Your Thyroid Might Not Be the Problem

Low thyroid function isn’t always a strictly thyroid problem. It’s often the result of something else.

For instance — is your thyroid hormone not converting properly?

Is thyroid hormone bound up in a way that keeps it from reaching your cells?

Is your pituitary failing to signal the thyroid?

Or is your immune system attacking the thyroid itself, which is Hashimoto’s?

Those are completely different problems, and they deserve different approaches.

When damage to the thyroid through autoimmune attack is permanent, thyroid hormone replacement is necessary and often life changing.

But replacing the hormone doesn’t answer why your thyroid stopped working.

In our clinic, roughly 80% of thyroid patients turn out to have autoimmune Hashimoto’s. For them the thyroid was never the primary problem. The immune system was.

The symptoms women learn to live with

On the SIP Podcast, Alex Lourdes described what she’d spent years assuming was normal. Waking up exhausted no matter how long she slept. A blanket in 100-degree weather. Weight she couldn’t lose. Brain fog where she’d forget what she was saying mid-sentence. Dry skin, brittle nails, sluggish digestion, heavy irregular periods.

The heavy periods were driving her iron down, and the low iron was feeding the Hashimoto’s. Nobody had connected those two things.

Sound familiar? Most women I see don’t know how good they’re supposed to feel.

Why the fatigue and the bloating are the same problem

When you have an autoimmune condition, it can inflame your brain, and an inflamed brain shows up as fatigue, depression, and brain fog.

That same brain also has to fire to your intestinal tract. When it isn’t firing well, you get poor motility, poor digestion, and poor absorption.

Bloating after meals gets written off as normal aging. It’s a signaling problem, and it’s connected to the exhaustion you came in for.

Red flags

What are some common red flags for Hashimoto’s?

Fifteen symptoms yet “your labs are normal.” That usually means nobody checked deep enough.

A pill for each symptom while nothing addresses the mechanism underneath it.

TSH is run alone, hormone prescribed, and the conversation is over.

Or you ask to be tested for Hashimoto’s and you’re told there’s no point because it won’t change the prescription. That part is true, and it misses the opportunity to return you to well being and lower your risk for developing other autoimmune issues.

Knowing you have Hashimoto’s opens up dietary and lifestyle changes that calm the autoimmune response, and that goes well beyond what a thyroid hormone does on its own.

What to ask your doctor to run:

• Thyroid antibodies: TPO and thyroglobulin
• A full thyroid panel, not TSH alone
• Transglutaminase antibodies, to screen for celiac disease
• Antiparietal cell antibodies, common with Hashimoto’s and rarely checked
• Inflammatory markers
• Iron and ferritin
• Fasting glucose, fasting insulin, and hemoglobin A1C
• If you’re over 30: progesterone, estradiol, LH, FSH, testosterone

You can have thyroid antibodies with a panel that still reads normal. This means your immune system is destroying tissue and producing symptoms, yet the standard test doesn’t show it yet.

Alex and I go deeper on all of this in the first episode of the SIP Podcast with She’s in Progress.