The diagnostic terms “hypothyroid” and “hyperthyroid” are polar opposites. These diagnoses are not made unless distinct out-of-lab-range values appear in your thyroid testing. So if you don’t have those blood test numbers, you could remain undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed. There’s no official name for your condition except subclinical hypothyroidism.
Subclinical hypothyroid misdiagnosed as depression, ADD, anxiety, a “mental disorder” like “bipolar,” or a bowel disorder.
There is no official diagnostic term called “exhausted thyroid,” or “subclinical hypothyroid.” Yet, there is a time period when your thyroid function can be up and down, hypo and hyper. When this “bi-polar” pattern is on back-to-back tests, you could get a misdiagnosis.
Thyroid Testing
During the next 3 years your thyroid testing may show TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) higher and lower on successive tests. However, TSH may still appear within the “falsely expanded normal values” — nothing diagnosable as hypothyroid or hyperthyroid. With this up and down thyroid activity you might become exhausted, but you enter into an undiagnosable limbo; “thyroid limbo.” You may even get an overly simplified psychiatric misdiagnosis. Because your TSH isn’t outside of the wide lab range, it rules-out a simple diagnosis, like hypothyroid or hyperthyroid.
Thyroid limbo is your destiny when your current, well-meaning, but clueless doctors overlook your thyroid dysfunction (hence, your symptoms). Your current doctor refuses to order additional thyroid tests (like thyroid antibodies) because your TSH isn’t out of range yet. The doctor doesn’t care about the 7 other thyroid tests in a full thyroid panel because they wouldn’t change the only thyroid treatment; thyroid replacement hormone (T4, aka: thyroxine). If you are already taking thyroxine, the doctor won’t see the value in additional thyroid tests either, since you are already on the treatment and additional tests wouldn’t change that treatment. Additionally, if another doctor prescribed psyc meds., you will find-out that most medical doctors will not investigate or change another doctor’s prescription. What a limited viewpoint!
Undiagnosable Thyroid: Too Complex for Do-it-Yourself, but We Can Help You
When your thyroid tests still show “TSH” within its “normal” wide lab range, your condition is not treatable by prescriptions. Your condition is not a pharmaceutical case. Exogenous hormones are not the answer. Hormone replacement drugs are not the answer. You can NOT use exogenous thyroid hormones when you are NOT hypothyroid. Any doctor who prescribes thyroid hormones for you when you are not hypothyroid is an idiot. When you are clearly not hypothyroid, but your symptoms reflect thyroid dysfunction, your condition is a clinical nutrition case. You need the help of a functional doctor / clinical nutritionist. You don’t need a doctor who would prescribe the wrong treatment.
Escape from Subclinical Hypothyroid Limbo
The sole TSH test to evaluate your thyroid was not sufficient to give enough information about your true thyroid function. Routine thyroid blood tests may only include one or two “thyroid markers.” This does not show enough information. Additional thyroid markers are necessary to know what is really happening with your thyroid function, or your thyroid hormone metabolism. Your doctors say: “there’s nothing wrong with your thyroid,” but this is the first big mistake. From here, you could end-up on the wrong path; a misdiagnosis, and the wrong, destructive treatments. It is a tragedy when thyroid dysfunction gets misdiagnosed as a mental disorder.
Routine, limited thyroid tests miss the important details. Your test result hides in an overly wide TSH laboratory range that means nothing. The misunderstanding, may lead to a “psych” misdiagnosis. The tests won’t correlate your up-and-down feelings with thyroid dysfunction.
Without a functional medicine doctor’s interpretation of your test results, your lab tests will most likely get overlooked. Sub optimal thyroid function (not hypothyroid and not treatable by exogenous hormones) goes undetected by the routine tests you’ve already had. Three years from onset your level of health would deteriorate so much that it would finally show-up as “out of lab range.” They’re wasting your time. You are obviously not well now, but they keep telling you “you’re fine” and “it’s not your thyroid” (watch this short video).
Your Imminent Psychiatric Misdiagnosis
While you are still waiting, doing nothing, and without any tests for thyroid autoimmunity or leaky gut, you apparently experience “depression,” lack of motivation “bipolar episodes,” “anxiety attacks,” adult ADD, or other “mental disorders” a psychiatrist could label. The labeling process of depression is faulty and subjective, and depends on who is giving you the label. Throwing around these dangerous labels is a practice of destructive nonsense. Generally, the “depression” label is an inaccurate misdiagnosis, and often leads to dangerous drug prescriptions, even during lactation. Natural remedies for postpartum depression exist, but women get drug prescriptions instead. Pregnant? Protect yourself from these misused labels.
“Depression” is usually not the initiator of your condition. “Depression” is usually a misdiagnosis.
Hypothyroid Misdiagnosed based on the Doctor’s Idiosyncrasies
If you were to visit a psychiatrist during this time period of thyroid limbo, you would get misdiagnosed as bipolar, misdiagnosed with depression of one sort or another, misdiagnosed with anxiety, or misdiagnosed with ADD.” After receiving one of these overly simplistic diagnostic labels, you get “drug therapy.” Meanwhile, the real conditions causing your symptoms are masked and ignored. Why? Because via mostly questioning, the psychiatrist concludes you are depressed, or bipolar, within about twenty minutes without any physical exam. Visit a psychiatrist or psychologist and get a psychological label. Visit an endocrinologist and get a hormonal label. You don’t want a label. Visit me, get no label. The type of practitioner you visit thinks that you are looking for the answers they have, so they give you what they think you want.
The problem with a new psychological or psychiatric label for your condition, is the dangerous medical assumption that your problem is coming from your mind, or brain. This is a misdiagnosis. Unfortunately, to complicate the issue, once you take such a diagnostic label, you and the people who care about you are likely to truly believe that your problem really is coming from your mind or your brain, based solely on that opinion. Nobody even thinks that “depression,” or “bipolar” can be a misdiagnosis. So, likewise, you end up with one person’s “diagnostic” opinion, and one life potentially destroyed by mind-altering drugs like antidepressants, anxiolytics, bipolar meds, etc. That is not a viable answer!
Thyroid Evaluation Alternatives
As your integrative doctor in Los Angeles, we will be willing to challenge the flawed notion that your problems are “all in your head,” As your integrative doctor, we investigate your condition, including physical testing which doesn’t depend on blood tests, or a misguided “diagnostic opinion.” We use extensive history-taking (listening to you), lab testing and a physical exam to reveal the potential true origins of your symptoms. The physical evaluation and the lab tests support each other. Our process of discovery gives the best big picture of what to recommend.
We investigate what really needs correction in your body. Masking your symptoms with drugs only makes you unaware that you are not any better.
“Parasites can have significant behavioral effects (1) on a number of behaviors such as memory, and anxiety, even when parasitism is sub-clinical.” – an example of when anxiety is due to a parasite problem. (1) https://www.sciencedirect.com/scoemce/article/abs/pii/S0149763499000354
One food supplement we could use with thyroid problems is: Ashwaganda Complex. When you’re also a slow starter in the morning, you could use Paraplex.
With indications of a parasite, we could start with Zymex II.
Integrative, Testing
As your integrative doctor we may also use advanced tests that are available from Cyrex Labs, ALCAT, or ELISA to get at the true causes of your condition. So if leaky gut syndrome were affecting your thyroid function, that, in turn, could affect your brain function. Your brain would seem to have a problem, but in that case, your brain is not the cause of your problem.
Since your brain is not the origin of your problem, your brain is not the cause of your problem.
Is your subclinical hypothyroid misdiagnosed? Your first challenge is to pull away from the entrenched, misguided, destructive and very convincing labels of mental disorders that were given to you. I understand that you still believe there might be some truth to the erroneous labels you still have, but with our guidance and direction you can get out of thyroid limbo. Then, you will finally realize and know that you are not a psychiatric case after all.
Do you really want to keep experiencing ADD, anxiety, depression, fatigue, and feeling cold all the time? Are you willing to ignore digestive system problems, IBS (irritable bowel), or your hair falling out? Do you think it will be easy once your health declines enough where your “thyroid doctor” finally prescribes thyroid hormone? Stop waiting. This is your wake-up call. Come get a detailed evaluation to protect yourself from the crazy psychiatric misdiagnoses.