The Fibromyalgia Low Thyroid Connection

Welcome and Fibromyalgia Overview 0:00

Hi. Welcome. I'm doctor Roger Murphy, and I'm your host at the freedom from Fibromyalgia summit. Thanks for joining us today. Specialize in fibromyalgia for the last 22 years, a common trigger that I see that's initiating a lot of the symptoms associated with fibromyalgia is low thyroid function. I find that about 70% of my patients with fibromyalgia have a problem with their thyroid. It's not been properly diagnosed or has not been properly treated. The symptoms of low thyroid function are very similar to the symptoms we'd see in fibromyalgia diffuse achy pain, nerve pain, tingling in your hands and feet, cold hands and feet, fatigue, lethargy, brain fog, anxiety, depression, irritable bowel, constipation.

These are just some of the many symptoms associated with fibromyalgia and low thyroid. Your thyroid is your only one of. If not the master gland in your body. Because the thyroid hormones control every cell, every system in the body, you control your sleep wake system. They control your your, immune system, your digestion,

Low Thyroid as a Common Trigger 1:14

your elimination, your, they help your mental mental clarity. The thyroid is incredibly important. And if it's not working correctly, we can see all sorts of different symptoms start to show up. And I want to share a couple slides with you that will go into more detail about this, because I think it's really important that you understand that low thyroid is a common condition in fibromyalgia, and one that's routinely missed. We see that recent studies show that over 43% of individuals with fibromyalgia have low thyroid function.

I found it higher than that in my practice. It's estimated that those with fibromyalgia are 10 to 250,000 times more likely to suffer from thyroid dysfunction. So obviously we need to be looking at, looking in depth at any potential issues with with a compromised thyroid. And yet low thyroid is routinely missed in conventional practices. A case in point is, John, I was a patient that came to see me years ago when I still had a actually had a clinic now a practices, a telemedicine practice, and I get to work with patients all over the world using zoom and, other online media.

But John came to see me with her husband a few years ago, and I remember her husband pulling me off to the side and saying, Doctor Murphree, you know, we really think that this is it for her.

Jana's Case and Hashimoto's Thyroiditis 2:50

This is going to be her last Christmas. She's been sick for years. She's really going down downhill. She's bedridden. She can't get out of bed. I was just had to do everything I could to get her, fly her here, get her into your office and have her be seen by you. You are our last chance. Our last hope. Now, I hear that a lot. Because, you know, it's not unusual for patients to have been to numerous doctors. And unfortunate, a lot of those patients don't find any help. But it's not unusual to your patients have been to to Mayo clinic and other very prominent clinics around the country or the world before they ever reach out to me for help.

But I knew that I didn't have a lot of time agenda. And, you can see a before and after picture, you can see that she lost quite a bit of weight working with me, partly due to an anti-inflammatory diet that I developed years ago that I've used for my patients. That really helps them lose weight in a very healthy way. Patients oftentimes lose 20, 30, 40 some patients well over 100 pounds on the diet. It's a very safe, healthy diet, but it's designed to really boost their metabolism, get their own bodies, fat burning abilities to to kick into gear and help them to lose the weight.

And by losing the weight, they're losing toxins and inflammatory chemicals that they store in fat cells. So your fat cells are very much alive. They are generating inflammatory chemicals that can create pain and inflammation throughout your body, and can increase your risk of heart attack and stroke and other unwanted condition conditions, including cancer. Because of this toxic nature of these of these fat cells. But what I found right off the bat for Jana was that she had a condition called Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

And you're going to hear lectures, you're going to talk about this. But this is an autoimmune disease where the body is erroneously attacking her thyroid tissue. What started her symptoms for her fibromyalgia was she she had mono as a kid and as an adolescent in her early teens. And then, about four years before she saw me, she developed a flare of Romano or Epstein-Barr virus. And she got really, really sick. And she wasn't able to really overcome that at all. Doctors that she interacted with finally gave her diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and she was on, eight different medications when I saw her.

She was on medications to help her sleep on medications to give her some, some energy. She was on, Providence. I'm sorry. She was on Adderall and antidepressant and pain medications, and she gained quite a bit of weight, partly due to these medications, one

Functional Medicine Approach to Recovery 5:49

which notoriously helps to create weight gain, which is Lyrica. You can gain easily 10 pounds a month on that medication. But she was carrying around some extra weight and I become bedridden. But when I did a very thorough thyroid panel, I saw that her thyroid was being attacked in this condition called Hashimoto's Towers, and no one had ever checked that no one had ever done a thorough thyroid panel. I want to encourage you when you get your thyroid check, to get a free and total T3 and T4, a TSH, a reverse T3, and to get your thyroid antibodies checked and.

But once I found out what was going on here, I was able to put her on over the counter thyroid medication supplement and within a short period of time by doing that and some other things, along with the anti-inflammatory that she was out of the bed six months later, she had lost 40 pounds. And, now she routinely sends me emails or postcards, pictures of her and her husband hiking in the mountains. This is something that she loves to do. In fact, that's what she told me when I asked her when I first saw her.

Said, what? What is it that you would love to be able to do that you can't do right now? And she said, Doctor Murphy, I can barely get out of bed some days. Most days I can't. And I really miss being able to hike in the mountains in Colorado with my husband. That's one of the things I love to do. We love to do together, and I hadn't been able to do it in years, and I didn't know if that was going to be possible because she really was so sick. But just using functional medicine criteria, looking at this paradigm where we're trying to find and fix the underlying causes, a big part of her cause of her symptoms was this problem with her thyroid.

And once we got that to kick in, we saw that she had more energy, she had less pain, and her immune system kicked in and was able to start to help her to overcome this shame, this chronic Epstein-Barr virus that she'd been battling for a number of years. She'd been to multiple doctors, and they'd all told her kind of the same thing, as. We don't really know what else to do for you. You're just going to have to learn to live with it. I want to encourage you not to learn to live with it, learn how to overcome it.

I encourage you to find a practitioner, somebody that can help you find the underlying causes of your symptoms, whether that's low thyroid or adrenal fatigue or muscle toxins or heavy metals. There's numerous triggers out there that have created this thing called fibromyalgia. And for you, you're fibromyalgia, no matter what we call it. And and finding those underlying causes is the key for you to be able to overcome fibromyalgia. So just like Jana, there's something that is holding you back. It's keeping you from being able to do the things that you love to do.

And don't give up. Don't give up. Keep learning. Be proactive. Reach out to, practitioner that you that that you resonate with and get he or she to help you to find these underlying triggers that no one else has looked for. No one else has help you find and, and, take that approach rather than relying on prescription medications or even just supplements to help you treat the symptoms, because that approach is not going to work. So enjoy the presentations today. There's some good ones, and, I look forward to sharing some information with you tomorrow.