Full Transcript Thyroidu2019s Role in the Whole Body 0:07 And I know I said we were going to talk about thyroid. 0:11 Thyroid's a hormone. 0:13 It's different type of hormone than the hormones I just showed you in that graph. 0:19 But thyroid is active in every single cell in your entire body. 0:24 There's place for thyroid to have action. 0:28 If your thyroid's sluggish, everything goes slowly. 0:32 You gain weight, you can't think as fast, your colon slows down. 0:37 Your hair gets dry, your skin gets dried, you're not making protein at a good a rate. 0:42 That slows down. 0:43 Your nails break and get brittle. 0:47 And this is just to show you, this a cell and every cell in your body is under the influence of thyroid. 0:56 I have people come in all the time who said, I thought it was my thyroid, went to see the doctor, they said my tests were normal.
Why Normal Thyroid Tests Can Miss Low Function 1:04 And they're frustrated. 1:05 And understandably so. 1:06 I had one young woman, and she actually had a UCLA endocrinologist that was seeing her. 1:14 She had incredibly low thyroid function, but her endoconologist didn't know, because conventional doctors don't measure the most important test that will 1:24 show you if somebody has low-thyroid, which is free T3. 1:28 And I got her records from her endocrinologist because I wanted to know if she had this autoimmune problem like the one I had and to see if had those tests run. 1:37 And the endocynologist had written a letter, actually he had communicated back to her primary care doctor and said, you know, 1:45 I saw this young woman and she continues to complain of fatigue, constipation, dry hair, and dry skin. 1:54 All her thyroid tests are normal. 1:56 You know we're keeping her on the same dose. 2:02 Oh, your thyroid tests are normal, and you should believe me, because I'm the doctor. 2:08 So you have to understand what the normal range means. 2:13 This is really important in anti-aging medicine. 2:17 All biological systems, whether you look at people's height, map out to what we call an S-curve. 2:27 If you think about it, there are some really short people There are a few really tall people, like the basketball players, 2:33 right, seven feet tall, not that many of us. 2:36 And then there are whole bunch of in the middle. 2:41 This applies to all biological systems. 2:44 So how does the lab develop your normal range? 2:48 And this is really critical. 2:49 They test like 20,000 people's thyroid, and they map it out like this. 2:57 There's some people really low. 2:59 There are some really high.
Understanding Reference Ranges and T3 vs T4 3:01 And they do a cutoff. 3:03 They say, OK, we're going to take off the really highs and the real low, and everything else is normal. 3:10 Well, first of all, there's a bunch of people in that 20,000 that don't feel good that have low thyroid. 3:16 That's one thing. 3:18 Plus which, people don' t feel go down at this end, even if it's in the reference plane. 3:25 you really want to be at the upper part. 3:27 That's where people feel better, that's for your body functions better. 3:30 So having it just somewhere in the normal range, and it's true for a lot of the hormones that we work with. 3:36 You don't want it to just be somewhere on the normally range. 3:39 And for some of them, you don' want be in a normal-range for you age, because if it is DHEA, which is the most important energy and vitality hormone, 3:48 it goes down, down with age. 3:51 If you don't want to be where all the 60 year olds are, you want be were the 25 to 30 year old are. 3:57 So you have to understand reference ranges. 4:01 And so what happened is this young woman, she was in the reference range. 4:08 That was one issue. 4:09 The other issue is the wrong test was done. 4:12 Most doctors do T4, which that's not the hormone that gets on the cell that I just showed you. 4:20 It's a preliminary hormone, that converts into T3. 4:25 So doctors are measuring T-4 and guess what? 4:28 As you get older, you don't do that conversion as well. 4:32 Stress will inhibit that conversion. 4:34 Nutritional deficiencies like iodine will inhibit that conversation. 4:38 So you're measuring T4 rather than directly the things that would make the person's thyroid functioning well or not. 4:46 And the other thing that gets measured is thyroid stimulating hormone or TSH. 4:50 If you have lab tests at home, you'll go look. 4:53 It's the TSh that get done and sometimes the t4. 4:57 The Tsh is a very indirect indication of how your thyroid's doing. 5:03 And the older you get, the worse of an indication it is. 5:07 So as you older, saying that you have a normal TSH doesn't mean a thing. 5:15 And so what you want to get is the free T3 hormone level, you wanna interpret it so it's at the upper end of the reference range. 5:24 You can look at their reference on the lab slip, if you wanted up near the higher end, the high number.
Recognizing Symptoms and Treating to Feel Better 5:30 And there's this tremendous fear among doctors of giving people thyroid hormone. 5:35 It is like the safest medication, it is safest thing you could give people and it makes them feel so much better. 5:42 So I'm gonna show you how to make your own diagnosis. 5:45 Just like my patient. 5:48 You're tired, you're constipated, You feel cold all the time, your hands and feet are cold, Your colder than everyone around you, 5:55 and you wear socks to bed. 5:58 Your hair is dry and your skin is dried. 6:01 And the young lady that I told you about had been trying to lose weight besides the severe fatigue and she was about to start dental school. 6:10 She was in her 20s, she's very young. 6:13 She couldn't lose weight no matter what she did. 6:14 She would like work out for two hours a day, eat the paleo diet, no carbs, know nothing, you know, and couldn' t lose a pound. 6:24 And as soon as her T3 came up with treatment, she wasn't tired and it was really great. 6:32 It really, She saw me about two or three months before she started dental school. 6:36 I don't know how she would have done in dental School if she hadn't gotten this taken care of. 6:40 and she's started losing weight. 6:42 Her energy is good. 6:44 But you can make your own diagnosis. 6:47 If you have all of these things, if you even have half of them, you probably have low thyroid function. 6:53 And in this whole field of anti-aging medicine, there is actually a long history of doctors who don't even use thyroid testing to gauge treatment. 7:02 They give people thyroid in incrementally increased doses until they feel good. 7:08 And sometimes people are on a lot of thyroid and if you looked at their lab tests you'd like faint that their T3 level was so high. 7:15 But the philosophy among some doctors is treat until people feel good. 7:20 So I try to use a combination. 7:21 I don't want it to be out of control high, but if your a little bit above the top of the normal range and you feel good and your not having any symptoms 7:32 of too much thyroid like feeling shaky or palpitations. 7:37 I leave your dosage where it is. 7:43 So like I said, I call myself the patient revolution MD because I really want to foster the changes that are going on.
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