If you have been diagnosed as being hypothyroid, there is a 90% chance that the cause of your condition is not truly a dysfunctional thyroid. Rather, it is a dysfunctional immune system. The reason is because the #1
cause of low thyroid or hypothyroid in the United States is something called
Hashimoto's thyroiditis or autoimmune thyroid.
It's an autoimmune condition and it means that your immune system is
attacking your thyroid.
An
autoimmune condition is where your immune system is attacking a part of your
body, and in your case, it is most likely attacking your thyroid gland. Remember, your thyroid controls your body’s
metabolism. ALL OF IT! You don’t
have just a “thyroid” problem, you have an “immune” problem. Unfortunately, thyroid hormones do nothing
for this autoimmune attack. You will continue
to lose more and more of your thyroid by
not addressing the cause. It is a slow,
progressive, downward slide. You MUST heal the immune system, and thyroid hormones alone are not going to help accomplish this.
There are
two parts to your immune system, TH1 and TH2, and they should be in balance,
kind of like a teeter-totter effect. One
should not be higher than the other. If
your immune system goes out of balance because of stress (physical, chemical or
emotional), one system (TH1 or TH2) will become dominant and this will cause
your immune system to attack your body.
There are specific blood tests for thyroid antibodies that can be run to determine if you are
autoimmune and if one part of your immune system is dominant.
Now the
problem with an autoimmune condition is it just doesn't attack one area of your
body…for instance, your thyroid. It can attack other
areas of your body. It can attack your
pancreas, causing diabetes, or it can attack your gut -- your stomach lining, (causing
IBS), or it can attack your joints (rheumatoid arthritis). It can attack your entire body. Often times, the attack on the thyroid is just the beginning.
How do you
know if you're autoimmune? Specific to the thyroid, we would test for TPO and TGB antibodies, to see if you have an
autoimmune thyroid or Hashimoto's thyroiditis, along with the immune panels to see if your TH1 and TH2 systems are imbalanced. But, the
reality is…most people already know that
they're autoimmune just from the fact that they may already suffer from a
current autoimmune disorder, such as psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis,
ulcerative colitis, Sjogren's syndrome, scleroderma, and/or lupus.
Another way
that people will know if they're autoimmune is that their symptoms may wax and wane. Symptoms that wax and wane are a sure sign
that you are most likely suffering from an autoimmune condition.
The third
way to know if a patient's autoimmune is that they will come in with a basket of
supplements--I mean a truck-load. I've had people bring in so many bottles of
supplements it wasn't funny. In many
cases, the supplements that they are
taking were actually making them worse!
Number
four…their life fell apart after they
got sick. That's how they know
they're autoimmune. They've been to 12 or
15 or 20 different doctors and they have a stack of medical records sky-high,
all because it's an undiagnosed autoimmune condition.
They may
develop an autoimmune condition following
a pregnancy. Usually, women are TH2
dominant in the third trimester and TH1 dominant postpartum.
And
finally, as I've mentioned, there's positive testing via the immune panels and
TPO and TGB antibodies. You see, your immune
system is designed to protect you. When
your immune system runs amuck, it starts attacking different parts of your
body. It's important to know that once you realize you have an autoimmune
condition, you need to get checked, and you need to manage that autoimmune
condition.
Dr. Daniel Boggs
For more information, visit www.wvthyroidrelief.com
