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Hello. And welcome back. This is dr. Alison and today we’re talking about is your thyroid actually the problem. So most people are looking online and looking at their symptoms and going, Oh my gosh, I’m connecting the dots. There has to be something wrong with my thyroid. And they have the classic symptoms of can’t lose weight. Always tired hair is falling out. The outer third of their eyebrows is disappearing. They have digestive issues. Their heart feels weird, whether it’s palpitations or just tightness in their chest, they might have mood issues like depression and anxiety, and they’re going, there has to be something there. And then they go to the doctor and they run classic blood work and it all comes back. Great. All comes back normal and they’re told there’s nothing wrong with them. And it’s so incredibly frustrating. So I feel like it’s so important to trust yourself, but I also find that many people who have thyroid issues or look classic thyroid actually have other things going on.
And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So the first thing we want to dive into is what’s actually going on in your blood work and the most common test, which is blood that they do for the thyroid is the TSH, the thyroid stimulating hormone. And that actually comes from the brain, the pituitary to stimulate the thyroid to make it work. Now, most doctors will just test TSH or they might throw a T four free T three in there, just, I don’t know, whatever the lab says, we’ll just run a panel. And they don’t really look at what’s going on. The other thing about TSH is that the lab ranges are wildly huge. When you look at it, so when you’re told you’re within the normal ranges, you might actually be out of a functional range. So in functional medicine, we are ranges are much smaller.
So we catch issues before they become full blown issues where you need medication or surgery. And so that way we can start working on allowing the body to heal itself, manage itself and redirect any issues that are going on this month. What is it June, June 15th right now, when I’m recording this I’ve seen a ton of women come in or really on video that have massive thyroid issues and you can see it on their neck and it’s swollen and it’s huge. And their doctors are saying there’s something there, but I don’t care because your blood work’s normal. Now, to me, that’s an issue. I actually, for the first time in my life, saw a thyroid range go all the way down to 0.4 0.4 is not normal. So actually was it, it was either 0.4 0.2. You typically, I see it end at 0.5.
So I think that this one actually ended up point to being normal. And the top range was five. So most labs you’ll see the lab range be about 0.5 to 4.5 as your normal TSH in functional medicine, even at various here. So I sit around 1.2 to 2.5 is kind of my normal range based off of what’s going on with someone, some books will say 1.8 to 3.2. So you’re seeing it somewhere in between that one and a half and two and a half range is, was actually a healthy common range for TSH. So if you’re sitting at 0.4 and your doctor’s telling you, you’re fine, there’s nothing wrong with you. I don’t care that your neck swollen out to here when you’re at 0.1, when you’re dead, when you have a thyroid storm and you kill over it, then we’ll refer you to an endocrinologist.
That’s ridiculous. Find a new doctor act. Now, if you’re sitting at 4.8 and your doctor is like, there’s nothing wrong, you’re right. Like find a new doctor or find someone who’s willing to work with you. Like, especially in functional medicine, we’re all over. We want to work with you. We know these numbers inside and out. We want to be able to help you. So when you look at your TSH, now you can go back and pull out your blood work and say, Oh my gosh, I met 5.2 or, Oh my gosh, I’m at 0.2. There’s something really wrong. Now, you know, there’s something going on. Now, the other part of this though, is that the thyroid actually has a huge panel that you can look at. So when you get your done, look it up, go to Google. Like what’s in the thyroid panel. I won’t say it out here because this is on a podcast and recording.
You’re not going to get it all down. And if I can get it in the comments I will, but we want to look at everything going on because it tells us what kind of thyroid problem is it? Is it a true thyroid issue where the thyroid is having an issue? Is it coming from the gut and the liver where the thyroid hormones are being turned over? So if you have leaky gut, if you have liver overwhelm, if you’re having estrogen dominance issues, you know, you’re going to have thyroid issues because the liver is all messed up. So when we look at that whole panel, we’ll be able to see what numbers are, where is it a primary? Is it secondary? Is it something else? Completely? The other thing is that a lot of my patients have been turned down for auto-immune testing. I don’t know why.
I don’t know why demand auto immune testing. If you get a thyroid panel done, ask them to run it. Auto immune panel, say your family, it runs in your family. You want to know if it’s going on because there’s no reason that you should be denied an auto immune panel for the thyroid. If you’re having thyroid symptoms, because it can be so sneaky. And I’ve seen it a million times where the thyroid looks normal, your neck has completely swollen. And they’re like, no, it can’t be auto immune. Oh my goodness. Find a new doctor. Let’s run an autoimmune panel. I can order that blood work for you. And most of the time I get people’s blood work and even thorough ones, I’m like, okay, we’re missing two or four tests. Like let’s run over to lab Corp and I’ll get the results. And one day, and we’re going to know this is auto immune, for sure.
Because that definitely affects how someone would treat you in the medical world and endocrinology world in a functional world. We need to know what’s going on. So the other thing though, is that when look at that whole panel, we can see, again, like I said, is it gut? Is it liver? Is it auto-immune the other major players that we see with the thyroid is infections like Epstein BARR, like cytomegalovirus, like I almost said longterm strep, but it just depends on what’s going on with the body and how much the brain is affected. The other thing that we see a lot is gluten. And the reason gluten is an issue. I know nobody wants to talk about going gluten free anymore. Like everybody is over it, but I’m going to keep talking about it because it’s so important. So when we eat gluten and it’s not digested, that protein stays whole and it shouldn’t, and it gets picked up by the immune system and it sees this whole protein instead of what it should be wished is broken down and the immune system tags it and says, this is a problem.
This protein is a problem. If you see this protein attack it. And then what happens is that gluten looks really, really, really similar to a lot of other organs or body, especially the thyroid, especially the cerebellum and the brain, especially sometimes the pancreas and the ovaries. So women who are traveled, struggling with PCs, thyroid, infertility, brain fog, all of these things like, Oh my gosh, your body is essentially being attacked. Or the people who come in and say, Oh, I have this immune issue, this autoimmune, this [inaudible] gluten. Okay. So take a look at that. I do have a free going gluten free program that goes through this really in depth. So you can hop on my website and get that for free and learn all about it. Okay. The other thing that I like to look at with thyroid issues is heavy metals. So the metals can also get embedded either into our fat, into our organs, into our brain, and we have to get rid of them.
Now there’s a lot of things there. Now, we just made this huge list of all of these things that could be causing your thyroid to have all of these issues. So focus. This is what we do with functional medicine. We do one thing at a time. That’s what I like to do. At least one or two things at a time we can run the tests. We can do one or two tests at a time and just start peeling back those layers and eventually get to mold muddles, Texas. See, sometimes we know right away like, okay, this is definitely up st. Bar, let’s go for this. So don’t get overwhelmed. Like, let’s start with your blood work. Let’s start with a few things that seem really obvious. Okay. Keep going. The other thing is that the last thing I guess I should say is, like I mentioned, you might be having thyroid symptoms, but even when I get your panels back, I’m like, Oh my gosh, your thyroid is amazing.
It’s perfect. Your bloodwork looks great. What could this be? And honestly it often comes down to adrenals and adrenal fatigue. And what does adrenal fatigue mean? It really means brain fatigue that HP axis, the hypothalamus pituitary axis. And those are the parts of their brain that basically conduct the orchestra of our endocrine system. It talks to everything and everything. So our organs start producing chemicals and neuro-transmitters, and all of these signals that go back up to the brain and say, we’re working or we’re not working. And it either speeds things up or slows things down. So when we’re struggling with thyroid Lake issues and everything’s coming up clean, what could it be? I start thinking adrenal started thinking cortisol. So thinking blood sugar. Absolutely. And then again, we start going down that list of toxicity is mold infections. But when those are clean too, we have to start looking elsewhere.
And a lot of times it comes down to adrenal fatigue. That’s when I like to use protomorphogens organ support, do some heavy hitting things, herbs, aren’t going to cut it up. Some salt baths. Aren’t going to cut it. We really do have to work on resetting the brain, feeding the brain with the things that we use in functional medicine, the thyroid, and then all the way down and get everything signaling again and make sure that your cells are receptive to the thyroid hormones. So you can increase your energy and grow your hair and do all of those good things. So I hope this was helpful for you. Get out your bloodwork or get your blood work done. If you can’t or you don’t know how, or you don’t have anybody to talk to you, shoot me a message on Facebook. You can schedule online for free online consult. We can figure this out together, brainstorm and make a plan that works for you. All right. Have a great day. And we’ll talk to you later.
