Dr. Susan Sklar reveals vital information related to stress, hormones and health in this informative video.
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Full Transcript
Thyroidu2019s Role in the Whole Body 0:00
And I know I said we were going to talk about thyroid. Thyroid's a hormone. It's different type of hormone than the hormones I just showed you in that graph. But thyroid is active in every single cell in your entire body. There's place for thyroid to have action. If your thyroid's sluggish, everything goes slowly. You gain weight, you can't think as fast, your colon slows down. Your hair gets dry, your skin gets dried, you're not making protein at a good a rate. That slows down. Your nails break and get brittle.
And this is just to show you, this a cell and every cell in your body is under the influence of thyroid. 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 1:01
And they're frustrated. And understandably so. I had one young woman, and she actually had a UCLA endocrinologist that was seeing her. She had incredibly low thyroid function, but her endoconologist didn't know, because conventional doctors don't measure the most important test that will show you if somebody has low-thyroid, which is free T3. 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.
And the endocynologist had written a letter, actually he had communicated back to her primary care doctor and said, you know, I saw this young woman and she continues to complain of fatigue, constipation, dry hair, and dry skin. All her thyroid tests are normal. You know we're keeping her on the same dose. Oh, your thyroid tests are normal, and you should believe me, because I'm the doctor. So you have to understand what the normal range means. This is really important in anti-aging medicine. All biological systems, whether you look at people's height, map out to what we call an S-curve.
If you think about it, there are some really short people There are a few really tall people, like the basketball players, right, seven feet tall, not that many of us. And then there are whole bunch of in the middle. This applies to all biological systems. So how does the lab develop your normal range? And this is really critical. They test like 20,000 people's thyroid, and they map it out like this. There's some people really low. There are some really high.
Understanding Reference Ranges and T3 vs T4 3:00
And they do a cutoff. They say, OK, we're going to take off the really highs and the real low, and everything else is normal. Well, first of all, there's a bunch of people in that 20,000 that don't feel good that have low thyroid. That's one thing. Plus which, people don' t feel go down at this end, even if it's in the reference plane. you really want to be at the upper part. That's where people feel better, that's for your body functions better. So having it just somewhere in the normal range, and it's true for a lot of the hormones that we work with.
You don't want it to just be somewhere on the normally range. 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, it goes down, down with age. 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. So you have to understand reference ranges. And so what happened is this young woman, she was in the reference range. That was one issue. The other issue is the wrong test was done.
Most doctors do T4, which that's not the hormone that gets on the cell that I just showed you. It's a preliminary hormone, that converts into T3. So doctors are measuring T-4 and guess what? As you get older, you don't do that conversion as well. Stress will inhibit that conversion. Nutritional deficiencies like iodine will inhibit that conversation. So you're measuring T4 rather than directly the things that would make the person's thyroid functioning well or not. And the other thing that gets measured is thyroid stimulating hormone or TSH.
If you have lab tests at home, you'll go look. It's the TSh that get done and sometimes the t4. The Tsh is a very indirect indication of how your thyroid's doing. And the older you get, the worse of an indication it is. So as you older, saying that you have a normal TSH doesn't mean a thing. 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. 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. It is like the safest medication, it is safest thing you could give people and it makes them feel so much better. So I'm gonna show you how to make your own diagnosis. Just like my patient. You're tired, you're constipated, You feel cold all the time, your hands and feet are cold, Your colder than everyone around you, and you wear socks to bed. Your hair is dry and your skin is dried. 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.
She was in her 20s, she's very young. She couldn't lose weight no matter what she did. 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. And as soon as her T3 came up with treatment, she wasn't tired and it was really great. It really, She saw me about two or three months before she started dental school. I don't know how she would have done in dental School if she hadn't gotten this taken care of. and she's started losing weight.
Her energy is good. But you can make your own diagnosis. If you have all of these things, if you even have half of them, you probably have low thyroid function. 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. They give people thyroid in incrementally increased doses until they feel good. 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.
But the philosophy among some doctors is treat until people feel good. So I try to use a combination. 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 of too much thyroid like feeling shaky or palpitations. I leave your dosage where it is. 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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