Material Corrections

Transcription

Material Corrections:
For further clarification, Wilson’s Syndrome or Wilson’s Temperature
Syndrome is a Thyroid problem. All references to Wilson’s Disease in the
program, refer to Wilson’s Syndrome. Wilson’s Disease is a liver disease.
Module 1 Transcripts
www.CompleteThyroid.com
page 2 / The Thyroid Health Program
Kevin:
Welcome everyone. This is Kevin Gianni from RenegadeHealth.com. I want to personally thank you for
taking an interest in your health and investing in this program. The Complete Thyroid Health Program
will teach you the cutting-edge national approaches to thyroid treatment so you can understand how
your body works and how you can heal naturally.
First, before we start, I’d like to introduce our special guest, Dr. James Williams. Dr. Williams is a
pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, longevity and the quality of life. He’s the author of five acclaimed books, including “Viral Immunity” and “Prolonging Health.” With more than 25 years of clinical experience treating chronic disease, he brings his experience with over 100,000 patient visits directly
to you.
In this program I’ll be your host while Dr. Williams shares this important information with you. Before
we start I want to share this important disclaimer with you. The information in this course is intended
for educational purposes only. It does not replace the evaluation and advice of a qualified, licensed health
care professional. For detailed information about your thyroid health, please consult with your physician.
So let’s get started on this module.
I want to welcome you to this very special program. It’s called “Thyroid Health with Dr. J.E. Williams.”
What we’re going to do in this program is we’re going to cover the thyroid, what it does, what can harm
it, what can impair its functioning and how your body can repair the thyroid. We’ll be talking about
herbs and supplements and other considerations as well. So not only will we tell you what’s going on,
but we can tell you how and what are some techniques you can use to help yourself get healthy.
Today is the first module. We’ll be laying the groundwork for the next three. We’re going to talk about
the endocrine system, what exactly the thyroid does and then move on from their.
So Dr. Williams, welcome to the call.
Dr. Williams:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure.
Kevin:
The thyroid is a big issue. I wanted to let everyone know that we’re here to make it easy to understand
and also to get into higher hormone systems and the endocrine system. So let’s start with that. What is
the endocrine system?
Dr. Williams:
The endocrine system is a network of glands. They secrete chemical substances that we call hormones.
They are, in fact, chemical messengers and communication molecules. They’re extraordinarily important
for every aspect of the living body system.
Keep in mind that all living things have hormones. Plants have hormones. All animals have hormones.
Insects have hormones. Of course we’re going to be talking about human hormones with a focus on the
thyroid.
The endocrine hormones are involved in growth and development and homeostasis. That’s the internal
balance of all your body’s systems. That’s what keeps you alive. And metabolism, which produces energy
in your body, and reproduction so we can continue as a species. And response to stimuli, stress, which
Transcripts Module 1 / page 3
becomes a big part of your adrenal. The adrenal and thyroid overlap.
The classical endocrine system is composed of a bevy of hormones. Starting from the top down we go
from the hypothalamus and then the pineal gland and the pituitary. Then below that in the throat area
is the thyroid. It has four other little, tiny glands called the parathyroids. Then there’s the thymus in the
center of your chest, the adrenals, pancreas, ovaries and testes.
The chemical messengers are what we call hormones. That’s what we’ve called them for a hundred years.
We know them now to be much more than that. They are discreted directly by these glands into the
extra-cellular fluid. Then those messenger molecules, the hormones, are picked up by the capillaries
where they gain access to the bloodstream. Then they go throughout the body. They have affinity for
different target sites in the body and they go there. They are taken up by the cells, in particularly we talk
about thyroid hormones, and they are able to cross right through the cell membranes and the work goes
on right inside the cells. So hormones facilitate functional coordination between all organs and all cells
in the body.
For our purposes we can classify hormones into two types, major and minor, like the major and minor
scales in music. They blend together, but the major hormones are critical to keep you alive - insulin,
cortisol and adrenaline. Two of those, cortisol and adrenaline, come from the adrenals. The minor hormones include the sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, some of the adrenal hormones such as DHEA and pregnenolone, and the thyroid hormones. Meaning that they’re important for
life but you can live without them not very well. As you age the DHEA goes down and your estrogen
and testosterone go down. You’re still alive but you’re not functioning as well and you’re aging. The same
thing with thyroid hormones, though a little more important. They’re kind of between minor and major
hormones. Absence or deficiency of the thyroid hormone doesn’t completely kill you.
Kevin:
When talking about hormones what are the certain rhythms that they go through? How do they transfer
and how do they kind of move course throughout the body?
Dr. Williams:
This is really important. We’re now thinking of hormones as chemical messengers. These are very intelligent molecules. We also now think of these glands, not just as pumps where they’re just pumping and
pumping like a mechanical pump pumping water into a field to irrigate it. That’s not how they work.
Sometimes they’re quiescent and sometimes they’re highly active. We know now that they release hormones in rhythmic waves and cycles. They’re released in rhythmic pulses. These rhythms are superimposed, one on the other, into a highly-refined, orchestrated symphony of chemical messengers. Among
all of the different hormones the relationship of them and these overlaps of them, is highly important for
the body to run well and for you to feel well, for you to be happy, for you to healthy in that you have a
sense of well-being, of energy, of wellness and good mood and that all of your systems are working well.
Kevin:
What are the main hormonal networks?
Dr. Williams:
This is the third thing that goes together in terms of getting acquainted with your endocrine system.
They don’t work in isolation. It works as a symphony of different instruments in the larger, complete
orchestra. From the top down we have the hypothalamus and the pituitary, and also the pineal in the
brain. The two main endocrine glands that are in our brain are the hypothalamus and pituitary. They
inter-relate and communicate with all of the other endocrine organs. They form different axes. Instead
of just working in isolation, the adrenal, for example, works in tandem with the hypothalamus and the
pituitary. This is the axis that is most studied and considered the main one still at this point. It’s called
the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or the HPA axis.
In respect to the thyroid there is the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis, or the HPT axis. That’s very
important, when we talk about restoring normal thyroid function, that we look not just at the thyroid
hormone being deficient but restoring the relationship and the intercommunication between the higher
centers, the hypothalamus and the pituitary, and the down-stream effects all the way down to the cells.
Kevin:
Can you just clarify how the thyroid gets activated, how the endocrine system sends messages to the
thyroid?
Dr. Williams:
There’s a loop. These glands communicate to each other. In biology we call it the Cascade Phenomenon.
For example, if you look at a mountain and you go higher and higher up, it gets colder and colder and
there you have snow. As the sun comes up it warms up a little bit of the snow or a little bit of the ice and
it drips down. Little by little more and more drips come together and you have a little trickle and then a
rivulet and then pretty soon a nice stream with waterfalls. It’s feeding plants along the way and the deer
are coming to eat. Then it goes down a bit further and forms into a lake and into the ocean. All the way
around this the sun is still heating that up. The clouds are forming and they rise up over the mountain
and they drop snow and rain. This is the same type of cycle we have in the body, or similar. There’s a
macrocosmic, a big cycle, and a microcosmic cycle.
The higher centers, at the top of the mountain, you have the hypothalamus. that secretes releasing factors
or releasing hormones that tell the pituitary to produce hormones that are the stimulating hormones.
Talking about the thyroid we have TSH that is released by the pituitary, which informs or communicates to the thyroid gland that it needs to make more T4--we’ll talk about those in a minute--thyroxine,
which is the main hormone the thyroid produces. That goes out into circulation. When there’s sufficient amount and the cells are running smoothly then the body communicates back through multiple
methods, through the nervous system and through communication molecules, that tells the pituitary it’s
enough so you can shut down the stimulation to the thyroid. Then the pituitary communicates back to
the hypothalamus and says, “We’re OK now. We can shut down.” Those feedback loops continue back
and forth all of the time.
Kevin:
Let’s move into the thyroid. Some people may not know where the thyroid is so let’s start with that and
then talk about what it does and some of the main thyroid hormones that you just mentioned.
Dr. Williams:
The thyroid is in your throat. If you examine yourself right now and you imagine where your chin is or
put your finger on your chin, the tip of your chin, and then the other finger at your collarbone where the
little notch is at the base of your throat in the center of your chest and if you can divide that into thirds,
approximately the lower third or one-third of the way up from the collarbone is where the thyroid is
located. It has two parts. They’re called lobes, one on each side of the throat. Inside those lobes there are
four little glands called the parathyroid glands. If it’s enlarged you can actually see it. If it gets really big
it becomes a goiter. Normally it should be high-functioning and you shouldn’t be able to feel it. When
I examine a patient I don’t want to feel the thyroid as being enlarged or soft or boggy. You shouldn’t be
able to see it, having a swollen throat or anything like that, from the outside.
Here’s something that’s very important. The thyroid gland is the only gland-- that’s not true. In men the
testicles are palpable. You can feel them from the outside. Of the glands in the greater part of the body,
the thyroid is the only one you can feel if something is wrong. It’s the one that’s closest to the external
environment. So it’s easily influenced because it is basically just underneath the skin and therefore easily
influenced by the percentage of oxygen in the air, by chemical pollutants that are in the air.
Kevin:
So if you’re feeling around for it, how do you know, within your muscles and your skin there in your
throat, what part of that is your thyroid? If it’s healthy, would you feel it at all?
Dr. Williams:
As I’ve mentioned, if it’s healthy you shouldn’t feel it at all. If you’re palpating very lightly down your
throat, they should feel their trachea. That makes up the throat. For thin people you can actually see the
outline of the trachea. As you go down a little bit further there’s a bone called the hyoid bone, which is a
little bit larger, sort of the Adam’s apple. Then just below that and around that area is where the thyroid
glands are. There’s really one gland with two lobes, one on each side of the trachea. You can push your
fingers to the side of your trachea, the side of your throat, without causing any harm or anything and just
carefully, gently move that back and forth and push that to the side. If one side or the other, one lobe or
the other, of the thyroid gland is enlarged you can actually kind of displace it a little bit and feel it. You
have to be trained to do that, unless you have a true goiter and it’s really obvious, like a large bulb on
your throat.
Kevin:
What does the thyroid do?
Dr. Williams:
This is another one of those key points. It makes oxygen available to the cells. We can’t live without oxygen, everybody knows that, in terms of breathing, for very long, just a few minutes. But oxygen is necessary for the metabolism of your entire system and is one of the key molecules right inside the cells. So
if you don’t have enough oxygen, if there’s not enough in the air…Remember that in severely-polluted
areas we can have as low as nine percent oxygen in the air. We function better if we have 20 or 30 percent in the air. In the rain forest, I love to go there, you can feel and smell the oxygen almost. It can get
up to 30 percent, even up to 50 percent. Even if you have enough oxygen in the air, you have to have
a sufficient thyroid hormone and it has to be viable enough, it has to be bio-active enough, it has to be
healthy hormone molecule so that it helps the oxygen to get into the cell so that your cells can breathe,
just like you breathe.
The most active thyroid hormones are the T3. That’s the one that’s mainly involved in metabolism,
growth and development and temperature regulation, which all kind of falls under your basal-metabolic
rate. You need the oxygen and you need that thyroid activity and you need it in the cells in key parts of
the body at the right time. So that’s basically what the thyroid does.
It has considerable influence in other aspects of the body, including normal growth, heart rate, sweating,
muscle activity, bone growth, hair growth and energy. When the thyroid gland is not working well it can
mimic almost every type of disease. It’s called the great mimicker, in terms of the amount of symptoms
it produces. When it’s functioning well it’s often called the copasetic hormone. People are bright, alert,
alive. They’re eager for new experiences. Some of the French doctors like to call it the love molecule or
love hormone. Not testosterone and estrogen, but thyroid. It’s a wide spectrum of many, many things.
Kevin:
You mentioned T3. What about T4? What are some of the other main thyroid hormones?
Dr. Williams:
There are two main thyroid hormones. T3, the technical name is tri--meaning three, iodo--meaning
iodine, thyronine. Triiodothyronine is T3. T4 is thyroxine. Both of those are built from thyrocine and
therefore part of the name in both, which an amino acid, and iodine. So you need the thyrocine molecule and you need the iodine molecule in order to build those hormones.
The thyroid produces mainly T4. T3 is converted from T4 in the liver and the peripheral tissues. In other
words, outside of the thyroid the body makes its own stores of T3. They both have different functions in
the body. There is some overlap. But the most active one of the two is the T3.
Kevin:
How are they transported in the body?
Dr. Williams: Once T4 is made by the thyroid it goes into the extra-cellular fluid. It’s absorbed by the capillaries, the
small blood vessels, and then it goes into the systemic circulation. Once it’s there some of it is freefloating around and we call those the bio-available or free forms. But mainly it has to be transported by
carrier proteins. Those are molecules that pick up hormones, not just thyroid but all types of hormones,
and they shuttle them around. They’re like the buses in the mass transit. They pick them up and shuttle
them to a different part of the city and drop them off there. Otherwise it would take forever if they were
just floating around.
The main transport molecule for thyroid is called thyroid hormone binding globulin, or TBG. It carries both T4 and T3 to all parts of the body where they’re necessary. They readily enter the cells. They’re
released and converted into their active and free forms. Then they go right into the cells where many, if
not most, of other substances are not that easily transported through into cells. The reason is because all
the cells need this thyroid hormone to function at optimum levels.
Kevin:
Let’s run over this again so we can understand. The raw materials are amino acids and iodine. Are there
any other raw materials that are needed for the production of some of these hormones?
Dr. Williams: No, those are the basic ones. For the production there’s thyrocine and iodine. Those are the main substances that are the raw materials and building blocks. As you go out further, as the thyroid hormones
go along, there’s processes and metabolism that take place. They don’t just come out of the thyroid ready
to go to work. T4 has to be converted into T3 and both of those have to be converted into their bioavailable forms. That takes place in the liver and the peripheral tissues, in the muscles and skin throughout the body. At that point other molecules, nutritional molecules like selenium, for example, are highly
important for that conversion and that bio-availability.
Kevin:
So the hormones are released into the blood by the thyroid and then are metabolized in the muscle tissue
and the liver?
Dr. Williams: Yes.
Kevin:
OK. Great. When they get to where they finally need to go, the cells, what happens? What’s the aftereffect of that process?
Dr. Williams: When they get to the cells the intra-cellular metabolism takes place. The cells then can utilize the oxygen
and each cell, whether it’s in your hair follicle or in the liver cell or a brain cell or in a muscle cell, then
can function optimally. The T4 only lasts seven days in the body. That’s a whole week. So it’s circulating
around and is carried around and is available to be converted into T3. But the T3, some of it is also made
in the thyroid gland but most of it is converted from T4 in the periphery of the body. It only lasts 24
hours. So you have to have very good T3 conversion. That’s part of what we’ll talk about in terms of sub
clinical and these thyroid disorders is that T3 problem and the poor conversion. Then those molecules
need to be replaced and they’re excreted from the liver and kidneys.
Kevin:
Let’s talk about the thyroid gland in relation to your health. We kind of laid nice groundwork in terms
of what it does, where it is, what it releases. What are some of the challenges people have with thyroid
issues? What are some of the problems that are surfacing now?
Dr. Williams: Again, because of its function, the way I look at it is if you don’t get enough oxygen to your cells you’re
not going to function well. You’re going to have a slower metabolic rate and you’re going to have underfunctioning cells and you’re going to start to express a variety of different problems, all the way to true
thyroid disease.
The main symptoms of low thyroid function, there’s a long list of these, but here’s some of the main
ones - fatigue, stiffness--people who complain about being stiff in the morning. It’s not just arthritis.
Sometimes that stiffness is actually in the soft tissue, in the muscle and tendons. Thyroid hormone is
necessary to keep the tissue supple and not stiff. Weakness in the muscles. Not just tiredness but also
weakness. When I’m talking to patients I differentiate between if they’re just tired, if they can exercise,
are they better or worse after exercising and then about weakness. Are they tired and weak? If they go to
the gym they not only feel more tired but they don’t have the strength to exercise or to lift the weights.
Also there’s a lethargy. You just don’t want to do anything. It’s hard to get up, hard to get out of bed.
Often people will attribute that to some other problems. The doctor may say, “No, you’re not sick at all.
You’re depressed.” Often it’s neither of those. It’s a thyroid hormone problem.
Sleepiness. People who oversleep, who sleep 10 or 12 or more hours and say, “I need my sleep.” Slow to
start in the mornings. They can’t get up. They can’t wake up in the morning. They wake up and it takes
them hours to get going. Aches and pains. We’ll talk about how fibromyalgia interplays with the thyroid.
Even just too much aches and pains. You ache too much after the gym. People say, “I don’t want to exercise because it hurts too much.” Or, “I already hurt. I don’t want to hurt more.”
A couple of the symptoms that are really critical from a clinical point of view, because we usually think
of fatigue as the main one of the thyroid but dry, coarse skin. If your skin is almost thickening and scaly
and coarse, that’s often thyroid deficiency.
As you treat the person for thyroid improvement their skin starts to become silky again and moist and
supple. They have more energy and they’re able to exercise. Less aches and pains. Also, hair falling out.
Before the hair starts to fall out they may have dry and brittle hair, cracking and thinning. Sometimes
it’s part of the aging process but sometimes it’s thyroid. There’s lots of symptoms and a lot of challenges
that people have with thyroid.
The main conditions are going to be low thyroid, which is hypothyroidism, and high thyroid, which is
hyperthyroidism. The third is autoimmune thyroiditis, which can be either low or high. Those are the
basic clinical entities. Hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism and then Grave’s Disease, which is an autoimmune hyper, or Hashimoto’s Disease, which is a hypothyroid autoimmune condition. The old bellshaped curve of thyroid disease, which is pretty broad, has now become narrower and narrower so that
we have more and more outliers into the sub clinical low and high thyroid conditions.
Kevin:
So the losing of hair. This doesn’t have any relation to male-pattern baldness, does it?
Dr. Williams: No, not at all. It’s usually over the whole head. Sometimes you’ll see by looking at the hair you’ll see little
fine hairs growing back in but they’re very easily broken off. Like after you wash your hair, when you
towel your hair dry it will break those little hairs off. At its extreme people will say that when they wash
their hair they see a lot of hair on the shower floor. But it’s usually the whole head. If you have a tendency
to bald in certain areas, you’ll have a little more thinning in those areas. Male-pattern baldness is related
to too much dihydrotestosterone, a completely different problem.
Kevin:
You mentioned that the thyroid helps deliver oxygen to the cells. There’s a lot of information out there
that low oxygen in the body can actually contribute to cancer. Is there a direct link between the two?
Dr. Williams: Yes. There’s a link, maybe not a direct link. There’s probably not a direct link between low oxygen and
development of cancer. There’s two things we know. One is that people with even borderline low thyroid
function are four to eight times more likely to develop cancer than those with normal functioning or
high functioning thyroid. So there’s an oxygen-cancer connection.
We know that once tumor genesis takes place and a cancer’s growth has developed, it starts to have its
own lifecycle. As a matter of fact, they’re immortal, the only cell we know that’s immortal. They set up
an immune island around them and they rob the blood supply and the nutrition from the body. In the
core of that tumor it’s very oxygen-deficient. It functions differently from normal living cells in animals
and plants like we’re used to. If you use oxygen therapies like vitamin C and ozone hydrogen peroxide,
by getting more oxygen to the body and into the tumor, the belief is that you can defeat the cancer. So
there’s definitely an oxygen-cancer connection and thyroid plays a role in it.
Kevin:
So what exactly affects the thyroid? What causes it to get out of whack?
Dr. Williams: Low oxygen in the air. The most important nutritional deficiency is iodine. We now the goiter belts in
the middle of the country where there’s low amounts of iodine in the soil and that translates into low iodine content in the food and people in the middle part of the country, Michigan and so forth have more
of a tendency to have goiter. However, now food comes from all over the place. It comes from Chili and
Israel California. So Michigan people, you don’t see them being the goiter belt anymore. But modern
foods can be trace-mineral deficient, including selenium and zinc, also important for thyroid function.
But the main one is iodine. So iodine and avoiding iodine deficiency is critical for healthy thyroid.
Malnutrition itself and also low-calorie diets…If you’re doing, for example, a low-calorie life-extension
program where you’re eating 30 percent or less of the average calories that you need, for life-extension,
your thyroid and these feedback mechanisms will start to shut down. It will produce sort of a balanced
array of thyroid hormones, but it will start to make less. Your metabolism then shuts down because
there’s not enough nutrition for you to function at a higher level. So everything starts to shut down.
Malnutrition or the absence or the deficiency of key trace minerals like selenium, are very important.
Stress is another factor. The adrenal gland and the thyroid gland overlap in many ways in terms of the
hypothalamic-pituitary axis. Certain pesticides wreck havoc on the thyroid. Hormonal deficiencies like
melatonin. When treating thyroid we always add melatonin, different dosages, to the program. It has to
be a whole-body program. Too much of other hormones, like estrogen-dominance in women, is going
to cause imbalances in the thyroid, aging itself, but unhealthy aging. Many of my healthy, if not all of
my healthy older patients in their late 70s, 80s, into their 90s, have relatively normal to normal levels of
T3 and T4.
Then anti-thyroid foods like soy and alcohol, have a negative effect on thyroid function.
Kevin:
For someone who may be fasting on a regular basis, this would be a problem as well. You mentioned low
calories so that would be in the same kind of boat for the thyroid.
Dr. Williams: Not necessarily, if you’re eating well in between. If you do fasting and cleansing on a regular basis and
you don’t over-do it and you nourish yourself in between--my rule is 25 percent detoxification and
cleansing and 75 percent regeneration and building. If you’re weak on the building part and you’re weak
on the regeneration and you over-emphasize the detoxification fasting and you’re borderline malnutrition in between, or you’re on a low-calorie diet in between, that could affect it. But if 75 percent of the
time you have a strong diet and you do 25 percent of the time even full-on fasting, your body will cycle
better and it will rebound better. It’s the chronic low-grade malnutrition, low-grade absence of sufficient
amount of calories, low-grade absence of the right nutrients, which you just cannot get from modern
foods, even if you’re on a fully plant-based diet. You’re not going to get the maximum nutrient density.
So you’ll have to supplement that. Then you’ll do OK.
Kevin:
I’ve heard that there’s a connection between EMF and radiation and the thyroid. Is that true?
Dr. Williams: Yes. Radiation is not very good at all for the thyroid, like medical radiation from x-rays and CAT scans.
It predisposes to cancer. Here’s what I was saying earlier. The thyroid gland is really the only gland in
your body that is most exposed to the environment. Everything else is either deep inside, hidden under
muscle and bones or underneath your clothing. The thyroid gland is right there by your throat. You can
wear a hat in the cold weather. Unless you’re wearing a scarf you have your throat exposed. So electromagnetic radiation, pollutants and so forth all can affect the thyroid.
Sunlight, rhythms of the daytime also can affect thyroid and parathyroid metabolism and hormone activity and secretion.
Kevin:
Two of the biggest things that I know that you experience as well as I hear about all the time are chronic
fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. What is the role of thyroid hormones in the facilitation of these two
conditions?
Dr. Williams: There’s a direct and an indirect connection in almost all cases. Clinically I’m going to first rule out the
main things that cause fatigue, like anemia, vitamin deficiencies, coexisting infection and other disease
like liver disease. Those would all directly cause fatigue. Most of the time in the chronic fatigue people,
those don’t exist or they’re mild or correctable and they remain fatigued.
Then we’re going to look at hormones, first thyroid. I’m going to look at it in a very fairly detailed way.
Always I screen, right in the beginning, TSH. Then I start to look deeper if there’s anything that I’m
suspicious of. As you know, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia overlap in about 70 percent of patients with
either of those conditions, as does the irritable bowel syndrome.
In fibromyalgia in particular--and we’re looking at T3, particularly at the T3 portion of the thyroid hormone family, because it controls body temperature and stiffness and muscle pain. A sufficient percentage
can be fixed, completely cured, fairly quickly with a correct T3 replacement. It’s quite amazing. They
complain and complain. They get acupuncture sessions after acupuncture sessions. They go for chiropractic after chiropractic adjustment. They change their diet. They do fasting and cleansing. We find
the T3 part of it low, have them measure their basal temperature under their arm every day. They take
their T3 and within less than a month they’re normal people again. That doesn’t happen to all of them
but there’s a significant percentage where it’s a T3 problem and it’s at the conversion at the periphery
between T4 and T3 or what we call a resistance syndrome where they’re making enough hormone but
it’s not getting into the cells. Thyroid hormone should pass readily through the cell membrane. But they
also have to relate to the receptors on the cell. So for reasons we don’t understand the cell receptors can
become less in number or just resistant. They become lazy or fatigued or they won’t accept the thyroid
molecule and pass it into the cell. But once we get past that those fibromyalgia people respond very, very
well.
Another thing that’s important here is that thyroid hormone plays a key role in the connective tissue and
the extra cellular membrane matrix, which is a gel-like substance under your skin. It’s in the dermis. It
connects through all the connective tissue in your body. This is an interconnected system. It’s almost like
an organ system in itself, that goes from your toes to your head. The fluid portion of it bathes tissues and
gives the cells a fluid environment to live in.
When we become toxic two things happen at a deeper level. This is why just fasting and so forth it’s very
old-fashioned and doesn’t work that well, in many of these type of patients. As a matter of fact it makes
them significantly more toxic. The cleansing mechanisms, where the fluid is, is not free-flowing enough.
It’s highly important that during fasting you’re sweating, that you’re warming up your body. These people
who have low basal temperature, if they lower their metabolism through fasting they get significantly
worse. It’s very hard for me to get them better. This fluid matrix now, that should be like the ocean,
moving back and forth and around all the cells and the cells are moving like seaweeds and this free-flow,
rhythmic pattern now becomes muddy and toxic and more plastic. It becomes more like rubber. So as
the part of your connective tissue systems tries to move between the muscles inflammation develops and
pain is created. You barely touch these people and they have pain because there’s a high preponderance
of inflammatory chemokines and cytokines that have accumulated and can’t be detoxified out of that
system. Where does that go? It goes out through the skin and it goes into the lymphatic systems.
So a wiser, more comprehensive approach to not only thyroid health but fasting and detoxification is so
important so that modern people can have more effective results.
Kevin:
Is there a thyroid disease epidemic, from what you’ve seen through your observation?
Dr. Williams: I think so. It’s worldwide. I’ve been following this very closely now for about 12 or 14 years. Of course,
treating thyroid conditions since the beginning of my career, 30 years ago. You see more and more and
more thyroid conditions now. The old way, 20 years ago, the medical school way of talking about hypo
and hyper thyroid was that you would see eight hypothyroid cases, predominantly women, and one
hyperthyroid case. I started to see more and more and more thyroid cases about six to eight years ago.
Pretty soon the ratio was one hypothyroid to four or five hyperthyroids. So it’s a double amount. Those
are mainly autoimmune cases. Then you start to see a one-to-one ratio, one classical hypothyroid case-for each hypothyroid basic classical case that’s just not producing enough thyroid hormone and you give
them basic T4 replacement and they do just fine, they feel much better, to every one of those now we’re
seeing another sub clinical or autoimmune type of hypothyroidism in a wide spectrum of presentations.
There can actually be hyper and hypo, or low and high thyroid, symptoms existing at the same time in
the same patient. It’s unusual. You didn’t see these type of cases when I first started practicing. As I said,
it’s worldwide. It’s not just in the United States where we’re over-diagnosing or we have more naturopathic physicians or something like that. I see these cases and read the journals from all over the planet.
They have the same problems. The biggest one that we look at is, is this really a spectrum disorder or
is it a classifiable, sub clinical type of hypothyroidism? At least we know now that we can look at it as
autoimmune types and crossover types and hybrid types an then the sub clinical hypothyroidism, low
thyroid, which fall into a couple of main categories. One would be this low body temperature syndrome,
so-called Wilson’s Syndrome and then the pain and fatigue and constipation syndrome that occurs in
the chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and IBS folks, and then the thyroid hormone resistance syndromes and
then this variety of autoimmune syndromes.
Kevin:
I think the scariest thing about the sub clinical hyper or hypothyroidism is the fact that you can go to
your doctor, you can get a thyroid test and they can send you home saying you don’t have an issue.
Dr. Williams: Exactly. They’re looking at a paradigm and a model that’s 120 years old. One of my mentors in Belgium,
in endocrine disorders, 5th generation endocrinology family, his great, great grandfather - and I saw the
sepia pictures - was among the first in Europe to use pig thyroid glands to treat thyroid cases. They didn’t
know what was wrong with them. You see these pictures of people, these are 35-year old people and they
look 100 years old. The hair is thin and falling out. They have droopy-looking faces. They’re very pale.
They have no expression at all. They feel terrible and they can’t think. Then you see them a month, two
or three months later with these old-style cameras from the 1800s, treated with ground-up pig thyroid,
and they’re a completely different person. I saw some where a 35-year old looks 60-plus years old and
very unwell, gradually turning back to a 35-year old with a smile and bright eyes and a full head of dark
hair. It’s really quite amazing.
Kevin:
We’re going to talk about more testing and how you can read your thyroid and see how it’s operating in
module two. This is the end of module one. Dr. Williams, thank you so much for your time.
Dr. Williams: You’re very welcome.
Kevin:
Thanks so much for listening to this module. For more information about thyroid treatment, including
a discount on blood tests, please visit CompleteThyroid.com. Thanks again, and don’t forget to live awesome.
Kevin:
pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, longevity and the quality of life. He’s the author of five
acclaimed books, including “Viral Immunity” and “Prolonging Health.” With more than 25 years of
clinical experience treating chronic disease, he brings his experience with over 100,000 patient visits
directly to you.
In this program I’ll be your host while Dr. Williams shares this important information with you. Before
we start I want to share this important disclaimer with you. The information in this course is intended
for educational purposes only. It does not replace the evaluation and advice of a qualified, licensed
health care professional. For detailed information about your thyroid health, please consult with your
physician.
This is module two of the Thyroid Health program with Dr. J.E. Williams. Today we’re going to be
talking about the types of thyroid conditions, symptoms and how to identify what’s happening through
testing. Dr. Williams, thank you for being on the call.
Dr. Williams:
It’s my pleasure, as always. Thank you so much for having me.
Kevin:
All right. Let’s dig into this. We talked a little bit about testing in module one but we’re going to get into
depth today. First let’s talk about the thyroid in terms of different conditions. How is thyroid disease
categorized?
Dr. Williams:
Thyroid disease is categorized into about four to six different main areas. The first one, which is the
big one and the most common one and the one that we’re going to focus most on in this talk is the
hypothyroidism or the low thyroid syndrome. The other one is its opposite, the hyper or high thyroid
syndrome. The third one is the autoimmune thyroid diseases which are some types of the hypothyroid
and hyperthyroid. Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis is a type of low thyroid or hypothyroid and Grave’s Disease
is a type of hyperthyroid. The difference is that in the autoimmune thyroid diseases there are specific
laboratory tests that tell us that your own immune system is now messing around with the thyroid for
a variety of reasons. It complicates the picture so you have low thyroid, for example, or hypothyroidism
with autoimmune activity.
The fourth type used to be considered a sub-type of the hypothyroidism but I believe now we’re starting
to look at it as an entity in itself. Those are the sub-clinical thyroid spectrum disorders. There’s three of
those that we know about. There are the low-temperature syndrome, also called Wilson’s Disease, the
T3 receptor insensitivity also called thyroid hormone resistance and then the poor T4 to T3 conversion.
Sometimes we just say those patients are poor T4 to T3 converters.
T4 is what your thyroid gland mostly makes. That’s the thyroxin that we talked about module one. Every
day the thyroid gland produces about 90 milligrams of thyroxin, or T4. It produces only about a third
of that, about 30 milligrams per day of T3. So the T3 is the actual active hormone that gets into the cells
and does the work in its bioavailable form, which we call free T3. Much of it is made in the body in the
liver and in the peripheral tissue, in the muscles and skin and tissue underneath the skin, into T3. The
T3 is then transformed into its active or free form and that’s the one that gets into the cells.
So we have three distinct classes of this thyroid spectrum disorder that are sub-clinical in some cases and
in other cases they’re actually high levels of TSH making for a true hyperthyroid condition. Sometimes
you also see autoimmune involved. So you can have a triple overlapping condition and sometimes you
can now see complicated conditions where hyperthyroid and hypothyroid overlap. It’s very strange. It’s a
relatively new phenomenon. We believe that it’s caused by environmental influences, toxins in the water,
air and food supply.
The last one is thyroid cancer. We’ve heard a lot about that from the Chernobyl reactor incident a
number of years ago. I actually treated several patients from that, Russian and Ukrainian people. We also
know that exposure to too much medical x-rays, even dental x-rays, can increase the incidence of thyroid
cancer.
By the way, on the flip side of that is low thyroid. It increases your susceptibility to all types of cancer by
four to eight times. It’s important to have a normal functioning thyroid gland.
Kevin:
So what does a person experience when their thyroid gland is not functioning well?
Dr. Williams:
Here’s the interesting part. For hyperthyroid, high thyroid, it’s pretty clear. People feel very, very anxious.
They feel very irritable. Their eyes are almost like bulging out of their heads. Sometimes they have a
goiter. Sometimes they don’t. They feel very hot. They can’t sleep. They’re very hungry. They typically are
very lean. No matter how much they eat they don’t gain weight.
But hypothyroid is sometimes called the great imitator. It mimics all the symptoms of anemia, of
chronic fatigue syndrome. It’s associated with fibromyalgia. It’s associated with nutritional deficiencies.
It’s associated with adrenal gland deficiencies and adrenal exhaustion. I developed a list I took from my
patients over the years and put it together with the medical lists. I have a questionnaire that I ask all
my patients that are possibly low thyroid to fill out. I won’t read the whole list but here’s some. Having
exhausted feelings that are not related to stress or the amount of work or exercise you do. Morning
tiredness after a full-night’s rest. If you’re slow to get up in the morning and it takes them a half hour or
an hour to get up and they sleep a lot, 8-14 hours and still aren’t rested. Depression that doesn’t respond
to antidepressants or diet or exercise or acupuncture or massage. They have this flat affect, kind of a bland
or expressionless look on their face. They can also have the opposite. They can have unexplained anxiety
and panic attacks, kind of a trembling feeling. They tend to move in slow motion. They tend to take 20
or 30 seconds, sometimes up to one minute--I had one patient, we timed her. It took her three minutes
to respond to every question. You could almost read a book in between. She understood what you said
and her cognition was absolutely clear. It was the gap between the response of what she heard you say,
what she processed and then what she said. Low voice. Hoarseness without being a smoker, especially in
a woman, is often a sign of possible thyroid. And low sex drive.
The French call thyroid the love hormone and the love gland, not testosterone or estrogen but thyroid. If
there’s not enough thyroid they have trouble with orgasms. When you correct the thyroid they become
alive again and they become interested.
High cholesterol that’s unresponsive to diet or cholesterol-lowering medications. Correct the thyroid and
it goes down. Achiness and pains and joint pains and stiffness, carpal tunnel syndrome, fibromyalgiatype pains, are all related to thyroid. People with allergies and multiple allergy syndrome. Nobody is
that allergic. Well, every once in a while you find one. But the majority of patients are not allergic to
everything. Their immune system has gone askew. There’s imbalances all over the place. One of the them
is the thyroid. Difficulty losing weight and dry skin and hair falling out are some of the classical signs.
And there are many, many others.
Kevin:
Let me ask you this. That’s hypothyroid and hyperthyroid. When does autoimmune thyroid disease
come in? Is it an extension of, a further kind of evolution of hyperthyroid or hypothyroid or are they
completely different?
Dr. Williams:
It’s not completely different in terms of symptoms. The patients will have very similar symptoms, if
not the same symptoms. When you’re checking their markers in the blood you might find that they’re
quite extreme and there are some other imbalances that we find in the blood. It will lead us to look
at the auto markers and then we discover that there’s autoimmune markers there. They may have an
association with chronic fatigue, deficiency syndromes. They may have fibromyalgia-type syndromes,
fibrocytis, myocitis, other connective tissue disorders that give you clues or hints towards looking for
the autoimmune component. The symptom profile is not distinct from hypothyroid or hyperthyroid in
autoimmune disease.
Kevin:
Let’s talk about the sub-clinical thyroid disorders. What are they and why are they different than
hypothyroid or hyperthyroid?
Dr. Williams:
They’re different because they’re a spectrum disorder. They overlap. They blend. They mimic one and
the other. If we’re only looking at the paper we’ll see a low TSH and we’ll think that that patient is
hyperthyroid. When we look at the patient we’ll see an overweight, very cold, very fatigued, very pale
patient who has symptoms of hypothyroid. So the paper and the patient are conflicting. It’s something
we didn’t used to see 10, 20, 30 years ago when I first started practicing. It became increasingly more
common until at this point they are probably 50 percent of what you see in clinical practice. So the subclinical types overlap with each other. They overlap with autoimmune.
There are two broad categories. One is the true sub-clinical types. Their levels of TSH, T4 and T3 are
normal or very close to normal. But they have additional symptoms that lead you to believe the thyroid
is not working well. It’s not being taken up by the cells well or there’s poor conversion between the T4
and T3.
So if we look at those three different ones we’re going to see the first one is the low temperature syndrome.
All of these sub-clinical types are T3 thyroid diseases. Classical hypothyroidism is typically a T4 disease.
The thyroid gland is simply not making enough thyroxin. The sub-clinical types are primarily T3 disease.
T3 controls more of the metabolism and the body temperature. So if a person has a large part of the
symptoms of low thyroid, hypothyroid, and they take my questionnaire and they answer yes to many of
those questions, the next thing we want to do is do the blood test. If that comes up fairly normal then
we want to start measuring the body temperature. I suggest most patients now start taking their basal
temperature right away. Normal core body temperature when you take it by mouth is 98.6, but it can
vary several points one way or the other, the range being between 97 and 100. Sometimes people may
have a fever at 99, sometimes they won’t. They just run warm or the other way around, they tend to run
cold. But usually we consider that all core body temperatures of 98 or below are too low and suggest
trouble with T3. Basal temperature, which is under the arm, measures more of the basal metabolic rate
in the body, how the metabolism is actually working and keeping the body. Many of those patients
will have basal temperatures 96, sometimes even 95. Basal temperatures are usually several points lower
than core body temperature, by a full point like down to 97 or 96. But anything in the low 97s and
definitely anything that’s 96 degrees, is too low. That tells us that that patient is not getting enough T3 or
regulating body temperature well enough because there’s something wrong with how the T3 is working
in the body.
So that’s the first one, the low temperature syndrome, sometimes called Wilson’s Disease. He was a
medical doctor who really discovered this and started doing the basal temperature based on the Broda
Barns basal temperature study. Broda Barns is an MD and PhD who has dedicated more than 50 years of
his life to researching, teaching and treating thyroid disorders and related endocrine disorders. His most
significant contribution was that thyroid hormone blood tests left many patients with clinical symptoms
of hypothyroidism undiagnosed and therefore untreated. So he used natural desiccated thyroid. When
he treated his patients he found that their symptoms improved a lot better than with synthetic thyroid
hormone. Since then Dr. Wilson picked that up, also an MD, and discovered that it was really in the T3
aspect of the thyroid hormone.
So he focused on a slow release, bio-identical form of T3. At one time it was only made in Alabama
at one compounding pharmacy, about 20 years ago. It was the only place you could get it. Now all
compounding pharmacies make it. It releases slowly because T3 tends to go into the body very quickly
and dissipates also very quickly. So you want it to release slowly or you want to take it in small amounts
spread out throughout the day. When you take the T3 we usually start off in low dosages then gradually
bring the patient up. Watch their temperature as well as their blood tests, until their temperature is up
into the mid-97 range and preferably about 97.7, 97.8, closer to 98. As the temperature goes up the
numbers on the blood test also improve and usually the patient improves as well. So that’s the first one.
That’s easy to follow and check.
The second one is the receptor sensitivity or thyroid hormone resistance. That’s very difficult to look for.
How we do that is we look for the T3 uptake, which gives us an idea of available hormone-binding sites.
The binding proteins in this case thyroid hormone binding protein or globulin, is measured in the blood
and then the uptake of that, the T3 uptake, is measured. That gives us an idea if it’s T4 or true T3 disease
and if there’s some trouble with their receptors. It’s a good test. The test mechanisms are very, very good,
however it will only provide some clues to make decisions on that, whether you would give a patient T3
or not T3 or how you would treat that patient.
Then the poor T4 to T3 conversion, that’s very difficult to test. We don’t know what’s going on in
the periphery. We don’t know what’s going on in the liver. So in all of these disorders, including the
autoimmune diseases, we tend to treat them as if there was a combination overlapping. We provide
nutrients, particularly trace minerals like selenium that help the T4 convert into T3. We also provide
iodine in the organic forms to help build the molecules in a better way, and thyrocine, an amino acid.
We’ll talk about more of that in detail in the next modules.
Kevin:
I want to ask about thyroid hormone resistance. Is this similar to insulin resistance or is it completely
different?
Dr. Williams:
It’s very similar. The same thing with adrenal hormone resistance, thyroid hormone resistance, insulin
resistance. Here’s the big difference. When you’re looking at hormones in terms of the endocrine system,
for our purposes we’re going to look at ones that are critical for life and those that are not critical for life.
Insulin is critical for life. You can’t live without the right level of insulin. You’ll go into a diabetic coma
without the right amount of insulin in your body, too much or too little. It’s the only hormone that we
know about, now about 100 years that we’ve known about insulin and we haven’t found anything else
that can replace insulin. We haven’t found an insulin 1, a 2, 3, 4 like we have with thyroid hormone.
You can remove the thyroid and the patient would decline gradually but it’s not life-threatening. If the
hormone is not readily available, the gland is not working well, the communication between the pituitary
and the hypothalamus and the thyroid isn’t functioning well the patient will also be not functioning well.
They’ll have a lot of symptoms. They’ll be tired. As we talked about the thyroid hormone, it helps the
body use oxygen in the cell. So if you can’t breathe or if the cell can’t breathe then you’re going to have
sub-optimal function. However, it wouldn’t kill you outright.
So there are similarities and very close parallels in terms of the receptor mechanisms on the cells but the
difference is that insulin problems cause huge disorders in the body and can lead to death and thyroid
problems cause more of a dysfunctional concern. Of course, if you have a really rapid onset of thryoiditis
or inflammatory thyroid disease or if you have really rapid onset of Grave’s Disease, it can also make
you very, very sick and bring you close to death. There’s a difference there between those two groups of
hormones.
Kevin:
Since we touched on testing, why don’t we get deeper into it now. What tests are available? Which are
the best? Let’s talk about diagnosis as well.
Dr. Williams:
I want to first answer a question that’s probably going to come up with listeners. That is, blood or urine.
I’ve used both, hundreds and hundreds of them. But I’ve used thousands of blood tests for thyroid. Urine
tests are good but they’re tedious to do because you have to collect all the urine and do it just right.
It has to be gotten to the lab just right. Then the results are different from blood. Blood is measuring
the thyroid molecule. We’re measuring the free form of the thyroid molecules. We’re measuring the
thymoglobulin, which is the binding protein. And we’re measuring also the inflammatory markers
related to autoimmune disease and the antibodies. So blood is the best.
Urine is sometimes helpful when you get into the sub-clinical thyroid spectrum disorders and you just
can’t figure it out. It measures metabolites of the hormones. Some of the hormones have very, very small
ones. It’s very difficult to interpret. It has been used in Europe for decades. They can interpret it better
than we can. Our lab tests here, the ones that do it, and there’s only a few, they have the machines from
Europe and they do testing but the pathologists are just not trained. If you have questions as a clinician
you’re kind of running blind.
So to establish it from the beginning, I use all blood now, from major labs and we cover all of our bases
and it works quite well for the patients. We have a wide range of tests available. I think they’re quite
accurate and quite good. We have different ways of looking at the thyroid through the blood tests.
Kevin:
Say someone comes to you tomorrow and says, “I think I have a thyroid problem.” How would you go
about working with them?
Dr. Williams:
The first thing we’d do is we’d sit down and we’d say, “Why do you think that?” While they’re explaining
to me why they think they have a thyroid problem I’m going to be looking at them. I’m going to be
getting visual confirmation right there in real time, if I think that they have a thyroid problem. Most of
the time people think they have a thyroid problem because of three reasons. One, they can’t lose weight.
Two, they’re tired. And number three, somebody told them they might have a thyroid problem because
they can’t lose weight or they’re tired.
I can tell you this. Seven to nine times out of ten a healthy overweight person has a normal thyroid. There
are overweight people and there are underweight people and there are normal weight people who have
problems with their thyroid. The majority of modern people are overweight not because their thyroid
isn’t working, it’s because they don’t exercise enough and they eat too much. So I have to clear that up.
Then if I think they have a thyroid problem I start to ask them very specific questions. I have them
fill out my extensive questionnaire. Then I look at their family history. One, most thyroid disease
are hypothyroid, at least half. When I first started practicing the rule of thumb was seven to eight
hypothyroid to one hyperthyroid. Now that’s changed and you have almost half and half of hypothyroid
to hyperthyroid, autoimmune, sub-clinical, this other spectrum of diseases. So you’re going to start to
look at which half are these patients falling into? Most of them still fall into the low. You’ll find that most
of them are women. The age range is late 20s to 40s. Often the younger the woman is the more tendency
they have autoimmune thyroid disease. Thyroid hormone production tends to go down as we age. But
in healthy, robust, strong, active people who have a good hypothalamus, pituitary and a normal thyroid
gland, they are going to be producing the same amount of thyroid or very close to it as they did when
they were younger. So age is a factor but not always. During aging I watch and we can see a trend upward
very, very slowly, but it often never gets to the true hypothyroid clinical stage. However, patients might
start to express some symptoms.
Lastly, family history. If there’s a tendency, and usually it will be on the female side of the family, to have
low thyroid then it’s likely that that individual will also have it.
Then I go to examination. The first thing I’ve already done before is to look at the patient. I want to see
if they have puffiness under their eyes, a good sign that they have something wrong with their thyroid. If
their eyes are really puffy that’s called myxedema. That’s severe hypothyroidism. We look at their skin. Is
it soft? Do they have low muscle tone? Are they holding fluid under their skin? Do they have edema in
their ankles? Then we look at they thyroid gland itself and see if it’s enlarged, if we can feel any nodules
or not in there. Then look at their hair and the skin. Thin, balding, hair falling out, brittle hair, is one of
the keys signs for low thyroid. And dry, coarse skin.
As you treat the patients their skin starts to become like silk again. Their hair starts to become thicker
and starts to fill in and stop falling out.
Then we go to the testing.
Kevin:
Is it possible for someone to examine their own thyroid?
Dr. Williams:
Yes, you can examine your own thyroid. I teach my patients how to do that. I also teach them how to
take care of the thyroid gland and what exercises to do. You exercise your muscles all the time. You go to
the gym and do yoga for the muscles. You wash your skin. You brush teeth. But we don’t do anything for
our thyroid. It’s important to take care of the thyroid. There are simple exercises that I teach my patients
and self-exam on the thyroid.
Kevin:
What would it feel like if it’s out of whack?
Dr. Williams:
Number one, it would be enlarged. It’s usually not tender or painful. The thyroid sits about in the
middle of the throat, maybe about a third above the collarbone. You should be able to feel your trachea,
which would be kind of hard. If you press on the trachea you’ll feel like you’re choking. Then there’s a
group of bones there, right in front of the trachea we call the Adam’s apple in men, in women it’s not
so predominant but they still have that. It’s a bony structure there. The thyroid gland is small so you
shouldn’t be able to feel it at all. But if you feel something that’s kind of boggy or soft and you have a
hard time--unless you’re obese and then you’re not going to be able to feel any of this. But for a normal
weight and leaner people you’ll be running your fingers on both sides along your throat, feeling for the
normal structures. If you feel anything around it or soft or boggy and if you look in the mirror and see a
little bit of a goiter that can certainly tell you that your thyroid is slightly enlarged and you ought to get
a more professional examination.
Kevin:
You keep mentioning if people have thinning hair. Is there any relation to male baldness or no?
Dr. Williams:
Not at all. Male pattern baldness is due to too much of a very active form of testosterone called
dihydrotestosterone or DHT for short. That can come in younger ages. The type of hair loss that occurs
in thyroid is first it starts to fall out. It becomes dry and brittle and thinner. Then it starts to become very
thin all through the head. Often you’ll see in an area about the size of your palm, just in the top middle
part. It becomes very straggly and just sort of droops down and it just gets progressively worse over time.
Kevin:
What is causing the hair to fall out?
Dr. Williams:
The active hormone is not getting into the cells that build the hair as it grows out of the hair follicle.
Thyroid hormone is necessary for protein activity in the body. Hair is made of protein. Muscle is made
of protein. Without enough thyroid hormone you’re going to have weak muscles and soft muscles and
you’re going to have thin and falling hair. Anything to do with protein is going to have a problem.
Kevin:
That’s completely reversible, right?
Dr. Williams:
It’s almost always completely reversible.
Kevin:
You mentioned the blood tests. I want to know what are the best ones to take and then maybe break it
down into who would need to take which ones.
Dr. Williams:
First of all, everybody should get their TSH checked. I like to have baselines for my patients. So the
earlier the better. Late 20s is good and mid 30s is great. By your late 30s, early 40s I want to have
baselines on both male and female patients. That would include the hormones, the cholesterol and
everything that we normally take but also the TSH. People are living longer. They want to be healthier,
more robust through middle age. They can’t get there without keeping the hormones balanced. So first
of all, for healthy people, we’re going to do TSH screening. That’s enough for those people.
Now, both high, low and autoimmune thyroid people will need to have their TSH done. That’s the thyroid
stimulating hormone produced by the pituitary. The big question though is, is that enough? When we’re
looking at these complex thyroid diseases. If 50 percent of the patients that come in, that’s conservative,
I believe they’re increasing, will be missed by just doing the TSH because it’s mostly reflective of the T4
and not so reflective of T3, then we need to go a little bit further.
The better approach that I use is the TSH and the free T4 that I’m looking at two ways, very classical
ways of looking at thyroid function for both and the total T3. Those three tests, TSH, free T4 and total
T3, are what I use.
There’s different opinions on the T3. Some physicians like to do the free T3 right away. But the range
is so narrow you don’t get a chance to see where the numbers fall. It’s either in or out. When you do the
total T3 you can a clear idea of where the T3 number is falling in a broader range. Is it in the middle?
Is it towards the higher end? Is it on the lower end of normal? Is it below normal? Is it high above the
range? If you do the TSH and the free T4 together you get a very good idea of how the pituitary and the
thyroid gland are communicating and the end product of thyroxin, which is its bio-available form of
the free T4. To keep the cost of the tests down and to get a good view, what I call a better approach for
screening, is TSH, free T4 and total T3.
For people who want to take a deeper look we do a functional medicine thyroid panel. This is pretty
standard for naturopathic physicians and holistic MDs and holistic osteopathic doctors. We look at the
TSH, total T4 and the free T4, the total T3 and the free T3 and the reverse T3. So here we have all of
the markers that we need to evaluate hypo, hyper and sub-clinical thyroid, at least as a comprehensive
screening.
So those three, the basic TSH screening, the better approach of TSH, free T4 and total T3 and then the
functional medicine thyroid panel, which is the more comprehensive look, are the tiered level of how
we go about doing it. Some people want to just jump in and do the whole thing. I don’t need to do
that because I can tell from how the patient presents, from the questionnaire, from the patient history,
the family history, their other blood testing, kind of which direction I’m going. We do their basal
temperature. Reflexes tend to be very slow in hypothyroid patients, particularly at their Achilles tendon
in the back of their heel. So I get very good ideas of which direction I’m going to go.
I know that people who already have thyroid disorders and they’re listening to this program are going to
say that, “I’ve already done all of those and my doctor says that everything is fine.” Or, “I’ve already done
all of those and there’s some that are fine and some that are corrected and some that aren’t corrected and
we can’t get them corrected. My doctor doesn’t know what to do about it.” Then we need to start looking
a little bit deeper. There’s many layers of looking now down.
The first one, if we think it’s T3 we’re going to start looking at T3 analysis. All of these, looking deeper, I
think, require the assistance of somebody who is well-versed and has long clinical experience in thyroid
disorders. In this T3 analysis--and our listeners may want to bring this to the attention of their physician-we want to look at the reverse T3, the free T3, the T3 uptake and T3 ratios. As I mentioned, the T3
uptake gives us an idea of the available hormone binding sites. It gives us a better idea, along with basal
temperature, if it’s a T4 problem or a T3 problem.
Then we might want to look at thyroid binding globulin. If there’s too much or too little of the binding
hormone protein that’s going in the blood, that will give us other clues.
Then lastly, but most importantly, are the autoimmune tests. The most common ones are the
thyroidperoxidase antibodies or what we call the TPO, the antithyroglobulin antibodies and the thyroid
stimulating amino glob.
Some of my patients have all three of these abnormal and their TSH is very high. They have very
abnormal readings in their T4 and T3 levels and nothing is right at all. In those patients we know that
we have not just a thyroid gland problem but we have a thyroid axis problem. This is a hypothalamuspituitary-thyroid axis problem. Not a simple up or down, high or low type of problem. Now we’ve got a
very good “challenge” on our hands.
If we look even deeper we find that the adrenal gland becomes involved. We’ll talk about that more in
a subsequent session. Then you have an axis problem that involves not just the thyroid but the adrenal
gland and you have a hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-thyroid axis imbalance. It gets quite confusing,
even for us.
Kevin:
Yes, it does. I want to go through these just one more time in terms of what would be high and what
would be low and what would be normal. TSH, if it’s high what do you have and if it’s low what are you
looking at?
Dr. Williams:
When the thyroid gland is weak the pituitary directs it, communicates to it with the thyroid stimulating
hormone to make more thyroxin. So when the TSH is high that means the thyroid is low. It’s
counterintuitive but that’s how it is. When the TSH is low, that’s hyperthyroidism. The lab range is,
approximately, depending on the labs, 0.4-5.5. What we want is the optimal range of 0.1-2.5. So some
patients that are 3.5 or 3.7 or 4.2, a conventionally-trained conservative physician will say it’s nothing
wrong. “I did the screening tests and your thyroid is fine. I can’t explain why you’re fatigued, why you
have relentless anemia, why your hair is falling out. Maybe it’s stress. Maybe you’re depressed.” That’s not
good biological medicine. That person may in fact have problems with the other markers and we need to
do more expanded profile in terms of the testing and then look a little bit deeper. So we’re going to look
at T3 and T4. The lab range is 0.8-1.8. So that’s a very tight range. We want the patients number to fall
right within that range. It could be a little bit tighter, like 1.0 or 1.5-1.8. But we want it to fall towards
the mid to the upper end of the range. It’s just fine if it’s within that range.
Then we look at the total T3. The range is pretty broad, from 60-181. We want the number to fall
within the range but actually patients are going to feel a lot better, they’re going to do a lot better, their
symptoms are going to go away faster, if their total T3 is higher, in the 100-120 up to about 180.
So there’s the lab range which gives you the classical diseases and then there’s the optimal range for total
symptom improvement and personal wellness that’s optimized for that individual.
If we look at the free T3 the range is a lot more narrow, 3.3-4.2. We want that to fall in the range.
The reverse T3 has a broad range from 90-350. What we don’t want is too much reverse T3. So if the
reverse T3 is falling within the range or around the mid-range or a little bit lower, then we’re good to go.
The body will make too much reverse T3, which is not able to be biologically-active in the body. The
receptors may pick it up but it will do nothing inside the cell and there’s not enough of the good total
and free T3.
The autoimmune markers, the TPO thyroglobulin antibody and the thyrostimulating immunoglobulin,
should be in the ranges. When they’re above their laboratory range there’s something wrong. When
they’re within the range there’s nothing wrong, in terms of autoimmune expression in that patient.
Kevin:
Great. Let’s just go through the free T4, total T3, free T3 and reverse T3. Well, you went through the
reverse T3 in terms of higher or low. If free T4 is too high, what are we possibly looking at and what are
we looking at if it’s too low?
Dr. Williams:
Let’s break it down into a couple of basic forms here. You look at the TSH always. If the TSH is to high
that’s hypothyroid. If the TSH is too low that’s hyperthyroid. Then you look at the TSH with the free
T4. If the TSH is high and the free T4 is low, that’s hypothyroid. If the TSH is low and the free T4 is
high, that’s hyperthyroid.
Kevin:
Then with the T3, let’s move through the other ones, free T3 and total T4.
Dr. Williams:
The total T4 is a generalized marker. We run it just to have a record of it but the free T4 is the one that
really reflects the TSH. Total T4 should be within range, the same thing as the free T4. If it’s low, that’s
not enough thyroxin and that’s hypothyroid. If it’s high it’s going to be related to hyperthyroid.
On the T3 components, you can have a normal TSH, because TSH is more reflective of T4, or you
could have a sub-clinical or sub-optimal range like 3.5 or 2.7. Some patients, even at 2.5 it’s not optimal
enough for them. They need a 1.5 or 0.5. But when you look at the TSH it’s going to be within normal
ranges it will tend to be in the higher end, somewhere between 3.5 and 5.5, meaning there’s likely some
sub-clinical thyroid, low thyroid problem. Then the T3 and free T3 numbers will be towards the low end
or below the normal range. When they’re scraping the left side edge of the reference range with just the
lower edge you can start to think that, “Ah, borderline high TSH, borderline low T3, total and free, and
basal temperature 96.2, probably have a T3 problem in that patient.”
Kevin:
Some of you may be wondering where you can get these tests. You can order these tests through your
health practitioner. We also do have an option where we set up a special discount for listeners at the
website that will be listed at the end of this program. So you can check that out and you can get the tests
there if you wanted to test yourself. Dr. Williams and I have set up a program where you can do that on
your own.
When do you use a thyroid ultrasound? What is a thyroid ultrasound?
Dr. Williams:
A thyroid ultrasound is a very usable tool. This is one your doctor will order for you. I did one on a
patient the other day, one of these very, very complex cases. She has improved tremendously, by the way.
Hair is growing back and skin is smooth again. But we’re not quite there yet. She has a number of other
conditions, all interlaced and overlapping. Now I have to weed them out and go through a discovery
process. One of those is to look a little bit further at her thyroid gland. She’s been sick for so long. We’ve
made tremendous improvement but we’re not quite getting to normal yet. So let’s see if there’s actually
anything wrong with the tissue itself.
When you feel the thyroid gland, a clinician that’s worked with thyroid for a long time and has been
trained, we can get a good idea how large the thyroid gland is. Sometimes you can feel nodules in there.
A lot of times these nodules are very small and you can’t feel them at all. You can only see them by
ultrasound. What they do is they send sound waves through the tissue and the density of the tissue is
registered on a computer. They didn’t have ultrasound before modern computer times, the late 80s and
90s. It’s very good technology. There’s no radiation so there’s no harm or damage to the patient. It’s done
very quickly and very safely. They don’t need to use any radioactive dyes. Then we can see if there’s any
nodules. Nodules mean there is tissue changes have occurred. It could be precancerous or they could be
benign. The thyroid tissue itself, the gland itself, is diseased and it’s not just low-functioning.
Unfortunately in my patient we found four to six small nodules. So now I know that her thyroid gland
is actually more diseased than we thought in the beginning, although we had pretty good evidence that
it was seriously sick. Now we have to make decisions on what we do from there.
If you or your doctor are working on improving your thyroid and you’re doing all the exercises that I’m
going to teach you and you’re taking all the supplements that I educate you on and you’ve started on the
right hormone and your numbers are getting aligned but not quite right and you’re still not quite right
I would order an ultrasound.
Kevin:
Does ultrasound generate a significant amount of heat? Is that something to be concerned about?
Dr. Williams:
There’s two types of ultrasound. Sometimes they’re called sonograms. There’s a therapeutic one and then
there’s a diagnostic one. They’re both going to generate heat if you leave the instrument in one place.
The therapeutic ones you actually want to generate heat deep into the tissue and it’s used for treatment.
We had therapeutic ultrasound long before we had diagnostic ultrasound. The therapeutic ultrasound
generates a lot of heat and you just leave it there for a few seconds. The diagnostic ultrasound, the
technician will keep that moving slowly around the area around the tissue and they’ll watch the screen
until they get a good image and then they’ll click onto that image and they’ll freeze that image. They
don’t have to do it quickly but they don’t leave it in one area. Patients never complain about feeling any
heat from diagnostic ultrasound.
Kevin:
Let’s take someone through what they can do if they are doing self-testing or even if they’re working with
their practitioner. You and I both agree that it’s important to work with a practitioner in many cases
because they can help with certain distinctions. What’s the advice that you could give someone, breaking
it down about self-testing for the thyroid.
Dr. Williams:
First of all, take the questionnaire. I’ll provide that and a lot of other information in the PDF that’s
going to accompany this. It’s also in my books, “Prolonging Health” and “Viral Immunity.” I talk about
the importance of thyroid and the immune system and aging in both of those books. You’ll find that
questionnaire in there as well. So first of all, take the questionnaire.
Second, take your basal temperature and your oral temperature. Buy a basal thermometer. Learn how to
do that. I will provide information and how to do that in the PDF that accompanies this program. Find
out what your basal temperature and your core body temperature. Often you’ll see quite a big difference.
Your core temperature that you take by mouth, if you take it several times during the day, may start
off cooler in the morning, which is somewhat normal. Then it will normalize by 10 or 11 and will stay
normal the rest of the day. When you find that every day it’s working like that then you don’t have to
continue doing that. But you may find that your basal temperature, which you take under your arm,
only in the morning before getting out of bed, will be low and stay low day after day. Women who are
menstruating it will fluctuate somewhat during the menstrual cycle. You can see great dips sometimes.
So number one, questionnaire, number two, temperature. Then, if you have a normal basal temperature
and have a normal oral temperature and you only have a few of the symptoms on the questionnaire,
then you can get by with just doing just a basic TSH screening. Or, if you want the better approach,
do the TSH, the free T4 and the total T3, if you’re concerned that you might have low thyroid. If you
have low basal temperature, lower than 97.2, and you filled out more than one half of the answers to the
questionnaire as yes, and you have thought that you might have low thyroid, then you should do the
functional medicine panel. That would include the entire T4, T3, TSH and the reverse T3. If you think
you have an autoimmune condition or any advanced thyroid disease or are concerned about thyroid
cancer, then consult with your physician or specialist in functional thyroid disorders and thyroid disease.
Kevin:
So as we’re wrapping up this module, what kind of general advice can you give someone who is looking
at this and saying, “I think maybe this will work for me.” Will this work for everyone? How many people
will it work for? Who will need to move forward and do more?
Dr. Williams:
The lab testing is very good. It’s state of the art and it’s universal. Someone in Belgium or Canada or
Zimbabwe or Peru will take the same TSH test equipment. The technicians are running it. The reference
ranges may vary a little bit depending on that but they’ll always be approximately the same and high will
always be hypothyroid and low will be hyper. So that’s number one.
The second thing is you want to take it from, the question, the worry, the anxiety about having
hypothyroid or not, having hypothyroid as part of your fatigue syndrome, part of your fibromyalgia…
Then you start with the questionnaire and you start with the temperature studies. The testing part, if you
do the TSH, the free T4 and the total T3, you’re going to get a very good screening. You’re going to look
at three distinctive aspects of that, along with the questionnaire and temperature. You’re going to have
more than enough information to start self-treatment and to take that to your physician and say, “I want
to go a little bit further.” Or, “Look, I found this. This is as far as I can go myself. Can we take a look at
it a little bit further?”
I think you can do a lot of corrective work in one-third of the time. Another third of the time it gets quite
complicated but an intelligent person that’s done a lot of reading and a lot of studying could probably
work with it and work with their physician intelligently. The last third is way beyond the average
intelligent person without some deep background in thyroid endocrinology and autoimmune disease.
Kevin:
Like I said before, you can get some of these tests if you want to do them yourself. You can get them on
the website that I will mention at the end of this program. So keep listening.
In module three we’re going to be talking about what to do next. Once you get all the test results, once
you know what’s going on, what can you do? Dr. Williams, thank you so much.
Dr. Williams:
You’re very welcome. I’m looking forward to getting to the next module because that’s the exciting part.
Kevin:
a discount on blood tests, please visit CompleteThyroid.com. Thanks again, and don’t forget to live
awesome.
Kevin:
directly to you.
In this program I’ll be your host while Dr. Williams shares this important information with you. Before we
start I want to share this disclaimer: The information in this course is intended for educational purposes
only. It does not replace the evaluation and advice of a qualified, licensed health care professional. For
detailed information about your thyroid health, please consult with your physician.
We are here for module three with Dr. J.E. Williams. Today we’re going to be talking about missing
thyroid links. You’re asking, “What does that mean?” Well, I’m actually going to let Dr. Williams explain.
So Dr. Williams, thanks for being on the call.
Dr. Williams:
You’re very welcome. It’s my pleasure to be here, again. I’m really looking forward to this module because
these are areas that are overlooked and very important. They’re not totally missed by the researchers
and the scientists and the clinicians and the endocrinologists and the naturopaths. I’m a board-certified
naturopathic doctor. We’re probably on the cutting-edge of all of this. But there’s a lot of details to it.
We’re in an in-between stage. We’re not in a gray area but a transition zone where research is building,
clinical evidence is building, experience is building. The lay public is crying out and the patients are
screaming for more information. So I thought that we would explore some of these missing links.
In three main areas, the sub-clinical and autoimmune thyroid links, the thyroid hormone and bone
health association and the links of thyroid and aging. All important areas for our health.
As a short introduction I’d like to pose the hypotheses, which I believe is well-confirmed now, certainly
in my clinical practice and other doctors I’ve talked to and in the literature, is that there are an increasing
number of thyroid disease cases. The old paradigm, the old model was that physicians thought they had
solved thyroid. Basically you had the pituitary interacting with the thyroid gland and producing a few
types of hormones, mainly the T4, which was well-converted into T3, the active hormone in the body.
The thyroid gland could become under-functioning or over-functioning. So you had a clinical diagnosis
of hyperthyroidism, too much, and hypothyroidism, too little, of T4, which is primarily what we’re
looking at, the thyroxin molecule which is what the thyroid mostly produces, about 80 percent. They
had a solution for each. For low thyroid you gave then synthetic T4. They believed that the science was
perfect and not just state of the art but we had reached the endpoint of all that we could do and the oldstyle thyroid medication, which was originally discovered in Germany and Belgium and in Europe in
the late 1800s, was to give pork thyroid glands, dried and processed. So basically we have what we call
protomorphogens, or whole desiccated porcine or pig thyroid. That had enough hormone in it to make
the difference in low thyroid cases.
Then they were able to manufacture it, both from pig and from cows, in a way in the laboratory that
was able to concentrate the hormones more, primarily the T4 and the T3 component. Then we had
Armour Thyroid, which is now back on the market, for over a year. Demand was so great that they had
ran out of supplies and there were some regulatory issues. Now that’s back on the market. There were a
couple of other companies, [inaudible] and Naturethyroid which were using cow hormone. Those are
also becoming available again. In Europe they don’t like to use that because of mad cow disease. They
prefer to stay with the pig hormone. Many countries don’t even allow desiccated thyroid to be used, only
synthetic forms, including bio-identical forms which are quite adequate.
So historically the AMA-style MDs thought they had it covered. “We’ll give synthetic thyroxin, T4,
for low thyroid patients. The TSH comes down. The patients feel better. Case closed. For high thyroid
we don’t have too much. We have only one drug which has a lot of side effects. So the best choice is
to destroy the thyroid gland, stop it completely, and then replace with T4.” So they had radiation and
surgery. That was it.
Then they started to show a different dimension, autoimmune types of high and low thyroid so they
established a Japanese physician, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. It’s an autoimmune thyroid type of condition
of low thyroid. Then Grave’s Disease and that was the autoimmune version of hyper thyroid. As things
went along and as we expanded our viewpoint we started to see more and more different shades of
high and low thyroid cases. Then we started to see them kind of tumbling into the opposites and
all kinds of mixed disorders and other conditions that might have thyroid-related components. We
started to look at axes because we already knew in the early 80s, by the early 80s we knew that the
hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis played a large role in endocrine health in the body. We found that
there’s a hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid, HPT, axis, that was very important for regulating the entire
thyroid-endocrine balance. Then we started to see that there was a hypothalamic-pituitary-ovary axis and
that those interactions between the thyroid and ovarian axis and the adrenal and the thyroid axis and that
everything is interconnected. If this web of endocrine interconnections becomes disturbed then all sorts
of imbalances start to show up beyond the average classical hypo or hyperthyroid symptomotology.
So the question really is, how do we define these? What can we do about them? What are some of the
determinants related to these type of thyroid diseases? As we start to look further and further we find
out that the science is incredibly better than it was 20, 40, 60 years ago. There are multiple molecular
determinants. There’s hormone-dependant control. There’s crosstalk and communication between
thyroid hormone and steroid hormones, both estrogen and androgens. There’s interplay between all
types of other tissues, bone, endometrial. So endometriosis may actually be proven to have a strong
thyroid connection. Aging and increasing likelihood to have cancer or develop from cancer to full-blown
tumor activity. So we’re starting to see that the thyroid is much, much more important than we used to
think.
Kevin:
Let’s talk about some of these different things that you’ve identified. Let’s start with sub-clinical and
autoimmune links.
Dr. Williams:
There’s basically three types of sub-clinical thyroid conditions. We talked about these in module two. The
first one is the most well-known and there’s the most emphasis on it by clinicians. They often think that
now that they’ve captured the essence of everything once they learn something new, but in fact there’s
a lot more to it. The first one we call the low T3 syndrome, also called Wilson’s Syndrome, and that’s
associated to temperature regulation. What we find is that the patients, even if they’ve corrected and
the TSH is normalized and the number comes down and their T4 component comes up, that they still
don’t feel well. They continue to feel tired. Their hair continues to fall. They still have dry skin and they
continue to have poor temperature regulation. They are more sensitive to cold. They’re the ones wearing
a sweater in the summer. They’re wearing a jacket or coat in air-conditioning. They often have cold hands
and feet even all the way to Reynaud’s Phenomenon, which is circulation so poor in the extremities that
fingertips and toes turn white or sometimes purple or black and are icy cold. When we take their core
temperature by mouth it’s lower than the standard 98.6, down to the low 98s or even high 97s. When
we do their basal temperature we find that their temperatures are low 97s, often in the 96 range and
occasionally all the way down to 95. They also have a tendency to have muscle aches and pains and
fibromyalgia. Of course, they have all of the other hypothyroid conditions. We look at this one type, the
low T3 temperature syndrome.
The other is where the body is producing too much reverse T3 so when the T4, thyroxin, is converted
in the body, the T3 can be converted to a biologically-available form or an biologically-unavailable
form which is called reverse T3. That’s measured high by blood tests, meaning that they have too much
reverse T3 or unavailable T3, the active thyroid hormone, and not enough regular T3. Too much reverse
T3 will occupy the receptor sites so that the T3 hormone that they do have can’t get into the cell. They
experience all of the low thyroid phenomenon. That’s often called Wilson’s Syndrome, after Dr. Wilson
who is a medical doctor who identified this problem.
The third type is true receptor sensitivity phenomenon, also associated with poor conversion. So you
have enough T4 but it’s not converting well enough to T3 and even if you have enough T3 it’s being
blocked at the cells by sensitivity or lazy receptors.
So we’ve identified three different types of sub-clinical thyroid condition. They overlap with the other
high and low thyroid. They overlap with autoimmune thyroid. The other aspect is the autoimmune
thyroid diseases, which overlap with everything. My specialty area, viral immunity, is that. Often my
focus is going to be, is there a viral role? Has a virus gotten into the thyroid or associated with the thyroid
and then the body is attacking the thyroid itself?
So do we try to correct the thyroid or do we look at a broader picture of viral immunity and thyroid.
Now we know that that can be true and that the immune system plays a crossover role with thyroid
hormone and vice versa. So I’m very keen on my work for that, for chronic viral infections or history of
acute virus, particularly around the throat or neck region.
The next component is environmental toxins. There’s two aspects of that. One is too much from multiple,
more than 6,000 different man-made toxins in the environment. How do we sort out those that are
causing problems with the thyroid? We don’t know quite yet. But we have a very strong suspicion that
they definitely play a role.
The other component is that because the air is polluted and is taken up with these pollutants and that the
oxygen percentage is low. Thyroid controls metabolism through oxygen regulation on the cellular level.
If there’s not enough oxygen you’re not going to feel well. If your thyroid is poorly functioning, there’s
a chicken and egg circular argument. Not enough oxygen creates low thyroid function and low thyroid
function does not produce enough oxygenation to the cells. They both interplay. We start to consider
ozone and oxygenation therapies, which we’ll talk about in the next module.
Then what about food? Does modern genetically-modified foods play a role in thyroid? Yes. We’re starting
to find that there are thyroid-friendly foods and that synthetic foods, genetically-modified forms of
natural foods play a role in influencing and regulating the genetic factors and can play a role in sensitive
individuals.
The next level is a stress connection and adrenal health. How do they overlap? We are also finding that
there is overlapping there.
So we have a number of components, a number of different ways of looking at things. It gets highly
complex. There’s a lot of head-scratching that goes on in my office when we’re looking at these cases. We
start from the basics and we start from the simple and work our way up. It’s like the Gordian knot, trying
to unravel these multiple connections. There’s different ways to do that. It’s fascinating and we’re making
progress. I want to assure our listeners today that if you don’t fall into the standard high or low category,
and if your treatments aren’t working, there’s other answers. There’s other ways to look at it. Sometimes
we can find the cause and use different ways to modulate and regulate any viral immunity interplay to
detoxify the body of chemicals, to change food choices, to cope with stress and manage stress better, to
help the pituitary and adrenal and other endocrine glands function better and to orchestrate the thyroid
hormone prescription so it’s more individualized and safer, more beneficial to the patients.
Kevin:
The viral immunity that you had mentioned, are there specific viruses or even bacteria that may play a
bigger role than others?
Dr. Williams:
We don’t know yet which of the viruses might be a direct cause. I’m not looking for that one cause,
one effect type of paradigm. I’ve found that clinically patients often have an Epstein-Bar virus which is
pervasive. They can be anywhere in different parts of the body. You often will find these patients with
sort of perpetual or cycling low-grade sore throat, low-grade swollen lymph glands. Typically these will
be in the front under their jaw, in the front of their neck rather than the back of the neck, although some
will have back of the neck and some will have both. The causative virus in the same family that cause
shingles, often that’s brought into the head and into the eye, towards the back of the head and around
towards the neck. They seem to get the most likely herpes virus family. I have found clinically, they are
the most commonly associated.
I haven’t found, particularly, bacteria. However, it’s very possible that bacteria play a role. We know that
large percentages, nearly 80 percent, of healthy people, if you do throat swabbing, will test positive for
streptococcus, even though they don’t have strep throat. Their body has neutralized it. It’s living in the
back of their throat. I think that toxicity, which includes environmental pollutants as well as viruses and
bacteria, will get trapped in the tonsils, which is a lymph node. That’s very close to where the thyroid is.
It can drain downward. So there is certainly some lymphatic involvement, some inflammatory changes
that are going on, cytokines, which are associated with tissue inflammation and active autoimmunity,
even if it’s not tissue-destructive autoimmunity.
Then up in the soft palate, if you run your tongue behind your teeth and along the hard palate, all the
way back is the soft palate where it opens to your throat area. On each side are our tonsils. It can be a
repository for all types of organisms, including bacteria and yeast and fungus. It can spread around in
your throat. They can also have a role in thyroid autoimmunity. Sometimes they’ll grow enough to cause
a low-grade sore throat or low-grade strep. Often we’ll see in the patient’s throat little white plaques of
where the fungus is growing. The next time we look it’ll be gone. So they don’t have a full-blown thrush.
They’re not completely autoimmune. They’re not completely immune-deficient. But things are growing
in the soft palate, these nasty little things that like that dark, warm, moist zone up there.
I took some workshops from a Japanese physician who was a leading expert in that. He had a special
probe made, a stainless steel probe and into that he put a q-tip. It was curved like a shepherd’s hook.
He would reach back in the throat and then the curved part he would lift up on the soft palate and take
a swab way up in there. Then he would have that cultured. I never heard of anybody doing that in the
states. It was very fascinating. He showed all this research and all the hundreds of different organisms
that he was finding in the soft palate.
So there are lots of influences, potentially. We just don’t completely know yet.
Kevin:
Let’s talk a little bit more about the connection between the adrenal and the thyroid.
Dr. Williams:
The first thing we have to think about here is stress. What role does stress play in adrenal and thyroid?
Well, we certainly know that stress plays a huge role with the adrenals. The adrenal gland is essentially
the stress-modulating endocrine gland in the body. It produces adrenaline, the fight or flight hormone.
It produces corticosteroid hormones that modulate inflammation. The endocrine system, if we rank,
from least important to most important, and divide it into two types, your most important where your
life depends on them and those that are less important where your life doesn’t depend on them. You can
live with very low thyroid and a very dysfunctional thyroid for a long time. But you can’t live without
your adrenal glands. There are very rapid changes when the adrenal hormones go too much or too little.
Adrenal crisis can be an emergency room situation. It can cause too low hormones and it can go to
adrenal shut down and your body can’t operate anymore. So that can lead to rapid death. So the adrenal
is highly important.
Both of those hang from the higher centers, starting with the hypothalamus, which is at the center
of the brain, approximately. It’s a very, very small gland. It has very, very powerful links to health and
aging and is highly influenced by the other endocrine glands like the adrenal, like the thyroid. It’s
main relationship, as we know it now, is to communicate and talk to the pituitary, where the pituitary
produces hormone that directly talks to and communicates with the adrenal and thyroid and ovaries. So
we have hypothalamic-pituitary interconnection between the adrenal and the thyroid.
Then a third axis link between the adrenal and thyroid via the hypothalamic-pituitary top of the pyramid,
kind of the coat hanger effect at the top where it hangs the clothes up.
I have one patient who recently we saw this in quite clearly. Her thyroid was extremely low-functioning,
one of the lowest I’ve ever seen and some of the lowest that my colleagues have ever seen. When I get
these unusual cases I like to share them with my colleagues and see if they have any tips or compare
notes. They said, “Wow, that’s about as low as it can get. It’s amazing she’s functioning at all.” At the same
time her adrenal gland was low-functioning. I’ve had several of these patients in the last few years. She’s
been diagnosed by her alternative healthcare practitioner as having low adrenal gland. They thought
that her extreme fatigue was due to low adrenal functioning. In fact, what’s happening here is that the
hypothalamic-pituitary connection was telling the adrenal, “Listen, your brother or cousins up above in
the thyroid gland are not doing so well. They’re unemployed and they need a little bit of assistance.” The
adrenal says, “Well, can’t the government help them out?” “Well, we’ve already done everything we can.
You’re their first cousin so you might have to take over a little bit until the government assistance kicks
in.” So the adrenal starts to produce more cortisol, more DHEA. Now what we have is we have a higher
level of adrenal activity that’s compensating for the adrenal low thyroid activity. Eventually what will
happen is that your adrenal may eventually exhaust and now you have both low adrenal and low thyroid
function. Or what can happen is when the standard medical practice would be to give synthetic thyroxin
for the low thyroid. Then the patient takes the thyroxin and it suppresses the pituitary so the TSH
level starts to go down and then the communication between the hypothalamic-pituitary and adrenal
gets confused. Now there’s an outside, synthetic component coming in and saying, “It looks like the
government assistance checks have started to come in.” So the older brother says, “Thank goodness. Let
me see bank statements. Oh, TSH is 2.5. That’s pretty good so I can take a break. I don’t need to produce
as much adrenal hormone. I’m tired. I’ve been carrying both families for too long.” Boom, the adrenal
shuts down and now we have an artificially-held up thyroid and now a deficient, hopefully temporarily,
but it could go into adrenal collapse.
So you have to be very carefully clinically on how you modulate these. That’s another very important area
when our listeners are looking for these complex thyroid conditions. We start from the basics and then
work our way through. If they’re still not doing better and don’t have good refined treatment with both
T4 and T3, diet, nutrients and so forth, then at some point you have to look at adrenal function.
The best way to do that, actually I do it two ways, but the best way is salivary hormone, DHEA and
cortisol. Those are the free and biologically-available forms of DHEA and cortisol. It’s done four times,
six times is better, during the day so you can get little snapshots every four hours or every six hours or
how the adrenal is functioning on two hormones, the DHEA and cortisol. That would be plotted on a
graph and then we can get an idea if it’s low overall or if it’s low or high at different times and where the
disregulation is.
I also do a total cortisol and sometimes a free cortisol. I look at my blood in the morning because at
nighttime the adrenal should be resting and the cortisol levels should be getting lower and lower during
the night. They should start to pick up when you wake up and start to ramp up again between 5 and 7 in
the morning. So you’d want to get those patients to the lab around 7 or 8 o’clock, no later than 9 o’clock
in the morning, to get a good idea of that.
Then there’s another part of this that’s very important. That’s the role that the pituitary, hypothalamus
and adrenal hormones play with blood sugar. So there’s strong crossover with cortisol and weight issues
and kind of excess cortisol. In fact, gaining weight and chunking up in the trunk of the body so eventually
the waist is larger than the hips, there can be low-grade levels of that and the regulation of blood sugar
in the body. So people will have a hypoglycemic-reaction here.
So we can have three things going on with some of these patients. The problem can become complex.
The adrenal overlap would be compensating and there often is a disregulation of how glucose and blood
sugar is used in the body. So they can have highs and lows with their blood sugar, with a tendency
towards hypoglycemia, low blood sugar and fatigue associated with that. So you have three types of
fatigue going on all at the same time. Adrenal fatigue, thyroid hormone fatigue and glycemic fatigue.
Those people who have chronic viruses will have another level of fatigue on top of that. So they will
come in and the term you hear over and over again from patients is wired and tired. These are the people
who have too much adrenal hormone, too much adrenaline going on, and they have too little thyroid,
both at the same time. Some it’s the reverse and they’ll have too much thyroid going on. They may be a
little bit autoimmune hyperthyroid and they have too little adrenal hormones going on so they feel the
classic wired and tired, very much like people who can’t sleep at night. Their body is tired and they feel
exhausted and yet they’re lying wide awake and can’t sleep.
Kevin:
So let’s move into the second link, the bone health link and how thyroid can affect that.
Dr. Williams:
Thyroid hormones play a very important role in bone health. First I want to preface my discussion on
the bone health link and the thyroid hormones with the idea that there are many factors in terms of bone
health, not just calcium. We’ve taken too much calcium and now we’re finding that there’s risks of taking
too much calcium. In naturopathic medicine we’ve never given high doses calcium. When the MDs were
saying 1400 milligrams a day we were saying less than 600 milligrams a day. Some of my patients are on
400 milligrams of calcium, plus nutrients and regulating their endocrine system with hormones. Even
with 80-year old women I’ve been able to slow down, stop and reverse osteoporosis. I haven’t been able
to bring them back to a 25-year old bone structure but we’ve reversed it so it is statistically significant. I
was involved for about 15 years in an osteoporosis study with Dexiscan when I lived in San Diego. They
have the review charts from radiology and they had the statistics on the changes calculated out by the
statistician who was working on the program. So my patients would come out with one and a half to
two or two and a half percent improvement, which for osteoporosis is statistically significant in the age
group over 75. So in terms of treatment calcium isn’t the only answer. It’s actually only part of the partial
answer and too much can be a problem.
With that said, let’s look at the thyroid connection. We know that too much thyroid hormone accelerates
osteoporosis. So if you have hyperthyroidism there’s a higher chance that you’re going to have bone loss
towards osteoporosis and if you already have osteoporosis it will make it worse. Not always but there’s a
higher risk, a higher chance.
We now know that the HPT, the hypothalamus-pituitary-thyroid axis plays an important role in the
development of the skeleton. Too little thyroid hormone causes abnormal skeletal development. It’s
very important that children have normal thyroid. It’s not just adults that are having this problem. The
majority of those are 27-year old women. So it’s very possible that you can have thyroid disruption in
teenagers as well, which is the time that their bodies are growing and the skeleton is growing. Even
low normal thyroid level may in some cases affect the development of the bones. Through childhood,
adolescence and in the 20s the bones are still becoming stronger, with the peak at around 29 or 30, 31.
We’ve found that the T3 rather than the T4 is the most associated with bone health. So again we have
the sub-clinical thyroid patients. Mostly it’s a T3 problem rather than a T4 problem or a problem that
adding just T4 alone doesn’t solve. We know that the TSH test is designed to be linked with T4, the most
common hormone produced by the thyroid gland, thyroxin. So the TSH and the T4 are very associated.
When we measure we use TSH and free T4 and total T4 to look at the classical low or high thyroid
conditions in the body. Now we have to look at the T3 aspect of it, under these three subtypes of low
T3, high reverse T3 and receptor resistance as I was talking about earlier. But now we’re also finding that
there’s a link between T3 and the TSH. Clinically we don’t quite know yet what that means. I’m looking
at in more detail. How can we use TSH and T3 together to establish these associations?
We do know that too much or too little thyroid hormone is definitely associated with increased risk
for bone breaks. So the incidence of fractures is higher in all ages. The thyroid hormone plays a very
important, perhaps even a key role in not only development of the skeleton, not only prevention of bone
loss through aging and osteoporosis but it’s associated with those people who have too many fractures.
You see this often in children. It’s not just lack of calcium. But you also would see it in adults who are
strong, healthy, normally functioning people that will have the smallest incident. A twist of an ankle,
for example, causes multiple fractures in the foot. That’s not normal. That’s not because they twisted
their ankle. There’s something wrong with their bone. They look at their calcium level, they look at
osteoporosis but the clinician may have missed the thyroid link.
Kevin:
When people think about osteoporosis, at least in the natural health world, they’re thinking a little bit
like acidic and alkaline. Is the hormone imbalance creating an acidic environment in the body?
Dr. Williams:
No, absolutely not. It’s not associated with that. There’s two things to keep in mind here. One goes back
to the French. First we had Louie Pasteur who came up with the bacterial connection of disease. Mainly
that’s the paradigm that we ran with. Now we’ve got both. You have one or the other. People don’t seem
to be able to hold two equally-true paradigms in their lives at the same time, even smart people like
our early scientists. They chose the disease model, the bugs cause disease model over the terrain model,
[indecipherable] who said that the terrain is what’s most important. Extremely aggressive infection may
overwhelm the terrain but even during these epidemics and pandemics and the black plague and so forth
they had historical data to show that some people who were exposed never got sick or they got sick and
they recovered quite well. That was immunity. He called that terrain. The terrain involves acid/alkaline
balance and we know that involves perhaps antioxidant status, how oxygen is used in the body, and
several other aspects. Those are kind of the heart of that baseline of what helps us prevent disease, resist
infection, stay healthy, live longer. That acid/alkaline balance is there.
Now, it does not, except at its very extreme, affect tissues directly. An extreme acid condition alone
wouldn’t--if you poor real acid on it it would dissolve it but if you’re talking about a low level acidity in
the body it’s not strong enough acid to dissolve bone. But in combination with not enough calcium--and
calcium is a buffering substance so it not only do bones need calcium to build their mineral structure but
it also buffers the normal acidity in the body. If people are eating too much meat, they’re drinking too
much sodas, too much sugar, there are phosphates that counterbalanced the calcium and magnesium. It
can kind of shift the terrain towards the possibility of having osteoporosis.
The second important thing is what we call homeostasis. So you have the terrain which I just talked
about and then the second level is our kidney function, our heart function, our blood pressure and
temperature regulation. Those are the physiological processes that keep us alive and keep us functioning
in narrow parameters of the environment.
Next comes the endocrine system. Those endocrine glands keep us alive, like the adrenal gland, where
the body puts most of its attention because if that shuts down then we die. The other ones, the secondary
ones like thyroid, are highly important to regulate all of the above.
All of those, the terrain, the homeostasis and endocrine system, are all interrelated. It’s very complex.
Kevin:
Let’s move into the last portion of this module and the link between the thyroid and aging. What
happens to the thyroid as we get older or does the thyroid play a role in us getting, looking and feeling
older?
Dr. Williams:
Very interesting and very important topic. Typically we think that as we get older our endocrine system
and our thymus gland, which controls our immunity, decline and atrophy and shrink. Now we know for
sure, historically and through modern science and clinical evidence, that reproductive glands, particularly
the ovaries in women, do atrophy and shrink. After reproductive ages pass then the chances of passing
on poor genes in evolutionary sense to the next generation increases as a woman gets older. So nature has
created this transition period for women called menopause. Their ovaries start to produce less and less
hormone over time. It gradually starts to show some imbalances in the late 30s. Then the estrogen and
progesterone production starts to decline and eventually the ovaries themselves don’t produce hardly any
and as you get much older none at all.
But that doesn’t translate to every single gland. That’s the model that we’ve been kind of operating on,
that other glands atrophy and shrink and produce less and less hormone as we age, just like the ovaries do.
That’s not the case at all. Now we know that older people can have very decent functioning, if not normal
functioning, pituitary, hypothalamus, adrenal and thyroid. However, because we’re not all that healthy
and because we have all these other factors going on in the environment and with our diet and so forth,
the tendency is for the thyroid gland to become weaker, to produce less and less hormone very gradually
starting usually in the 60s and declining as we age. That’s kind of a slow, progressive hypothyroidism
developing. Of course we need strong thyroid hormone for people to have robust function, for their
brain to function, for their bones to be in good shape, for their energy to be good.
The next question is, is there a real aging thyroid? Probably not. In my patients who age well and who
are healthy, have a good diet for decades before they enter aging, their thyroid gland and their thyroid
hormone levels, the TSH, T4 and T3, are normal to their 60s, their 70s and 80s.
Another group are people who slowly decline. I watch those every six months or year after year and we
see that the TSH gradually works its way up. It goes from 1.5 to 2.5 to 3.5, maybe over a decade. Then
a good question is at what point do we want to add thyroid hormone in. Usually it just takes a very, very
small amount, almost like a drop, to get those patients feeling better.
Then the question is, what if we just left it alone? What if we didn’t interfere? If we follow the philosophy,
which I don’t, that the thyroid gland just naturally declines as we age in everybody. I’ve shown in my
patients that it doesn’t. But in those cases where it is gradually failing then should we just let it fail or
should we do bioidentical hormone replacement? And if we don’t, what happens? Well, here’s a curious
thing. The metabolic theory of aging says that smaller animals that have higher metabolism like dogs,
for example, have shorter lives. Slower metabolisms, like tortoises, have longer lives. We know through
studies of aging that that’s a generalization that’s mostly true but doesn’t actually prove out when we
start looking at other animals and other plants as well and sea creatures. But there’s a generalization. If
your metabolism is too high you essentially burn up and that means since the thyroid gland controls
metabolism that means you have a strong thyroid or maybe too active thyroid gland producing a little
bit too much hormone, even if you’re not completely hyperthyroid. It would accelerate aging and you
would have a shorter lifespan. You’d have more fun, though.
The other is that in the animal models, in the laboratory, those organisms that have slower metabolism
are going to have lower thyroid hormone. That means they’re going to be cooler. Their body temperature
is going to be lower and they live longer. That’s like putting your vegetables in the refrigerator. It’s cooler
and they last longer. So your body metabolism is down and if you combine that with calorie restriction
you’re eating less and you’re going to increase your lifespan by approximately 30 percent. However, you’re
not doing much. You’re basically just sitting around with a sweater on all the time. So, not a lot of fun.
So that’s some interesting side information about that.
Where do we go? I think that we want to find a balance and we want to individualize that so that
small amounts of bioidentical desiccated thyroid or optimizing thyroid adaptogenic herbals like ginseng,
ashwaganda and others which we’ll talk about in module four, is going to improve but not over-improve
thyroid gland. During aging you’re going to be more active, more robust. You’ll have more fun. Then you
should live a healthier, long life rather than an extended life where you’re too weak and can’t do anything.
In my patients I follow, the healthy thyroid patients, I follow the TSH, the T4 and the T3 every year.
Our listeners can do the same. And I see if there’s a change. If your thyroid hormones are normal,
whether you have your doctor or through your own self-directed testing and you find your TSH is within
Dr. Williams’ optimal range or very close to it, “My T3 and T4s are good. I’m fine.” You still should test
that at least every few years. If you’re in your 30s it can be every two to four years. But if you’re in your
40s and 50s it should be every one to two years. And certainly if you’re over 55 it should be every year,
even if it’s normal. Then you start to plot that out on the graph and see where the curve is. Is it staying
the same? Is it declining? Is it going up? Typically the TSH tends to go very slowly upward, which means
thyroid is slowly aging and that patient is not doing well.
There’s exercises, yoga postures. There’s a thyroid-friendly diet, which we’ll talk about next time, that can
benefit all that. If your numbers are down, the TSH number starts to normalize, then we’ve solved that
just with lifestyle. If not then we consider a low dose natural thyroid replacement.
Kevin:
This has been module three, missing thyroid links. I look forward to module four where we’re going to
be discussing all the different things that you can do to help bring your thyroid back into balance. Dr.
Williams, thanks so much for being on this call.
Dr. Williams:
Thanks so much, Kevin. It’s always a pleasure to work with you.
Kevin:
awesome.
Kevin:
directly to you.
In this program I’ll be your host while Dr. Williams shares this important information with you. Before we
start I want to share this disclaimer: The information in this course is intended for educational purposes
only. It does not replace the evaluation and advice of a qualified, licensed health care professional. For
detailed information about your thyroid health, please consult with your physician.
Today is module four of The Complete Thyroid Health Program. Today we’ll put it all together for you.
We’re going to take all the information you learned and we’re going to tell you what you can do to allow
your body to heal itself. This is really the meat and potatoes, or maybe we should say the green smoothie
and sprouted buckwheat bread of the program here. So Dr. Williams, thank you for being on.
Dr. Williams:
Thank you so much for having me on.
Kevin:
Let’s get started. Let’s give a brief overview of what we covered because there was a lot of information. I
want to talk about how we can gather all that information up and then bring it right into how we can
actually take care of the thyroid and support it.
Dr. Williams:
The first thing we have to consider when we’re talking about taking care of the thyroid and treating
the thyroid or restructuring the thyroid hormone in the body is to make sure that the evaluation of the
thyroid gland’s health is good, clear, accurate and complete. We talked about that in previous modules.
There really are four aspects of evaluating the thyroid from the doctor’s point of view. That’s the medical
history, the physical examination, the blood tests and then the basal temperature study.
To translate that into self-evaluation you’d want to look at your symptoms and your signs, that’s the
questionnaire, and then you’d want to look at your basal, that’s your underarm temperature, and your
oral temperature and review the charts that I provided for that. Then look at your lab testing.
There are three main ways that you want to break that down. Look at the T4 deficiency part of that, that
would be the TSH and the free T4. That’s the standard testing. Then the T3 part of the thyroid hormone,
which is the free Ts, the total T3 and the reverse T3. Those are the main ones we look at. The T3 part
would be if you have a low basal and oral temperature. Then there’s the autoimmune testing. The most
important one is the TPO, the thyroidperoxidase antibody.
So keeping it simple, fill out the questionnaire, take your temperature and then do the basic testing.
Then we’ll go from there.
Kevin:
Say someone is going to take some of the information from this program module, can they cure their
thyroid? Is there a cure for it or is it something you’re always working with?
Dr. Williams:
It’s both. Most people are looking for a complete cure. Sometimes reversing all of it does happen, a
lifetime of dependency on thyroid hormone, and bring them back to normal. That’s possible but it takes
a lot of work. We have to acupuncture and specialized injection therapy. It’s kind of doctor-driven.
When we look at a comprehensive thyroid treatment there are many things you can do on your own if
the thyroid is just a little bit out of balance or just not functioning well. You can bring it back to normal
and then to optimal.
The two main things we want to look at are if you’re going to have to take thyroid replacement then
you want to know that it’s a glandular-based disease. That means that the thyroid gland itself is not
producing enough hormone, principally the T4, and that’s when your lab tests are going to show that
you have a high TSH and a low T4. In that case you can work with it for a while, but you want to make
sure that you’re following your lab tests, at least every few months, and that it’s not getting worse while
you’re doing your natural remedies and other things that we’re going to talk about and that it’s actually
improving or staying the same and that your symptoms are improving.
So glandular-based disease is where we will usually use the replacement therapy, either for the T4
component or the T3 or a combination of both.
The second part where you can normalize the thyroid is when there’s a nutritional deficiency based
thyroid disease. The most common one is iodine in the goiter belt of the United States. Years ago, in
the center part of the country, where there was not much iodine in the soil and they were not eating sea
and ocean fish, then they had a frank iodine deficiency. There was lots of thyroid disease. If iodine is
deficient then you can correct that and you can cure that thyroid disease by just adding iodine. Iodine is
extraordinarily important. We talk about it a little bit more in the program. Every cell in the body utilizes
it but it’s mostly concentrated in the endocrine system with most of it being in the thyroid gland. Too
little is associated with hypothyroidism and goiter. Too much, a lot, more than a gram a day, can cause
hyperthyroidism.
There is a thyroid cure and sometimes it requires replacement therapy. Sometimes it requires nutritional
support with iodine. Sometimes it requires both. And sometimes it requires lifestyle changes, which we’ll
talk about in a little bit further as we put the comprehensive thyroid treatment part of it together.
Kevin:
Let me just ask you a question. Too little iodine, hypothyroid. Too much, possibly hyperthyroid?
Dr. Williams:
Correct.
Kevin:
OK, just wanted to clarify that. Let’s get into some of the comprehensive treatments.
Dr. Williams:
I always like to preface things and put them in perspective. Like all of the work that I do, naturopathic
medicine and the naturopathic schools and natural health, we’re going to look at a comprehensive therapy
for chronic problems. Typically for modern people with chronic disease you’ll see them with complex
problems. Complex problems, including thyroid conditions, require comprehensive treatment. That
includes detoxification. Many of these problems, if not caused by, are associated with environmental
chemical pollutants and sometimes with auto-toxicity from accumulation of toxins in the body from
diet and sometimes from just overeating and not having good cleansing mechanisms in the liver and the
lymphatic system and common lifestyle, healthy choices.
The first thing we’re going to do is work on detoxification. In this case, with the thyroid, we’re going to
work on the lymphatic system and the thyroid area under the throat and where it drains into the upper
arm and under the arms into the rest of the body.
Then we’re going to look at foods. A happy thyroid needs the right kind of food, primarily iodinecontaining foods. Those are mainly your ocean fish and your sea vegetables. For vegans, no problem on
the sea vegetable part of it but a little problem on the fish. So you have to make sure that you’re always
using sufficient amount of sea weed or ground sea weed in your cooking or in your foods, as condiments,
on a daily basis, in order to maintain enough iodine.
Then you have to avoid certain foods that are the goiter-genic foods, and also chemicals that dampen
down the thyroid function and compete with iodine, even if you have enough iodine in the body. So
vegan and vegetarians typically will be eating a lot of vegetables. Many of those vegetables are goitergenic, including soybeans, peanuts, spinach, sweet potatoes and the entire cabbage family. When patients
tell me they eat a lot of broccoli. I say, “Wow, really? How’s your thyroid?” One wants to be careful about
that.
Then a number of drugs including some common antibiotics will influence thyroid in a negative manner.
Bromine, an elemental molecule that’s in the same family as iodine, competes with iodine and blocks
thyroid function. Those are often used in the commercial baking process. So we want people to really
avoid any bromine that’s added into baking. And lithium. Lithium is a good antidepressant but it’s also
used as a supplement. Some people can abuse that and even in low doses it can, in time, dampen down
the thyroid.
I really emphasize foods and diet with my patients that have all levels of thyroid conditions. There’s the
ones to avoid and there’s the ones that are friendly for the thyroid. There are the ones you want to include
and there’s a couple of other key aspects of the diet that are important.
Kevin:
Does it make a difference if the cruciferous vegetables are raw or cooked?
Dr. Williams:
Raw is worse. Cooked they’re a little bit less troublesome. If you eat them once in a while then it’s not
really a significant problem but if you’re eating broccoli every day and that’s your only vegetable then for
sensitive individuals that could be a problem. This is the cruciferous vegetable or the brassica family. That
includes broccoli, brussel sprouts, rutabaga, turnips, radishes, cauliflower, cabbage, mustard greens, kale,
bok choy and kohlrabi. Those are all in that family. In small amounts, for thyroid patients, they should
always be cooked, never raw in juices because that’s where those compounds are concentrated.
Kevin:
I know there are people listening that are saying, “That’s all I eat.”
Dr. Williams:
Yeah, that’s why I said that. The second thing is soy products. Soy is a very well-known thyroid-dampening
food. You notice in Asia that they don’t drink soy milk. They always use it in prepared and fermented
products like tofu and tempeh and miso, and in small amounts. So even though they use it frequently,
almost every day, they are very small amounts. Even soy sauce, of course, is made from soy. You’d want
to use tamari, which is made from wheat, unless you’re wheat-sensitive. Or avoid them all together.
This is for people who have a low thyroid condition. Normal people can consume all of these, the
cabbage family and the soy products in small amounts.
Here’s some of the other foods that dampen the thyroid. Lima beans, millet, peaches, peanuts, pine nuts,
radishes, spinach, strawberries, sweet potatoes, tapioca from the cassava family. So during peach season
up in Michigan or in Georgia or in California you have all these great peaches come in and a normal
person can eat tree-ripened peaches all day long. It’s quite a strong diuretic after a few peaches. You’ll
urinate more but it won’t have very much impact on your thyroid. But for a person who is thyroidsensitive or already hypothyroid, then those are the type of foods that you’d want to minimize in your
diet.
Kevin:
What can you eat?
Dr. Williams:
There’s a group of foods that are very thyroid-friendly. They include avocadoes, avocado oil and mostly
all of the virgin, cold-pressed vegetable oils like coconut oil, olive oil and flaxseed oil. Those are thyroidfriendly. Sea salt is also thyroid-friendly. But if you have high blood pressure you want to not overuse
salt. Other healthy fats and oils including the nut oils, walnut oil and almond oil are very good. Almonds
themselves are also very good for the thyroid. Of course, all the sea vegetables and ocean fish are all
excellent and beneficial to the thyroid.
Kevin:
Let’s talk about exercise for the thyroid and then we’ll get back into some of the other supplements and
things you can take.
Dr. Williams:
Exercise is interesting because it’s often overlooked in thyroid health. I teach my patients, and I was
taught this by Dr. Bernard Jenson, who is one of my principle mentors back in the 70s and 80s. He had
his people out at Hidden Valley Health Ranch tapping the thyroid. They would look up at the sun after
they’ve done their grass barefoot walking. They’d look up at the morning sun. Then they would hum and
then they would tap along the sides of the throat to stimulate the thyroid.
I’ve incorporate that into my daily routine of tapping my head and my thyroid and my thymus gland
in the middle of my chest, and my kidneys and my adrenals and my liver. I go through a whole process
like that. The main thing is that physical stimulation of the thyroid gland works. You can do that by
self-massage. You can do the tapping technique like I was just telling our listeners about. And most
importantly, you can do yoga practice.
I was practicing in California where, of course, everybody knows about it. Most everybody takes some
form of yoga class. So it’s easy to talk to them about which postures benefit the thyroid. In general,
when you’re doing yoga postures, your chin is tipped a little in so that your head and spine are straight.
Just that act of tipping your chin down a little bit compresses the thyroid. If you go into postures where
you’re doing the deep breathing and even the down dog, your chin should be tipped all the way into your
throat as far as possible. That compresses right on the thyroid so it pushes some of the blood out. The
compression causes a little bit of vassal constriction. Then when you open that up, lifting your chin up,
the blood flushes back in there. You do that over and over again every time you’re in a down dog posture
when done correctly.
Others include the shoulder stand and the plow position. All of those have a very tight pinching or
compression effect from the chin tucking into the notch at the top of your collarbone and compressing
the thyroid and then flushing it with fresh blood and cleaning that area out. Very important as part of
comprehensive thyroid treatment. Don’t neglect the thyroid exercises in yoga.
Kevin:
Let’s get into a little bit more detail about some of the molecules and some of the minerals that some of
these thyroid-friendly foods have and why we need them for the thyroid.
Dr. Williams:
There are two base molecules that are used to build the thyroid hormones. The first is tyrosine, which
is an amino acid. It helps your body make other protein. It’s found in fish, milk, almonds, chicken and
turkey. So it’s mainly in animal protein. Another reason why vegan vegetarians need to make sure they’re
getting enough seeds and nuts.
It also helps modulate neurotransmitters that are useful to combat stress. Stress can play a role in
dampening thyroid. But in the thyroid gland the tyrosine molecule attaches to the iodine to form the
actual thyroid hormones. So tyrosine doesn’t cure low thyroid, but it’s very important that it’s added in to
the base foundational program to heal hypothyroid. The starting dosage is 500 milligrams a day. Often
we’ll give 1500 milligrams, which is 500 milligrams three times a day.
The other base molecule is the iodine. A supplemental form that absorbs readily is potassium iodine.
That’s the preferred form. There’s several products out there that have them in generic and then there’s
one very well-known one called Ioderol, which is a combination of iodine and iodide, the potassium
form. It’s in 12.5 milligrams per capsule. The dosage for the potassium form of iodine, in order to be
effective, has to get up to at least 75 micrograms. Double that to 150 micrograms and then work your
way upwards gradually towards even as high as 50 milligrams, which is 50,000 micrograms. So you start
low and you allow the body to adapt to it and work your way up. Then you follow your blood tests and
your symptoms so that you don’t overdose yourself on too much iodine. As I mentioned earlier, if you’re
getting up to one gram, 1,000 milligrams, you’re taking way too much. But 50 milligrams is far from
that. And still that small amount, the microgram dosing, can be very effective.
So we want to right away put in the two base molecules, tyrosine and iodine, principally in the potassium
form.
Kevin:
Is there a test for iodine?
Dr. Williams:
No, there’s no good test. There’s some different ones out on the market and there’s some skin tests that
they use. You apply the iodine to the skin and see how long it takes to disappear and absorb. But they’re
very much guesswork. There’s no simple, common blood test whatsoever.
Kevin:
You just kind of have to gauge how your thyroid is doing? Would that be the best way?
Dr. Williams:
It seems like it would make sense. I’m sure that a lab will come out with an iodine test at some point.
It’s been ignored because up until recently it was so easy to correct hypothyroid disease. You either gave
them T4 or the natural equivalent of it, or you gave them iodine and people got better. The dosages were
so low and they were so deficient that there was almost no incidence reported of overdosing on iodine.
It just didn’t carry important for the laboratory chemists to come up with a test for it.
Iodine is also important for breast health. It’s a well-known preventor for cancer. If you have a combination
of low iodine in the breast tissue and low iodine dampening down the thyroid, even borderline subclinical hypothyroidism, it increases your cancer risk, in this case for breast cancer. So optimizing your
iodine--and you can do that with sea vegetables, sea weeds, dulse and kelp and wakame. There’s different
sea weeds that are available in health food stores or Asian markets. If you take it in small amounts every
day, even the Bragg Amino Acid family has a powdered sea weed sprinkles with sesame seeds and things
like that tastes pretty good. You can add that to your soups, on top of your vegetables and so forth to
keep that little bit of iodine every day going and keep your thyroid functioning.
Kevin:
So pretty much you can only get iodine from the sea or things that come from the sea. Is that true?
Dr. Williams:
It comes from the soil, too, but the soil has to contain it. It’s a trace mineral so it’s in small amounts.
Typically it’s the coastal areas which have the iodine in the soil. It has accumulated over hundreds of
thousands of years from being under water. Where it’s deficient would be in the central parts of the
continents, the central part of the United States and the center parts of Russia and so forth. As they put
huge crops in and drawing out everything from the soil and the topsoil being damaged and blow away
from mechanized farming practices then the iodine, along with selenium and other trace minerals, have
become very deficient in these soils. So in the modern world today, yes, the best place to prevent iodine
deficiency is in coastal areas. If you can’t do that then you can still consume ocean fish, sea vegetables and
sea salt.
Kevin:
Let’s move into some supplements and minerals and other things that you can take. Let’s start with
different herbs.
Dr. Williams:
After you have your base molecules, you’ve worked on your exercise, you have your sea weed in place and
you’ve adjusted your diet, then the next thing that I work with is the adaptogenic, herbal compounds
that are found in just a handful of very specialized herbs. The most well-known is ginseng, Siberian
ginseng, not a true panics [?] family at all, but named that. Then you have the caucuses [?]. You have
rodeola. And then from India you have ashwaganda, which is the main one for thyroid. South America
we have the suma and maca.
But the one that’s mainly used for thyroid is ashwaganda. It’s Latin name is Withania Somnifera. It’s
been shown to increase the amount of hormones secreted by the thyroid gland. So it has some type of
regulating effect on thyroid hormone secretion. Everything else has to be working well for it to work. But
really it’s the first step in the herbal family and is the main one that we would focus on.
The second one is basil. Basil leaf, used in Italian cooking. I grow tons of it and use it in my fresh cooking
and salads. I add it to my pastas and so forth. It’s very useful for the thyroid gland. Of course, in the
clinic we use it in a concentrated extract form. So we’re using holy basil leaf extract in a 10:1 extract. So
it’s very concentrated, 250 milligrams up to 1,000 milligrams a day.
The ashwaganda, we use the root and leaf extract and it’s concentrated at an eight percent of the active
component of the ashwaganda and 200 milligrams up to 1200 milligrams per day.
Then there’s a couple others. Myrrh is also useful. Another one is coleus, that’s the root. It contains a
substance called forskolin. That’s the active component. We usually use an eight percent concentrate of
extract of the forskolin and 150 milligrams up to 450 milligrams a day.
Those alone don’t correct the thyroid. I’ve used hundreds and hundreds of herbs over hundreds of cases.
Part of my hospital rotation in Shanghai in the mid-80s was in thyroid clinics. We would treat 200
patients a morning with hypothyroid. They were getting acupuncture and they were getting Chinese
herbs. Of course, they were getting treated every day and it was free. So we could do all these studies
and treat them well. But I took the best of that for an American patient who could only come in say
once a week or twice a week at the most. That would be the acupuncture for the thyroid gland and body
acupuncture, along with some of these type of herbs and the sea vegetables. In the Chinese herbal formula
you’ll always see roots and leaves from land-based plants combined with ocean-based sea vegetables into
a mixture for herbal health for the thyroid.
Kevin:
Now, does ashwaganda increase T3 or T4? Do we know specifically?
Dr. Williams:
The studies on ashwaganda are not specific. They don’t show selectively that the herbal extracts cause
the secretion of more T4, T3. Both levels seem to go up with ashwaganda. But there’s a very small
increase. Still, it’s the first step for low thyroid, especially when there’s stress involved. Well, who doesn’t
have stress? And when there’s low adrenal activity. So that’s when you want to use these adaptogens,
ashwaganda being the primary one for the thyroid.
Kevin:
Do you rotate adaptogens or can you take them all the time?
Dr. Williams:
You can do both. Adaptogens are the only herbal group, other than culinary herbs, that you can take
small amounts over long periods of time without any negative effects. They seem to do nothing but
benefit the body. However, people traditionally took adaptogens like ginseng, like ashwaganda, when
they were very weak, recovering from an illness or surgery or as older people. The older people would
take little bits for 10 or 20 or more years. It’s only in modern times where these substances are available
and younger people are taking the to stay awake and get through college and get through their first job
and so forth. So we don’t know the long-run if that traditional advice will hold up. However, so far it
seems pretty good.
To be careful, to protect yourself, it’s often a good idea to rotate them. So you’ll take ashwaganda for
a while and then rotate. That means like three to five months. Then rotate to rodeola and then rotate
to Siberian ginseng. It also gives you a chance to see how they work in your body, how you feel with
them, and to kind of explore which one may be working best for you. Remember, some of them have
stimulating effects like ginseng. So if you take too much you can run into what we call abuse syndrome
and can have high blood pressure. Women can have abnormal menstrual bleeding, with ginseng. So we
know that low-dose over long periods of time is safe but that high dosages in some cases are not.
Kevin:
Let’s talk about some of the trace minerals besides iodine.
Dr. Williams:
Here’s where we get into the conversion and thyroid hormone resistance impact of deficiencies, even
marginal deficiencies of particularly trace elements in the body. We know that there are a number of
minerals, as well as a few vitamins, that are necessary for the T4 to convert to the T3.
The first one and most important one is selenium. So that becomes your next line of supplementation.
I’m surprised at how often I see holistic physicians doing everything right in terms of their replacement
and some of the general health but they’re missing the selenium supplementation for their thyroid
patients. Selenium is very important. The basic dose is 200 micrograms twice a day.
Vitamin A is also very important. Not beta carotene, but pure vitamin A. Vitamin A comes from fish
liver oil. For your complete vegans that may not be an option and they would have to use a synthetic
vitamin A, if that was the weak link. We get plenty of beta carotene and other carotenoids in a vegetarian
and vegan diet. But it has to convert into the active form of vitamin A. The carotenoids have very
important antioxidant effects in the body. They can be converted into the retinol form of vitamin A,
which has other effects in the body. It’s highly important for the immune system and very important for
the T4 to T3 conversion.
Another one that tends to be low in vegetarian vegans is iron. We know that too much iron is problematic
and associated with increased cancer risk and accelerated aging and chronic infections. But too little iron
is associated with anemia, immune system deficiency and poor thyroid function and poor T4 to T3
conversion. So you want to have enough iron. That’s easy enough to test for by getting your total iron
levels and your serum your ferritin levels.
Zinc is also important. Not as important as selenium but both together are necessary. Too much copper-sometimes people are taking zinc and then they’re supplementing with copper to keep the zinc in
balance, but copper can dampen the thyroid. So you want to make sure that you’re not getting too much
copper or cooking in copper kettles. Some of the older houses up in the Northeast use all copper tubing
and people accumulated copper in their blood and in their bones and had a lot of health problems from
that. So a sufficient amount of zinc is 15 to 30 milligrams a day.
Vitamin E is important. A whole complex vitamin E that comes from vegetable sources is more than
adequate. Vitamin E oil is very useful as an antioxidant preservative. You might find that many of your
health food store vegetable oils have vitamin E added into it to help preserve them without adding
chemical preservatives.
Two B vitamins are very important. That includes B2, which is riboflavin, and a specialized form of niacin
or B3, which is an energy-enhancing compound called NADH. These are both commonly deficient in
thyroid patients and in chronic fatigue patients. By adding sufficient dosages in the riboflavin, usually
100-200 and sometimes higher milligrams per day, with NADH we use 5 and no more than 25 but
usually 5 or 10 milligrams a day…
Kevin:
The minerals, selenium, zinc, what form would we want to get those in?
Dr. Williams:
The zinc I use a picolinate and the selenium I use the methionate. But you don’t really need those fancy
forms. They can be in very basic types of trace minerals. The absorption in the lower dosages is reasonable.
The more therapeutic forms, selenium methionine and the zinc picolinate, are the ones I would use in
my practice. People who have serious thyroid problems probably should stay with those forms. But
people who are just trying to prevent thyroid condition or if they have a low-level hypothyroid, just to
correct that, selenium citrate and zinc citrate are more than adequate.
Kevin:
Can you get the vitamin A from sources other than fish liver?
Dr. Williams:
I’m not familiar with a vegetable source of vitamin A. It’s converted in the liver. Other than synthetic.
Kevin:
Are there other animal sources?
Dr. Williams:
It’s almost all concentrated in the liver so fish liver, beef liver, things like that.
Kevin:
Let’s move into thyroid replacement. There’s a lot of information about this back and forth. Let’s talk
about some of the things that can be effective and when does someone go to thyroid replacement? If all
this other stuff doesn’t work?
Dr. Williams:
First of all, I think if you look at the comprehensive approach, let me just review that. If you do your
foods, if you adjust your diet so that you’re avoiding the thyroid-dampening foods, the goitergens and
the chemicals, and you’re adding in more of the thyroid-friendly foods and you’re focusing on healthy
vegetarian and veganism so that you’re getting your sea vegetables, that’s a really important first step.
Second is to make sure that you’re paying attention to your thyroid and it just doesn’t suspend out there
in the air. It’s a part of your body and like your muscles it needs to be attended to. We totally ignore our
thyroid and it’s the only gland we have immediate access to, everyone has, both male and female. So
doing your exercises and if you’re a yoga practitioner really looking at which ones are thyroid-friendly.
Then make sure you have your base molecules, your tyrosine and iodine and then your ashwaganda and
some of the other herbs I mentioned like the holy basil and then your basic nutrients.
That’s 60-80 percent of the comprehensive thyroid program. Sometimes, especially if you have stimulation,
people have to go to acupuncture or biological regulatory injection therapy called biopuncture. That can
help stimulate the thyroid more and then you can start improving and returning to normal.
However, it’s not the rule. Typically if your TSH is quite high, say the upper number is 5.5, if it’s
beyond 10 and it’s 20 or 30, almost all of those cases do not normalize by themselves. They seem to have
gone to a point where renormalization is extremely difficult if not impossible. So you need to help the
thyroid and help the pituitary renormalize themselves. Then sometimes I’m able to get patients off of the
thyroid hormone replacement and on only their thyroid-friendly program. Every once in a while one is
completely normalized.
There’s different options for thyroid hormone replacement. The first step is always to start low. There’s
many reasons for that. One is that you don’t know how complex an individual’s case is. Instead of
matching T4 to the level of TSH, which is theoretically correct, you could cause more imbalances and
you could set off an autoimmune reaction. You could trigger off adrenal reaction. So it’s always better to
start slow and on the lower end of the list.
Now, some people will prefer to start with thyroid glandulars. I will also do that. Not all of them have
thyroid hormone in them. The ones that just have ground up thyroid gland from pigs or cows usually
would not be acceptable to vegans and vegetarians. But just the glandular product without the hormones
do very, very little. Some of those from New Zealand, for example, will contain small dosages of all
thyroid hormone. It will be approximately equivalent of a quarter grain of Armour Thyroid. Armour
and Naturethroid and Westhroid are the three main desiccated prescription thyroid replacements. They
contain regulated amounts of T4 and T3, with T4 predominating, in a very close to a 4:1 ratio. So the
Armour Thyroid is often very good for most people as a starting point, starting at a quarter grain and
gradually working up to a half and to one full grain and then following the testing and seeing where the
numbers improve.
However, some people have the predominance on the T3 end and there’s just not enough T3 in the
Armour and they’ll take more and more Armour and then they’ll suppress their TSH and they become
almost hyperthyroid without actually solving their thyroid problem. So now they have blood work
that looks like a hyperthyroid case and maybe some of the symptoms but they still have all of the other
symptoms like the coldness and the fatigue and the soft muscles and fluid retention of hypothyroid
patients. You have to evaluate those people and see if they need more T3. In that case, sometimes only
exclusively T3, we use a sustained release because T3 goes into the body and out of the body very quickly
within 50 minutes. So you really need a slow release or they need to take it in small amounts. Those are
in microgram dosages and it’s highly active. So that has to be titrated out very, very slowly and patients
can’t stay on high dosages of T3 for more than 30 days or sometimes shorter, sometimes a little bit
longer. It’s short therapy and then they have to be normalized down to much lower dosages, meaning
under 25 micrograms. Some of my patients are only on five micrograms of slow-release T3 and they do
just fine. So the idea is to get the individualized treatment if the starting point of Armour Thyroid isn’t
working. Compounding pharmacies, through your physician, your MD, DO or naturopathic physician,
can customize the amount of T4 and T3 in a bioidentical compounded form and just get it exactly right
for that patient.
Then of course there is the synthetic forms, your Synthroid, being synthetic T4, and Cytomel, synthetic
T3. Some patients do better on the synthetic version, they absorb faster, they absorb at a higher ratio.
Sometimes they need that kind of quick stimulation. But my experience has been that most people do
better on bioidentical and desiccated forms.
Kevin:
I assume there’s some people who are listening who are thinking, “I don’t want to take thyroid replacement
hormones.” Some people say that hormone replacement therapy is not healthy. Other people say that
you can do everything naturally. What do you think? What are your thoughts?
Dr. Williams:
You can’t do everything naturally. I’m a natural doctor and I’ve seen over 100,000 patient visits in my
career. There are very clear and obvious times when you just can’t do it all naturally. That’s one thing.
Number two, I think we have to watch the vegetarians and vegans. A preponderance of my low thyroid
patients have done vegetarian diets over long periods of time. You’ll see more hypothyroid patients in
those groups. For the obvious reasons that I already went over, they can be missing and/or just low
enough and sensitive individuals.
The first thing is to correct the foods and so forth and see if you can regulate your thyroid. You can’t
miss the exercise. You can do all the dulse and kelp in the world but if you miss getting the blood flow
properly into there it won’t work. And you have to have the base molecules like the tyrosine and the
potassium iodine and then the trace minerals like the selenium. So if you’ve done all of that and it’s
not budging your numbers, then it just may not be working, the thyroid itself or the communicating
between the thyroid and the pituitary and/or other hormone activities in the body, especially the adrenal
gland, may be blocking that from working. So you may want to regulate pituitary-hypothalamic function
and adrenal function and see if that works. But if it’s not working or if your starting point is severe
hypothyroidism and severe Hashimoto’s Disease then the amount of time it would take, we’re talking
about years and years of working on it in a natural way, make it challenging for the doctor and for the
patient to not use replacement therapy. The replacement therapy will improve the person dramatically
and quickly. If done carefully and safely it really is a godsend to the patient. Then you can start to try to
back them down.
Now I know the two criticisms would be that the synthetic , we know that there’s some side effects to the
synthetic molecules. They’re not bioidentical and you’d want to stay away from those. I can understand
vegetarians and vegans wanting to stay away from an animal source of thyroid hormone, using the
laboratory-prepared thyroid gland of pigs or beef. But the bioidentical compounded are neither animal
nor synthetic. So that becomes an option that is well-worth considering.
Kevin:
What about homeopathic and other therapies?
Dr. Williams:
There’s two things here. One is that if the thyroid is low, whether it’s Chinese medicine or modern
western medicine, when something is low you have to supplement it. You have to replace it. Chinese
medicine is one of the main areas that most people are familiar with, these tonic medicines like ginseng,
adaptogens. So you’re building the body back up. Astragulus for the immune system is another good
example. Dong quai for women’s problems. Those are building back up. Those are supplementing,
replacing and tonifying. So when the thyroid is low you need to build it back up or you need to get it
working again so that it’s building itself back up.
Homeopathic medicines, the dosage is so low that they don’t build up anything. They do regulate and
balance. So for hyperthyroid and for patients whose thyroid is just slightly off or sub-clinical thyroid
cases, sometimes homeopathic medicine can be helpful, even though they don’t provide building blocks
like iodine and tyrosine. They can complement the other therapies and provide regulatory mechanisms.
They’re also very good for providing cellular detoxification. But these are the modern version of
homeopathic remedies. We call them biological regulatory medicine or low-dose biological medicines.
Almost all come out of Germany, some from France and a large group of them come out of Italy. So
they can be useful as part of the program but I don’t rank them as part of the base-building blocks, the
foundation or the curative aspect of it.
Kevin:
Let’s just have a review of some of the different things we talked about and then get into when the
thyroid may not exactly be the full problem.
Dr. Williams:
These are the strategies that I talked about. Let me summarize those for the natural-medicine approach
or strategies for thyroid conditions. The first thing is to get evaluated. You have to know if you have it, if
you don’t have it and what level you have. That’s if you’re hypo, hyper, autoimmune or sub-clinical. Then,
as I mentioned, avoid the thyroid-dampening foods and chemicals, follow your thyroid-friendly diet.
That applies to all types of thyroid conditions. Making fundamental lifestyle changes, add the exercise
for thyroid, add your nutritional supplements, take your adaptogens, especially ashwaganda, and then
start to look at balancing other hormones, which we’ll talk about in a second, especially progesterone and
adrenal gland, and also pregnenolone. And then managing stress, because stress linked with the adrenal
can have a very unbalancing effect on the thyroid.
In summary, in terms of treating the hypothyroid disease naturally, you’re going to do all of the things
that I just mentioned and maybe you’re going to need some low-dose natural thyroid replacement,
bioidentical or desiccated thyroid replacement.
In treating hyperthyroid it’s slightly different. In hyperthyroid you want to dampen down the thyroid.
These are the cases I give more soy to. The traditional medical treatment for hyperthyroid is basically
either chemical or surgical or radiation to kill the thyroid and to stop it from producing and then
replace with synthetic hormones. So that’s not a good choice whatsoever. If you get hyperthyroid acute
activity it can be life-threatening because your heart will start pumping faster and faster. In that case
natural therapy, you’ve gone too far and you need to slow that down. In terms of the natural therapy for
hyperthyroid, you do everything above but not take any glandulars and not overuse iodine and not take
any thyroid medication. This is where homeopathy can come in, the biological-regulatory medicine. You
will take a look at that and you will start to use the foods that dampen the thyroid down, particularly soy
and of course your cabbage family.
In terms of your autoimmune thyroid diseases, they can be both high or low, hypo and hyperthyroid
autoimmune conditions. The main ones we see are hypothyroid autoimmune. They’re very complex.
You’re going to do everything that I mentioned above plus you’re going to be very careful not to upregulate your immune system. This is not low-immunity, this is excess, imbalanced immunity. So your
Echinacea, your betaglucans, your mushroom extracts, medicinal mushrooms, all of those type of
things you must be very careful with. It’s possible that you can have a weakened immunity along with a
heightened immunity and that’s sort of a dual process that are contradictory to each other going on at
the same time. Usually with autoimmune you need a considerable amount of professional help.
Your sub-clinical hypothyroidism, most of that can be treated naturally. These are the cases that typically
have enough T4 and some T3, but they’re not producing enough of the T3 at the cellular level from the
conversion of T4 to T3. That’s where we want to focus on lifestyle-based intervention. At that point we
have to go back to diet, back to exercise and in terms of the diet for these patients, you want to treat
the very much like they have hypoglycemia. So you’re going to increase their protein, overall protein,
and they’re going to eat four to five small meals a day with some protein in each meal. They need to get
around 65 grams of protein a day, as a minimum, and thyroid patients often have to go up to about
100 grams per day. So they’re going to really focus on whole food dietary choices, fresh, locally-grown,
organic and non-genetically modified. Avoid processed foods, hormone-containing meats and avoid
dairy products, trans-fats and sugars. Refined sugars and processed foods containing sugar and sugar-like
substances including maltose, dextrose, fructose, sucrose and of course high-fructose corn syrup, are out
completely. In terms of dairy products, some of the organic, non-fat yogurt, a little bit is OK.
Then, because autoimmune is sometimes triggered by compounds that you’re allergic to they want to do
some allergy testing or avoidance of the main allergenic foods, principally gluten-containing wheat, rye
and barley and anything else that they know that they’re allergic to, to reduce the autoimmune potential
of their body to become imbalance, overactive.
For the metabolic hypothyroid, the sub-clinical T3 cases, it’s really a lifestyle-based thyroid disease.
That’s where the people can do tremendous amount of work and pretty much take care of it themselves.
The solution is positive lifestyle and getting away from modern, processed foods and returning their
body to balance. That includes acid/alkaline and their biological trades. That means that they need
more antioxidants, vitamin C, beta carotene, vitamin D, and that they’re moving away from massiveproducing diet like too much meat-eating and too much sugar and too much refined wheat products.
But remember, don’t push too much. You’re just moving towards balance. From too much acid to regain
balance. That balance tends to be on the alkaline side a little bit. Very few people die from too much
acid. Alkalosis is an emergency room, critical care visit and people do die from that, none of my patients,
thankfully. I have seen other doctor’s patients who have pushed the alkaline so far, they’ve fasted and
they’ve drank so much juices that they’ve pushed themselves into alkalosis. I know more than a few who
have died from that. So please be careful and remember that the idea is balance, not extreme.
Kevin:
Let’s talk about some of the issues where the thyroid might not be the sole problem and there might be
some other complications.
Dr. Williams:
There’s several other areas that we want to look at. There’s two main ones. There’s an adrenal gland link
and there’s a progesterone link. The adrenal gland is important for stress but there’s a lot of crosstalk and
cross relationships between the adrenal and the pituitary and the hypothalamus, and the thyroid and
the pituitary and the hypothalamus, which we call the HPTA hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid-adrenal
axis. So the cross relationship is important. Typically in hypothyroidism the adrenal gland production is
also low. So you’ll see cases that are chronic fatigue hypothyroid and low adrenal. However, the opposite
can happen, too. If you have a decent adrenal gland but a terrible, poor functioning thyroid gland,
the adrenal hormones will be higher than normal because the adrenal gland is compensating for the
low thyroid. So a person will be functioning but just barely, based on their adrenal system and their
hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. At the same time too much TSH, as the thyroid becomes weaker
the pituitary puts out too much hormone and that can inhibit the adrenal glands.
So you have two basic cases. One, where you have low thyroid and low adrenal and the other where you
have low thyroid and high adrenal. In cases where you suspect adrenal fatigue, you need to support the
adrenal gland before taking thyroid hormone. You can do all of the lifestyle changes and you can support
the adrenal gland with adaptogens like rodeola, ashwaganda or ginseng or luthrocaucus [?]. Take the
adrenal hormones, DHEA and pregnenolone. Pregnenolone is very important. It’s usually very low in
hypothyroid cases. So you’ll see younger people, 30, 45, 50-years old, who have pregnenolone levels of
an 80-year old. That’s extraordinarily low. There’s not enough adrenal hormone activity, not just in the
aggressive ones like adrenaline but even in these basic precursor hormones like pregnenolone, to keep
the thyroid going. So don’t forget the adrenal-thyroid link.
The other is progesterone. Progesterone also interconverts with cortisol, an adrenal hormone in the
body. Strong thyroid function is necessary for good progesterone production, which is from the ovaries.
Men make some too, but in very small amounts. Women, of course, are predominantly the ones with
hypothyroid problems. So we want to look at progesterone levels and make sure that they’re not only
getting enough progesterone but that their estrogen isn’t too high because estrogen-dominance, or
too much estrogen, imbalances progesterone and blocks the release of thyroid hormone at the thyroid
gland. Enough progesterone facilitates the release of the thyroid hormone. So we want to make sure that
there’s enough progesterone. That can be provided from over-the-counter wild yam. That’s usually 20-30
milligrams per quarter teaspoon of cream applied to clean skin of the inner arms once or twice a day.
That’s often enough to lift up the progesterone level. And then pregnenolone, 30 milligrams. Sometimes
you have to take more. Watch your levels and then also check your DHEA-S, the sulfate levels, and make
sure that they’re adequate.
Kevin:
This wraps up our program here. Dr. Williams, thank you so much for contributing.
Dr. Williams:
You’re very welcome. It’s my pleasure.
Kevin:
For everyone, I hope you enjoyed this program. Please be sure to remember to check out the PDF
resources that we’ve put together for you in the download area. If you have any other questions or you
do want to get your blood tested, you can go to the website that’s at the end of this program and you can
get a special deal through Renegade Health and Dr. Williams. Be sure to check that out. Take care.
awesome.

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