The Unheard Thyroid

More and more I am developing an interest in helping those people who suffer from Thyroid conditions. In particular my interest lies with Hypo-Thyroid or low thyroid conditions. Believe me, these people are everywhere. It is my sincere opinion that these people are not getting their needs met by the mainstream approach. My goal in working with these people is to offer a well rounded approach to understanding the problem at hand as well as offering a scientifically backed treatment regimen. The bulk of this article will detail how mainstream medicine often times misses the intricacies of Hypo-Thyroidism how the condition could be approached to better address the underlying cause.

The Symptoms

Low energy
Difficulty losing weight
Weight gain even with high levels of exercise
Constipation
Hair loss (particularly of the outer third of eyebrow)
Get sick easily and/or often
Low libido (in both men and women)
Infertility
Cold hands and feet (or just plain feeling cold!)
Currently taking Thyroid medications but still feel crummy

Do any of these sound familiar? All of these symptoms can be related to low Thyroid function. Many of these are extremely common complaints in my practice and affect a large portion of the population.

The Problem with the Mainstream Approach

The general ways that a person is diagnosed with a Thyroid condition is through a routine blood screen. There are several particular markers which can indicate either high or low Thyroid function. The most common marker is thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH). Typically this has a laboratory reference range of 0.35 - 5.50. If you are out of this reference range you are indeed clinically diagnosable as either Hyper- or Hypo-Thyroid. And chances are that you feel awful! The unfortunate part of working in these reference ranges is that they are extremely broad and do not pick up sub-clinical dis harmonies which might otherwise be causing any or all of the symptoms described above. The message here is that in order to be helped by the mainstream approach you need to have blood work that is way out of normal. As I will describe later I use both the Laboratory ranges and what are called Functional ranges. The Functional range for TSH is 1.8 - 3.0. As you can see, the Functional range is a much smaller range and its use allows the practitioner to detect dis harmonies that may otherwise be hiding or can be addressed before they become serious. But believe me, there are plenty of subjective complaints from people who are just outside of these Functional ranges who slip through the cracks of mainstream medicine. These people need help but are generally not getting it. This is simply due to how the mainstream medical approach looks at illness. The other really important thing that gets missed in a great number of known Hypo-Thyroid patients is the Auto-immune connection. That means that the immune system is actually attacking the Thyroid tissue. The way this gets diagnosed is to look for antibodies against Thyroid tissue. (Antibodies normally help the immune cells target and destroy foreign invaders in the body. In this case the Thyroid is seen as foreign and worthy of destruction.) If there are antibodies against Thyroid it is important to realize that you have an immune disorder first and a Thyroid disorder second. Recently I had two different women come into my clinic with known Hypo-Thyroid conditions. Both have been medicated for many years for these low Thyroid conditions. Neither felt particularly good with their Thyroid medication. I ordered a test for Thyroid antibodies and of a normal reference range of 0 - 40 one woman came up with over 800, and the other came up with over 11,000! Unfortunately, their doctors never thought it necessary to look. Treating an Auto-immune thyroid like a normal Hypo-Thyroid not only doesn't work, it is just not good medical practice. I find this to be really troublesome and scary stuff! I hope that you find this a point of concern as well.

The Good News

The good news is that there is help out there. When I work up a Thyroid patient I make sure to utilize both Functional and Laboratory ranges not only for the Thyroid but for all other markers in the body to look for other contributing factors. Also, knowing that between 50 - 80% of all Hypo-Thyroid patients are actually Auto-Immune Thyroid (Hashimoto's) in nature, I most definitely order an antibody test to rule out this leading cause of low thyroid. If you have Hyper-Thyroid or high Thyroid you definitely have an Auto-Immune problem. The real take home message about Auto-Immune Thyroid is that even though it is the Thyroid symptoms that are making you feel crummy, your primary problem does not reside with the Thyroid itself. The problem is the immune system. Supporting the thyroid itself with pharmaceutical drugs or natural herbal/nutritional formulas simply will not work. And taking some basic thyroid supplements like Iodine will actually make your Auto-Immune Thyroid condition worse! Not until you focus your attempts squarely on balancing out the immune response can you see any significant results with the vast majority of Hypo-thyroid conditions. I will work with you to understand your particular condition and help you successfully treat the core of the problem.

The Unfortunate Reality

Yep, there is an unfortunate reality here... I am an acupuncturist telling you this. Not only do I have to challenge what your doctor might have said, but I have to negotiate the image or expectations of what an acupuncturist knows, or put another way, is allowed to know. I encounter this conundrum all of the time. People generally don't understand my training or ability to manage serious conditions like Auto-Immune Thyroid. And in many instances to do a better job at it than the mainstream approach! Just the other day I was talking with a Pharmacist who after sharing with him about the antibody tests I ran on those two women asked me very sternly, "So once you find that you must immediately refer them to their medical doctor! Right?" It noticeably shook him that I was managing these types of patients. The unfortunate part of this interaction is really two fold. One, my medical degree has been once again misunderstood, disrespected and disregarded. And two, a highly educated person thought it essential to refer back to the very institution which more times than not will miss the true diagnosis, allow for extreme reference ranges to be out of range before treatment, and who's treatment protocol involves replacement hormones (which don't work in Auto-Immune conditions). Or in the case of a known Auto-Immune condition involves either surgically removing or chemically killing Thyroid tissue or chemically suppressing the Immune system which can leave the patient open to much worse illnesses than low thyroid function.

Either way you look at it the mainstream approach is quite severe and in my opinion lacks the sensitivity to manage the core of the condition. But putting my ego aside for a moment, we as medical practitioners must at all times keep the best interest of our patients in mind. I feel very confident in my diagnostic approach and treatment protocols to effectively, and probably for the first time in that person's life, finally address the core of the problem. If people like me don't do it, then who will? It is time that we take a closer look at our options. Just because the mainstream approach is going strong doesn't mean that it is practicing the most up to date medicine. These things that I am handing down here come right out of the very same highly prestigious medical journals that doctors read. Contrary to what my medical degree might imply to the mainstream world, I am only providing information based upon the most cutting edge and up to date research available. And it is my privilege and joy to do so.

Treating The Lab Report And Not The Person

Interesting concept don’t you think? Perhaps a bit provocative, but it is something that I am becoming increasingly concerned with over time as I pour through more blood chemistry and patient histories. My hope for this article is that it leaves the reader a little uneasy about what they are being told is “normal” about their current state of health. The fact is that you should be uneasy. Don’t be afraid, but be interested in knowing more. Things are going unchecked and you are allowed to feel like you are getting the whole story and that everything is under control. I want to detail for you two different medical problems that I see quite often in my clinic and explain to you exactly what I mean by stating that in many cases people only end up successfully treating their lab report and not their actual medical concern.

Most of the time when I order blood tests for a patient the very first thing they ask about is their cholesterol. Perhaps that is the only part of the test people know anything about. No one has ever taken the time to explain the rest to them. But nevertheless, let’s just say that someone has high total cholesterol of 225. The doctor wants to put them on cholesterol lowering Statin therapy immediately. They do as they are told because if they didn’t they fear death, or worse… A terrible golf game. The follow up test showed a marked improvement in their total cholesterol. It is now 185! Yay!! Problem solved right? By all mainstream thinking heart disease is now under control because the paper showed that the cholesterol is within the “normal” ranges. Well, don’t get too comfortable. That’s not the whole story.

What the doctor didn’t tell you is that not all cholesterol is the same. The “Bad Cholesterol” called LDL is actually made up of different sized particles. The large LDL particles tend to not be dangerous to your arteries/heart in that they do not lead to plaque formation and subsequent poor health. But the small, dense LDL particles tend to be very likely to promote heart disease. The rub here is that Statin drugs are very good at lowering LDL cholesterol, but they lower the wrong kind of LDL. They are great at lowering the large “safe” type and terrible at lowering the small “dangerous” type. So here you have a scenario where someone was told they were in danger without the doctor looking into what size LDL particles there are (any many other important factors such as hsCRP, homocysteine, RLP, Lp(a), and more), and then giving a drug which quite a lot of research has shown to have rather suspect safety records. This then lowers the overall cholesterol by lowering the not-so-dangerous type of LDL while leaving the more dangerous type intact, and leads people to believe that they did the right thing and are now protected!

Well according to the Centers for Disease Control, only 50% of the people who die of heart disease die with high cholesterol. The other 50% have either normal or even low cholesterol! Wouldn’t you, a thinking person, rather compare yourself to the most up to date scientific standards and look into the true markers for heart disease rather than just settling on going the faith based path of doing what you are told by your doctor? And who do you think teaches the doctor? There are several rather large companies behind that one for sure. So the bottom line here is that just making the number smaller on the lab report does nothing to your overall health. This is especially true if you got it that way through the cunning use of medications and not by proper diet and exercise. Aerobic exercise by the way is one of the only things that actually lowers the more dangerous type of cholesterol.

One more concern that I have is pertaining to hormone replacement therapy. I specialize in hormone conditions so I see a significant amount of lab reports and see a lot of hormone replacement therapy going on. This story lends itself to treating a lab report and not the person quite well. It usually goes like this… A person goes into a doctor complaining about various mid-life problems and ends up on hormone replacement. Follow up tests show that the hormone levels are normal and the doctor and patient feel that the proper treatment was given. There is only one thing wrong though. Given six months or so the patient starts feeling the same symptoms returning, but the labs still show normal hormones. When was the last time you heard of anyone on replacement hormone therapy that was actually happy with the results 6 months to a year after starting? What gives?

Quite simply put hormone testing when done in a typical medical office does not look at what are called “free fraction” hormones. These are the ones that are actually doing the work. They are the active form of the hormone. It is much cheaper to look at the “serum” hormones. These are easy to find in the blood and happen to be in the inactive state. Two problems come from this depending upon what hormones were given.

Most commonly synthetic hormones are given. There is currently no test that looks for levels of synthetic hormones in the blood. Synthetic estrogen simply isn’t estrogen. I once asked the Head of Endocrinology (hormones) at the VA hospital in Portland how they monitor synthetic hormone levels and he said quite sharply and with contempt, “we don’t, we monitor symptoms.” If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you it should! So if they do test for hormones they can only test for your own natural hormones which are not representative of what is going on now that there are synthetic hormones in the mix. It is totally bass ackwards thinking!

The other increasingly common thing to see is someone who is tying to do the right thing and take “bio-identical” hormones. Now these are better because they are natural and can be tracked, but for some reason, probably expense, serum hormone levels are what are tested for and not the more expensive free fraction levels. It is important to know that bio-identical hormones are delivered usually through the skin via a cream and enter the blood only in the free fraction state. So looking at serum levels will look normal or even low when in fact the active free fraction levels are usually quite high. This little concept gets missed almost every time. So once again what we see on the report might look great, but the actual state of the person could still be a mess! In fact worse than before starting on the hormones in the first place.

I write this article partly out of anger and frustration I’ll admit. I see so much in the current medical system that is dangerously misguided and unsustainable. Change needs to happen. But I write it more for you, the reader. You deserve to know about your choices. To be fully aware of what you are being told you “need” to do. It is very easy to roll over and submit when it comes to our medical experience. I urge you not to. I urge you to pay attention, to be curious, and to question what you are being told. Hold your doctors accountable for what they say. And above all learn as much as you can about everything that you can. That is what I try to do, and that is what I try to pass along to the people in my life.

Please consider me a powerful resource, and in the mean time, be happy, be empowered and enjoy great health!

I'm officially famous!

Ok... Not really famous, but I did get a nice video posted on You Tube about my services. A patient and friend of mine started a website last year called SingleDad.com. It is an informational site for fathers who are single for one reason or another. It is a great site full of really good resources. Articles, recipes, tips/hints for good parenting, etc. Basically it is all about supporting each other. Really it is a site that is great for anyone to browse. I have submitted several articles to this site and will continue to be a part as a resource.

So check out my my video at the link below and see first hand what an average acupuncture session looks and fees like. Enjoy!

http://www.singledad.com/health-and-fitness/how-to/Acupuncture_Anyone_1234041647.php

The Misunderstood Prostate

If there is one thing that us men have to look forward to as we get older it is the fear of our prostate glands swelling up like apples and wreaking havoc on our urination and sex lives. And of course then there is the matter of prostate cancer. But for most old guys it is usually safe to say that there will be at least some discomfort around the concept of peeing freely. We all know about enlarged prostates, but do we really understand why it happens and how to protect ourselves against it? I hope through this article to shed some light on that pondering. And offer some food for thought.

The primary reason for an enlarged prostate would certainly have to be elevations in the hormone DHT. DHT is an extremely potent form of Testosterone and is what is also responsible for male balding for the most part. When there is an over abundance of DHT the tissues of the prostate become enlarged and give us the problems men either already know and love, or will know at some point in our lives. It is for conditions like this that the herb Saw Palmetto is so well known. Many men already know this and sales for such supplements are soaring! That’s the easy scenario. That’s the one the docs all lean towards. It is the easy diagnosis. Most of the time hormone testing isn’t even done. It is a simple description of symptoms, a finger in the rear end, and wammo, a basic diagnosis is made. But what if there is more to the equation?

And what do you know, there certainly is more to the equation. A little known fact, and one that is never considered in mainstream medicine, is the role that Estrogen plays in prostate health. Why look at Estrogen in a man? We men certainly don’t want to hear about it if there is any female hormone floating around in our bodies! But it just so happens to play a major role in prostate health. Not to mention, breast tissue growth, depression, low sex drive/performance. Hell it can even affect your golf game! Did I get your attention yet?

It works like this… Estrogen acts to lock the DHT hormone into the prostate tissues longer than normal therefore promoting more stimulation to the prostate tissues with less DHT hormone needed. So in essence you can have normal or even low DHT and still have prostate problems! You see, hormones are supposed to bind to receptors in the target tissue, do their thing and then move along. Elevated Estrogen in men stops DHT from leaving the tissue and there is nothing Saw Palmetto can do about that. Perhaps these are the men who end up under the knife because they “have tried everything” without success. If only they were told the whole story perhaps there would be more healthy prostates out there doing what they do best! And if you don’t know what prostates do best… Well, they produce semen! And men would probably prefer to have their ability to produce semen intact if given the opportunity, wouldn’t you say?

The good news is that this is a classic Functional Medicine problem. Considering variables like elevated Estrogen in men and going after the root of the problem is how people get better without the harsh medications, hormone replacement therapy and/or tricky surgeries which very often lead to erectile problems. No knifes near my prostate please! And believe it or not, another female type hormone Progesterone also plays a role here, but that is another article. The bottom line is that prostate health isn’t all that simple. It deserves a lot of care and consideration to get the proper results.

If you or the man in your life is experiencing these discomforts please call and book a free consultation. There really is no time like the present. Seriously, if left too long there is no other option than surgery. Once these tissues get too big there is no turning back. Prevention is your best friend. Don’t let that strong male ego stop you from peeing freely or having the perfect orgasm. Because what is more manly than that? Seek out knowledge and act! Your prostate will thank you.

I'm Leaking From Where Now? - Part 2

Back in September of last year I wrote an article about Leaky Gut Syndrome. If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading about leaky guts you should do so now. You can find it in the archive section for 2007. Not only is it good fun reading, it is incredibly important for our conversation today… Leaky Brain Syndrome. I don’t necessarily mean that we all have poop for brains, but if left long enough leaky brain syndrome might as well mean poop for brains! Read on and I will explain myself.

Much like the way that it sounds, leaky brain syndrome is a situation where the blood-brain-barrier (BBB) has become compromised and substances that are not meant to cross this barrier are able to pass either in or out unchecked. This barrier was discovered in the 19th century by the bacteriologist Ehrlich. He found that when he injected animals with staining chemicals every part of the animal took the stain but the brain. And subsequently when he injected the stain directly into the central nervous system nothing outside the brain took the color. The scientist therefore demonstrated that there was something that was stopping the transport of chemicals into and out of the brain. And this was for a good reason. The brain is of course a highly important organ for every function in our body and needs a high level of protection from harmful substances. When this barrier system becomes compromised the brain becomes susceptible to damage by invading substances and pathogens. The bottom line is you want a nice and tight, non-leaky blood-brain-barrier!

There is now current research that demonstrates to us the things that can both help and hurt this barrier system. Just several of the ones that harm the barrier should sound familiar to many of you. I see them in my practice all of the time. Increased oxidation due to free radical exposure, elevated Homocysteine (also a heart disease risk), stress of any kind (physical, mental/emotional, chemical), alcohol, and elevated blood sugar all work to destroy the BBB. If there is any one thing that I see the most of it is poor blood sugar regulation. Controlling all of these things as well as taking in Alpha-Lipoic Acid, antioxidants and simply using your brain all work to help maintain and rebuild the BBB.

This all becomes very important when considering the treatment and better yet, the prevention of many of the modern medical problems facing our society today. Loss of BBB integrity has been linked to several disease processes including meningitis, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Parkinson’s Disease. These studies can be found in highly respected medical journals like the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Neurotoxicology, Journal of Leukocyte Biology, Brain Research and more.

If you are interested in seeing if you might have a leaky brain condition there is a simple field test that you can perform on yourself. At the health food store you can purchase a supplement called GABA. GABA is a neurotransmitter found in the brain which elicits a relaxed state. People who are low in GABA tend to have anxiety type disorders. This substance should not be able to cross the BBB. (Which makes you wonder why it is being sold at all!) The test is to take 1000mg of GABA and see if you feel any enhanced state of relaxation. If you do then this substance has crossed the BBB and you have a “leaky brain!” Bad news. You need to fix that pronto! Oral GABA should not induce relaxation. If it does I can help you with this.

Believe me, there are a lot of things out there that if they get into your brain can lead to serious damage. Our brains are not supposed to have foreign substances in contact with it so when that happens the response is severe. Quite literally our immune system can go on a killing spree in a last ditch effort to save our brain from damage and in doing so will wipe out everything in its path including brain tissue! Counter productive, yes, but it is what we have, and it is good to know about.

Don’t let this happen to you. There are simple steps that you can take to protect yourself from a leaky brain. I am happy to be your guide in proper brain health. This is seriously one area of medicine both mainstream and alternative alike that is consistently overlooked time and time again. And in the meantime neurological disorders are continuously on the rise. Call to day for a consultation and request a free Brain Health Questioner.