Hashimoto's Disease (Hypothyroidism) 

Robert’s Story

He was only eight years old when he was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. He’s been on insulin injections for 23 years now and has a difficult time keeping his blood glucose levels perfect, with frequent spikes and drops. That’s not what brought him to seek help though. Four years ago his energy was going through extreme hills and valleys. His wife questioned him about stress at work and they frequently fought over things that ‘bothered him’ that previously were never an issue in their 9 years of marriage. Robert refused to go to counseling but did agree to a visit to the family doctor. After a routine blood workup revealed nothing out of the normal range, his MD ordered a TSH, the test for the Thyroid Stimulating Hormone. In traditional medicine approaches, the TSH alone is run to determine the health of the thyroid gland. Sure enough, Robert’s TSH was 47, more than 40 points above normal and it gave the doctor what he wanted – a diagnosis! Robert was diagnosed with low thyroid and placed on synthetic thyroid medication for life.

Robert’s story is identical to the millions of other ‘hypothyroid’ patients. Typically, when people do have a hypothyroid response, they generally don’t really feel that much better with replacement after what I call the “honeymoon period”. Their TSH’s look really nice and pretty with lab work but in reality, the patient does NO better, even if symptoms are subtly suppressed. They still have NOT addressed the cause of their condition and if you don’t fix the cause, the disease progresses! We’ll discuss the fact that hypothyroidism is NOT really a disease of the thyroid at all but an autoimmune attack on the thyroid from a normal functioning immune response that has ‘gone awry’. We will discuss why that takes place.

We also have to be fair and address how hypothyroidism has been traditionally supported from an alternative medicine model. In Robert’s case, after two and a half years of dissatisfaction in the replacement model of care through his MD, he decided to take the advice of a friend and visit a Naturopath. The naturopathic doctor gave Robert iodine and tyrosine supplements and a glandular product to support the thyroid in an attempt to give the gland the building blocks to recover. As was true in Robert’s case, these usually don’t do anything to correct the cause of the problem because they do NOT dampen the immune response against the thyroid. It is equally a failing approach and will often do less for the patient’s symptoms than replacement therapy.

If there is any ‘take away’ from this page may it be to stimulate the reader to ask one simple question as to their symptoms – “why?” If the answer to your question leads you to believe you may have an autoimmune disorder, don’t stop asking and don’t accept any treatment that isn’t logically treating the answers to your constant questions of, “Why?” When we see a person that has an autoimmune disease of any name, the goal really is to discover the cause (the reason ‘why’) of the immune dysregulation and make every effort to correct that. If you don’t support and modulate your immune system you will NEVER improve your physiology and the disease will simply progress to complete destruction and then begin to attack other organs and systems. 

In the case of autoimmune disease against a specific organ like Hashimotos hypothyroidism, there is little help in direct organ support without correcting the cause. The mechanism for the issue is the immune response in the first place and not that the organ is deficient in any type of nutrient; the reason the person may need hormone replacement (such as Synthyroid) in hypothyroidism is because the immune system is actually destroying the cells, but replacement without halting the destruction is missing the point. Both approaches are like throwing a sandwich to a man being attacked by a pack of wolves; even if your intent was to help him, he has bigger problems than hunger.

When we look at a person that is not well, one of the first questions needs to be, “what’s the mechanism”. One of the main mechanisms is an autoimmune mechanism, and we’ll talk about how to test for antibodies, and to follow these up with immune panels and specific antigen testing to discover the cause.

Both approaches are like throwing a sandwich to a man being attacked by a pack of wolves; even if your intent was to help him, he has bigger problems than hunger.

Let’s face it, if either traditional medical or the alternative models had any great percentage of success treating autoimmune disease, you wouldn’t be reading this book. Robert understood that it was “reasonable” that failure to discover the cause of thyroid destruction would lead to further destruction. He also saw that it was “reasonable” that someone ‘out there’ must be able to find out what was causing the destruction; and he thought that it was “reasonable” that if whatever was at cause for such destruction could be evaded, then it was “reasonable” that the destruction would at least slow down. He also reasoned that this deductive thought process would yield him success. Robert was a ‘man with a mission’ and his hard work and refusal to ‘own his disease’ led him to find the answers that would change his life forever!

When we look at any thyroid loss of function, we know that the metabolic rate of the person will decrease over time. We know that thyroid hormones have very powerful effects on controlling the metabolism which enables the body to attain homeostasis – a balance of health. This is why when people are truly hypothyroid, their cellular metabolic rate decreases, they cannot produce the energy in the mitochondria and they have a very hard time attaining a balance in their well-being; their response to viruses and bacteria may diminish, they struggle recovering after stress, just don’t feel as well as they used to and have very low energy. Many of these symptoms come on gradually and if the person is in their thirties or older when the attack takes its hold, they often chock it up to symptoms of aging.

We also know that when a person has thyroid problems they have a diminished gastrointestinal motility, with sluggish gastrointestinal tracts, and they’re often diagnosed with deficiencies in digestive enzymes when the reality is that the body doesn’t have enough metabolic capacity to move food along so there’s fermentation, bloating, gas and constipation. This leads to re-absorption of intestinal toxins and intestinal permeability. This problem is true for many other autoimmune conditions, since many end up attacking parasympathetic nervous centers in the brain that control peristaltic motion.