Integrative Thyroid Treatment
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. The thyroid is considered normal, so your misdiagnosis may be depression, ADHD, anxiety, “mental disorders” like “bipolar,” or a bowel disorder.
Integrative Thyroid Testing
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 your blood test numbers are not out of range, you could remain undiagnosed, or get misdiagnosed. In that case, there is no official name for your condition, but we can call it subclinical hypothyroidism.
For about 3 years, your thyroid testing may show TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) higher and lower on successive tests. However, TSH may still appear within the deceptively wide “normal range of 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. However, because your TSH isn’t outside of the wide lab range, it rules-out a 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. If you are already taking thyroxine, a 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!
The full thyroid panel gives us reference points if we need them for future comparisons to see if we are being effective with our treatment. The usual thyroid test, TSH, just shows how much hormone the pituitary has to produce to drive the thyroid to produce the thyroid hormone (T4). The full panel shows the individual levels of the hormones. It shows free and total T4 levels, free and total T3 levels, if there is too much inactivated T3 hormone being produced (reverse T3), and if there are thyroid antibodies present. This gives more information about the gland function, the ability of your body to convert the T4 hormone to the active form (T3), and if there is autoimmunity against the thyroid gland.
If the potential treatment were only replacement thyroid hormone (only if you were hypothyroid), none of those other numbers matter much to the doctor because the treatment goes by the TSH number. However, if the treatment were with nutritional components, those additional numbers help us to know where the focus is needed.
Integrative Thyroid Treatment for Undiagnosable Thyroid
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 kind of 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 integrative thyroid treatment based on integrative thyroid testing. It is too complex for you to do-it-yourself, but we can help you. 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 standard 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, treating nothing, without tests for thyroid autoimmunity or leaky gut, you may experience symptoms. Examples are: “depression,” lack of motivation “bipolar episodes,” “anxiety attacks,” adult ADHD, 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 destructive practice. Generally, the “depression” label is an inaccurate misdiagnosis, and often leads to dangerous drug prescriptions, even during pregnancy and 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 Misdiagnosis based on the Doctor’s Idiosyncrasies
If you were to visit a psychiatrist during this time period of thyroid limbo, you would likely get a misdiagnosis. You could be misdiagnosed as bipolar, misdiagnosed with depression of one sort or another, misdiagnosed with anxiety, or ADD/ADHD.” After receiving one of these overly simplistic diagnostic labels, you would 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 practitioners you visit think 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 accept 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!
Integrative Thyroid Evaluation
An integrative doctor in Los Angeles, is 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, but should correlate with them. 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. We don’t mask symptoms. Masking your symptoms with drugs only makes you unaware that you are not any better.
Part of our integrative thyroid evaluation is to consider the presence of parasites. The following quote from a study shows an example of when anxiety is due to a parasite problem. “Parasites can have significant behavioral effects (1) on a number of behaviors such as memory, and anxiety, even when parasitism is sub-clinical.” (1) https://www.sciencedirect.com/scoemce/article/abs/pii/S0149763499000354
One herbal 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.
Thyroid care near you
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 potentially given to you. If it is a thyroid disorder, the mental disorder aspect is not the cause. 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 ADHD, 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 integrative evaluation to protect yourself from the crazy psychiatric misdiagnoses. Contact us today.