The Fibromyalgia Low Thyroid Connection

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 without a major are 10 to 250000 times more likely to suffer from thyroid dysfunction. So obviously we need to be looking in depth at any potential issues with a compromised thyroid. And yet low thyroid is routinely missed in conventional practices. A case in point is Jana was a patient that came to see me years ago when I still had a actually had a clinic. Now a practice is a telemedicine practice and I get to work with patients all over the world using Zoom and other online media. But Jana came to see me with her husband a few years ago and I remember her, her husband pulling me off to the side and saying, Dr. Murphy, you know, we really think that this is it for her. This is going to be her last Christmas. She’s been sick for years. She’s really going 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 unfortunately, a lot of those patients don’t find any help. But it’s not unusual to your patients who’ve been 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 with Jana. 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 my patients. It really helps them lose weight in a very healthy way. Patients oftentimes lose 20, 30, 40. Some patients lose well over 100 pounds  on the diet. It’s a very safe, healthy diet that is designed to really boost their metabolism, get their own body’s fat burning abilities 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 to fat cells. So your fat cells are very much alive. They’re 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 conditions, including cancer, because of this toxic nature 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 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 and promptly syndrome and fibromyalgia, and she was on eight different medications. When I saw her. She was on a medications to help her sleep on medications to give her some energy. She was on a provided no, I’m sorry. She was on Adderall and antidepressant and pain medications. And she had gained quite a bit of weight, partly due to these medications, one 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 had become bedridden. But when I did very thorough thyroid panel, I saw that her thyroid was being attacked in this condition called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, 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 checked to get a free and total T3 and T for the TSA 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 to supplement and within a short period of time by doing that and some other things. Along with the anti-inflammatory diet, 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, Dr. 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, creating, we’re 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 be battling for a number of years. She’d been to multiple doctors, and they all told her the same thing is 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 would encourage you to find a practitioner, somebody that can help you find the underlying causes of your symptoms, whether that’s a low thyroid or adrenal fatigue or mold toxins or heavy metals. There’s numerous triggers out there that have created this thing called fibromyalgia. And for you, your fibromyalgia, no matter what we call it, and finding those underlying causes is the key for you to be able to ever overcome fibromyalgia. So just like Jana, there’s something that is holding you back, is 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 a 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. And what else has helped you find 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.