, your kid just crashed the car. Yup, that’s stressful. But how many other underlying chronic stresses are you dealing with on a day-to-day basis? You know in our world we’re dealing with sick kids, we’re dealing with sick parents, we’re dealing with job losses, changes of jobs, moving, all the things, and financial stressors. So all of that starts to build up in the bucket and then the bucket spills over. And that’s where we see autoimmune conditions turn on. Now, you have to remember too that some stressors can be natural. It could be pregnancy. It could be perimenopause, or menopause where your hormones are just shifting a little bit and then that autoimmune switch turns on. But whenever we’re talking about anything cortisol, stress, toxins, mold, or whatever you have to think of how your body can handle it and the inflammatory response that it will have when you are exposed to all those stressors.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. So that brings me to the next question. Okay, so clearly all of us are being exposed to toxins. I mean none of us are escaping it if we live in a first or second world or a third world country. If you live in the middle of the jungle, maybe in a remote place where there is no civilization, maybe. But I think most of the earth is toxic right now so we’re not escaping this. And then there’s this piece of genetics and how many toxins we’ve been exposed to and how our body handles it. And then we can get into these middle-of-the-ladder problems like the autoimmunity the thyroid triggers all of it. Okay, so we’ve set that stage. Now, let’s talk about the warning signs and the symptoms that this could be your thyroid. What are people looking for to know that, hey, I should probably go get this checked out?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Yeah, it’s going to be the stereotypical weight gain, the inability to lose weight no matter what you do. No matter how perfect your diet is, no matter how perfect your sleep and your exercise regimen your body just won’t budge. You might have some wonky blood glucose readings in CGM, if you’re wearing those or you are testing with a glucometer, you can have really crazy readings. Extreme fatigue and brain fog. I’ve had some patients actually come in and say, I think I’m getting early dementia. It’s like no, it’s just your thyroid. That’ll clear up. It’s just that thyroid brain fog, hair loss, low libido, and low gut motility. So a lot of constipation. You’re not going to the bathroom every day. Just everything if you think of low and slow, your body just kind of just slows down to a halt. So depression, that brain fog that I talked about, everything is slower in your body.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. And then there’s also this issue of hair loss and feeling cold and some of those things that people are always asking me, why am I cold all the time? It’s like the number one question, why is my hair not growing back? Okay. So, now we’ve established you probably should get your thyroid checked. And I always say this in my programs, I’m a gut and detox specialist and I want the people I work with to be working with someone who can help them with their thyroid. So we send our clients to you. We want our clients to get their thyroid worked up and make sure that this isn’t an issue. Ultimately, we have to solve the underlying reasons, but you also need to get that dialed in for comfort, for relief or to get your energy production up so you can do the deeper detox and gut work. You have to address this. So what kinds of tests and what kinds of evaluation should our audience be asking for? And we have about five more minutes on this first part of our talk. So tell us about what they should be looking for. So as they’re shopping for a practitioner, who should they find?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Yeah. So the testing is important because my rule of thumb is even if you go to, let’s say, your PCP, your OB-GYN, and you ask for a full thyroid panel and you even give them this list that I’m going to give you. If they say no to testing, it’s time to get a new doctor, because if they don’t even want to look at the full picture of what’s going on with you and do that deep dive work, how are they going to help you? How are they ever going to help you feel better? They’re just not. So testing-wise, we want to TSH. What we talked about earlier. That’s standard. That’s always run. That’s a pituitary hormone though and that’s not a thyroid hormone. So of course, we want to look at the thyroid hormones. We want to look at free T3 and free T4. The unbound active forms. T4 is inactive. It has to convert over to T3, but we still want to look at it. So free T4, free T3. We want to look at reverse T3, which is kind of like, I use the analogy of the bouncer at the club reversed T3 if it was high. It is sitting outside of your cell door and it’s telling that active, beautiful T3 thyroid hormone that wants to get in, that wants to attach to that receptor site so badly, to let you feel better, to give you a metabolism, to grow your hair, to make you feel alive again, tells it no, it can’t get in. So if reverse T3 is as high as blocking that T3 action at the cell level, we want to know that we want to know that about you, and then we want to test for Hashimoto’s that we talked about earlier. The TPO and the TGA. Those are the antibodies that tell us whether or not you have Hashimoto’s. And it’s important to mention here too when I was saying earlier that it’s often misdiagnosed, it’s not run and it can come back as a false negative. It can also come back with some antibodies. So let’s say that the standard lab values range goes up to 40. If you’re a conventional doctor or anyone looking at that test. If you come in at 25 TPO antibodies, they’re going to say, you’re fine, you don’t have Hashimoto’s. What I say and what functional medicine says is, yeah, but those are 25 the antibodies that are going out and beating up your thyroid and destroying it on a daily basis. Are we just going to wait until you get to 40 antibodies, 40 soldiers that go out and beat up your thyroid? Are we going to address it now? Let’s call it now and start addressing it now before that person gains another 25 pounds and can’t get out of bed. So those are all the tests but it’s also important to know you want those tests in the optimal range, not just the normal standard lab on your range.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. So this is so helpful. And we’re going to get into the next part of our talk here. But if you can just tell us real quick where to find you because like I said, I do send my clients

to you. So you can test all over the country and this is your expertise is thyroid. So where can our audience find you?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Absolutely. You can go to my website, dramiehornaman.com.  And if you’re interested in working together, you can certainly book a call. And then like Laura said earlier, the Thyroid Fixer podcast. I have a ton of content on there. You can deep dive into everything that I say about thyroid hormones.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yep. And I would say if you do book a call with Amie just put there in the comments Laura sent me or Silent Killers Summit or something like that so that they know where you came from because they’ll know you saw this interview. So thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Hornaman, for joining us today for this talk on thyroid health and to our audience. I hope you found our conversation insightful, and helpful. If you’re a summit purchaser, stay right here, because we’re about to dive even deeper into this thyroid discussion with Dr. Hornaman. If you’re not, click on the button on this page to get access to the continuation of the conversation and many others and get the tools you need to reclaim your health. If you’re watching this continuation of my talk with Dr. Hornaman, thank you for being a valuable member of our community, and we’re going to dive right back in. So what I would like to do now is we just got done talking about thyroid tests and symptoms and why the thyroid gets overwhelmed. I’d really like to dive into gut health for a minute because this is something that we help our clients with within our programs. Can you talk about how the thyroid and gut are connected?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Definitely. So we know that the immune system starts in the gut and with autoimmune it’s hard. You have to kind of decipher it in your mind. When we hear autoimmune and we know that it’s our immune system attacking our thyroid, we tend to think like the big bad autoimmune conditions, like suppressing the immune system. But that’s not true. We want to nurture the body because our body has healing potential out of the wazoo. Like, we don’t even give it enough credit for what the body can do naturally when we give it the tools to do so. So we want our immune systems working at the proper level, not overexaggerated and going into a crazy attack. But we also don’t want a low immune system. When we look at the gut and its importance in the overall immune system, there’s a direct tie. Our immunity starts in the gut. So if you have things going on in your gut that you’re not addressing, we will absolutely see an uptick in autoimmune conditions. Kind of just saying hello, that switch turning on. 

The other thing with autoimmune is where we see one, we see more than one. So going back to the gut and the importance of addressing anything that’s coming up and healing the gut, we’re doing this in turn to protect you from other autoimmune conditions. So if we’re just dealing with Hashimoto’s and we can get your gut under control and we can really shore up your immune system and shore up your whole body, then Hashimoto’s will stay Hashimoto’s, and maybe we can even put that into remission. If you let things go haywire and you ignore your body, you ignore your gut signs and symptoms, and you just push that to the side. That’s not important and that’s just a bunch of hoo-ha that people use to market this or that program. Well, then over time you’re going to see another autoimmune come up and another one. So usually we see it in threes and you better hope to god it’s not rheumatoid arthritis. I have a friend going through that now, it’s hell. Lupus, MS, I have another friend going through that it’s hell. We want to protect you from all these other autoimmune inflammatory diseases that can easily pop up if not controlled. That’s how we have to go back to the gut. 

There’s also that gut-brain connection. So many people with their own issues depression, anxiety, depression, anxiety. They’re actually put on antidepressants as a band-aid because they go into their Western medicine doc and say, hey, you know what’s going on here? My moods changed. I’m depressed. I’m anxious all the time. What’s happening? Oh, well, here’s an antidepressant. Instead of getting to the root cause and saying, maybe you have some gut dysfunction that is totally throwing off your brain that’s why you think you have early Alzheimer’s. And, oh, by the way, you have a thyroid issue, too. If we just address those two things, guess what, you might not need the antidepressants because you don’t have a Prozac deficiency. So again, that comes back to the gut as well. So many things go back to the gut. It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I have a question. So would it be safe to say that the thyroid is probably one of the easiest to test for and one of the first things we can identify as you go into a cascade of developing autoimmune conditions? And if you have Hashimoto’s chances are you’re going to get more. So that’s what I’m hearing. This is like the canary in the coal mine, right? I find this like it’s there, like if it’s there, solve it so you can prevent the other things.

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Exactly. I mean, that’s why I mean, so often you’ll hear on my podcast too, I say you’re not a tough case. You know, people think and I’m sure you get this, too, in your practice, people think that they are such a tough case because nobody’s been able to figure them out. And it’s like, well, right here in black and white there’s a thyroid problem. And if we just address that just like you said, like so many other things will improve and you’ll have better control over other things. So I’m not saying, okay, you fix the thyroid and your gut issues will go away and you’ll do this like a champ. And nobody’s going to make that process a lot easier. It’s not going to make it easier. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Absolutely. And I agree. Like there’s always an underlying reason. People get into a conversation that I’m a tough case and if that’s your belief then that’s your reality. So you gotta get out of that. I find people that are, we definitely run into people who are more committed to their sickness than their wellness. They’ve been bodied. You know, I am an insert name of conditioner disease. I am a diabetic. I am, you know, no, you are a person living with diabetes and there’s a solution for this, right? So you cannot embody your disease or your illness or you’ll be stuck with it for sure. It’ll be very difficult for somebody like Amie or me to come in and actually solve it for you. Because you have to be in the mindset that you can’t solve this.

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Right. Absolutely.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So let’s talk about interventions because you use a combination of prescriptions and supplements. So let’s unpack where do you start with this. Like when do you start with supplements? When do you start with medications? Should people be figuring this out on their own or should they be working with a practitioner to figure out kind of the order of operations or the recipe to solve this?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

You know, I think we all start off trying to figure it out on our own. And I mean, that’s even where I started, right? You start doing Internet searches and reading and reading books. Well, back in my day, there weren’t blogs or anything. I mean, this was like gateway computer time. But I think we all start there and then we expand our horizons and maybe we tried different supplements or we tried different programs. But at the end of the day, when people come to me, it really is the last stop. It’s I’ve tried everything. I’ve been to every doctor, I’ve been to a specialist. I’ve done this, I’ve taken that supplement. I’ve done all the things, changed my diet, and went gluten-free. I’m sleeping well, I’m eating great. I’m working out. And I still, whatever symptom or symptoms they’re experiencing. And that really is where when we test and if we see low thyroid function, we bring in thyroid hormone replacement and I differentiate that from medication because so many people say I don’t want to be on medication, I want to do this the natural way. And I say, well, if we’re catching it right in the beginning, if you’re lucky enough that, hey, maybe you’re listening to this and you are so body aware and health aware that we’re catching this in the very beginning stages then we might be able to do dietary and lifestyle and supplemental interventions that will absolutely keep you off any kind of script that you have to pick up at the pharmacy or get from a compounding pharmacy. Yeah, maybe. But I would say most of the time we need to bring in some thyroid hormones. And I like giving this analogy to the people that are like, I don’t want to be on medication. 

Thyroid hormone replacement is different. We’re replacing hormones that your body is no longer making properly or in the right amount. So I say, okay, what if you or a family member had type 1 diabetes that’s where your pancreas is not producing the life-saving hormone insulin which we all need. Without insulin, we die, period. End of story. Would you say? Yeah. You know what I really don’t want to go on that insulin. I don’t want to go on because it’s a medication, it’s a prescription. Like, okay, well then you’re going to die. Like no, you’re not going to say, no, I don’t want that medication because it’s a prescription. You’re going to take that hormone and replace it in your body because your body just isn’t making it properly anymore. And we have to accept that and move on. Thyroid hormone is no different. I mean, you’re not going to die without it. You’re not going to live a great life without it, but you’re not going to die without it. But still, it comes into that. It falls into that hormone replacement category where hormones give life, whether we’re talking about thyroid, estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone. 

Hormones give life so when we can give you that life back. Again, we’re kind of going back to the ladder. We’re Benjamin Button-ing you. We’re reversing aging or stopping aging in addition to helping you live your best life and feel like a rock star through it so don’t be averse to thyroid hormone replacement when done properly by a professional who knows what they’re doing. And in conjunction with, yeah, you can’t be living a hard life, partying, staying up till 2 A.M. drinking beer and eating pizza. You got to do the lifestyle changes too but when it’s all tied together it’s just a beautiful thing.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You know what I always say spending over 20 years in the Western medicines space as well as now totally focusing on functional medicine. I’ve written a lot of prescriptions in my lifetime and I am a huge fan of using medications where they make sense. You’ll never see me on the bandwagon that all prescriptions are bad. There’s a time and a place for medications and there’s a time and a place for supplements. You know modern medicine has advanced us in so many incredible ways and thank goodness if we injure ourselves we can go to an E.R. Thank goodness we can get insulin. Thank goodness we can get thyroid hormone. I mean hundreds of years ago, before the advancements of medicine people just died.

And yes, we’re exposed to a lot more toxins than we ever have been in the history of humanity. And thankfully, we’ve got some solutions to help us. And if you’re watching this you’re in the very small percentage age, about 4% of people who actually understand the value of integrative medicine. So what we’re really talking about here is integrating modern Western medicine and natural functional medicine. So thank you for making that so easy to understand. Now, in the last 10 minutes or so that we have here, I’d love to open this up to you. I mean, we could do something fun here. We could talk about some case studies. We could talk about some things that you think are really important for our audience to know that we haven’t covered yet. The floor is yours. If you had something that you really want people to know let us know that. If you’ve got some good case studies we can kind of take a look at let me know that too. Yeah.

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Well, let’s do both. So the first thing that I really, really want people to know that I talked so much on my podcast is having hope because also if you’re watching this you’re probably in that category of like Laura said, wanting to take your health to another level. But you also might be really searching for answers that you have not been able to find and you have to have hope. I promise you that your health can turn around. There is no such thing as an impossible case. Your case is not too hard no matter what you’ve heard from anyone in this space. Whether it’s a Western medicine doctor or a functional integrative doctor. You are not that tough of a case. You absolutely can be figured out and helped. So I want you to have hope. So I will piggyback that with a case study. Some of you have seen I’ve interviewed her, too. Her name’s Gabriela and she’s so famous that at the last conference we were at I saw her picture on one of the vendor’s backdrops. I was like, Gabriela, you’re famous. Because she did a testimonial for me because she’s so passionate about her transformation.

She came in at a young age. I mean, she was only in her thirties when she started really seeking help because she had multiple miscarriages, could not get pregnant, was gosh at that time, I want to say she was like 100 pounds overweight, Type 2 diabetes, all of these things. And of course, she was getting all the band-aids. So I want to say she was on a statin, definitely an antidepressant. Of course, they did all these different go on birth control, go on this, go on that for your fertility. And she just had a feeling because her mom had Hashimoto’s. She’s like, I just don’t know. I’ve been listening to you for a while. I really have a feeling like something’s going on. So of course, we tested her thoroughly and saw, yes, she does have Hashimoto’s just like her mom because it’s very genetic. With all autoimmune, you have to have that genetic component and then just it makes sense with her body putting on the weight, with her body going through the different band-aid medications, just the stress of trying to get pregnant, having miscarriages, and all that. That’s really stressful. So flip the switch to the on position for her Hashimoto’s and that’s when she started getting the symptoms, then gaining more weight, and are all these misdiagnoses. We started fixing her thyroid. She need a little bit of progesterone hormone because she was young. We didn’t have to get into the estrogen testosterone yet gave her a little progesterone. She starts feeling better, she’s chill, she’s calm and her anxieties are taken off. 

The edge is taken off, she’s sleeping better, she starts to lose weight, and her brain fog less. And she gets pregnant with twins. So it’s like, I mean just her whole world and she even says, like I became a better mom. I became a better wife to my husband because I just felt like, I mean she was kind of moving into that shell of herself. When we really get sick and we’re battling with these chronic symptoms that no one gives us an answer for we tend to close in and block people out of our life. Even our closest people are our spouses, our significant others, and our kids. And she was starting to kind of fall into that hole. And now she’s running half marathons. She got a new job. She’s posting her after pictures all the time. She’s posing in her gym clothes because she’s proud of herself. She loves how she looks now. And at the time that I interviewed her, I want to say she was down like 60 pounds. But then, of course, she texted me, she was down another five, then another ten. So I think she’s up to like an 80 to 100-pound weight loss or something like that. But yeah, a case study in point, you can get your life back literally.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, you know what I love too about working with you is you understand that you don’t stop at just replacing thyroid hormone and giving some hormones. Now, you need to do the deeper work to fix the gut health, get the toxins out of your body, stop retoxing your body, and solve chronic infections. This is what makes you so special. It’s a holistic approach. You’ve got to get people feeling better. You’ve got to get people able to have some wins. They got to be able to sleep. They got to be able to lose some weight. They got to be able to have their energy up. Their brain needs to come back online. That gives them the oomph to keep going and doing the deeper work. Right?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Right, exactly. Yeah. Everything together.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It’s so important. Okay. So in the last few minutes, any other last words that you’d like to share with our audience? And we’ve given them a message of hope. We’ve told them about the labs that they should get done. We’ve told them about the symptoms. We’ve talked about the importance of the thyroid as it relates to inflammation and the descent into chronic disease. Down the chronic disease ladder. We’ve covered a lot of ground. But if there was anything else, what would you like to say?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Yeah, no. I mean, I think that summarizes it all. It’s to get tested and get thoroughly tested. If your doctor says no to testing, find a new doctor. And really even if you are on that search, so let’s say we work together or we don’t. Let’s say you’re out in the world. You’re like, I’m going to find somebody that I want to work with. Grill them, ask them, do you use bioidentical hormone replacement? And I’m talking about the estradiol, the progesterone, the testosterone that we didn’t even get into today. Ask them if they use one form of thyroid hormone replacement or if they’re open to any and everything because you are a unique individual and your needs differ from her needs and his needs. So we need to tailor that treatment to you and to your lives and to your symptoms. When I work with people, I mean we’ll use natural desiccated Armour Thyroid, NP Thyroid, we’ll use synthroid, we’ll use levothyroxine, the generic, and the brand. We’ll combine those, we’ll switch them around, and we’ll use compounded slow release if we have to. We’ll use anything that is going to get you optimal. So make sure that you grill whoever you’re going to with to see what their protocols are. Because if they say, ooh, yeah, you know, I only use NDT, I don’t like any of those that synthroid, levothyroxine. What if it doesn’t work for you? You better find somebody who is open-minded enough to tailor a personalized treatment plan to you.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, absolutely. And also tells you where you might be incorrect in your assessment of yourself. You could have had incorrect information from another practitioner, from a blog you read or an article, or from a Google search. So you want somebody who’s not afraid to also kind of set you straight. And that’s one thing, Amie.

Dr. Amie Hornaman

I’ll do that and set you straight. That’s right. With love and compassion. A little bit of blunt love. That’s all.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That’s what it’s like when somebody stands for you. When somebody is willing to tell you that your request may not be the best option for you that is somebody standing for your health and your greatness truly. This is a great place to end. So, dramiehornaman.com. Make sure you spell  Amie’s name right. It’s AMIE. I always do this when I go to message you or text you. How do you spell her name again?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

Yes, yes. dramiehornaman.com

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

dramiehornaman.com. And your podcast?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

The Thyroid-Fixer.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thyroid fixer. It’s x, x, r, right?

Dr. Amie Hornaman

No, that’s a supplement line, FIXXR. The podcast is just flat-out like how you spell fixer, FIXER.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. I’m just so grateful that you came in and shared your wisdom here and just your knack for making it also simple and easy to understand. Our audience really appreciates you. Until next time, everyone. Take good care. Bye, now.