Understanding Thyroid Changes: Insights and Solutions with Dr. Paul Anderson

And there's of course a lot of hormonal components, but in chronic illness, one of the places that kind of can go off of the rail, so to speak, and not work as well as it used to or not work as well as it should is actually the thyroid, and so it's worth bringing that up now in this

series of why Can't I Get Better? What we're talking about are people who have usually had an acute infection or an acute trauma, or some combination thereof, and then at some point in the future, after they never really fully recover, they don't get better, or they have one of the very difficult to treat and assess chronic illnesses such as long COVID or post COVID syndrome, things such as chronic fatigue syndrome CFSME, or fibromyalgia or any other

number of chronic illnesses that go on and so they'll, you know, legitimately wonder why they can't get better. Well, in this session, we're going to talk about your thyroid. In other sessions we talked about like toxins and other infections and immune inhibitors and all this other stuff. Well, with your thyroid, the thing to keep in mind is it is what operates the metabolic rate inside your body. So in other sections we talked about the mitochondria and

how they make your energy. Well, they get their marching orders from the thyroid hormone, which tells them at what rate to put out energy. Now, go back to the cell and mitochondria section that we did. You also know that there's other things that can mess with the mitochondria function, such as not enough of oxygen and other nutrients going in, or too much toxicity and junk. It's not moving out of the cells fast enough. So obviously it's not just

the thyroid, but the thyroid does play a role. So your metabolic rate is operated by your thyroid gland ther thyroid gland puts out thyroid hormone, and one version, the T three version of your thyroid hormone has receptors on both the outside of the cell and on the mitochondria on the inside of the cell, and so the receptor on the outside of the cell turns on the feeding system for the cell, half of which goes to the mitochondria, and then the internal receptor actually up or down regulates

your metabolic rate how fast the mitochondria go to do their thing. So back in the mitochondria and cell section, what we said is if anything slows down the mitochondria, your energy production slows down, and you slow down, you don't feel right. Well, there's a number of reasons that that can go on, and not enough or abnormally functioning

thyroid hormone can be a piece of that puzzle. So when we think about that, we think, well, how, you know, the thyroid, like, you're not dead, it didn't stop working. How did it get injured with your you know, whatever triggered your chronic illness. Well, there's a couple of things

to think about. The first thing is that your theory could have been totally normal and serving you very well for your whole life, and then you get enough stressors into your system, and your hormonal system tries to respond, tries to bounce back and respond against those stressors because your body is ill, and so the thyroid has feedback mechanisms that will say, we're creating too much metabolism in

this person who's sick. And so sometimes with patients, I would make the analogy that if your motor is really not operating well and you just have to go a few blocks to get down to the auto repair shop, if you don't put too much of the gas on and you don't run your motor too fast, you're going to get a little bit more distance out of it while it's not running well. Whereas, if you you know, floor it put a lot of gas into a motor that's very dysfunctional, the motor may break sooner, it may

have other problems. And your body literally has a version of this that it largely regulates through your hormonal system. So thyroid is one of those big regulatory areas. Now you think, well, how could that go on? It's not usually a quick process. It's usually, let's let's say for the sake of argument, your thyroid was no problem, and

then you get knocked down with an illness. And that could be you've got pneumonia, you've got lime disease, you've got a chronic other problem, you've got a bunch of other infections, you got COVID, you got whatever else it happens, or you got a trauma, you had a car accident, or big surgery, or maybe you know the trifecta. You get you know, an accident, a trauma, surgery, then you've got recovery going on. So your body, you know, is

sensing this. So sometimes with a sick body, what the hormonal system will do is is it will say, let's slow down things. And it's using that sort of logic, if you will. It's sort of chemical logic. It's not sitting there really thinking about it, we don't believe, but it's chemically feeding back and giving this idea that the motor, you know, the body is not running well. We don't want to put too much energy, too much gas into

it and make it run fast but ill. Right, So you can actually and you see this with people if they're real sick, and you upregulate their thyroid by give them the thyroid hormone. Though sometimes it'll feel sicker, and I tell them, well, it's like having a sick motor and then making it run faster. It's going to run fast, but not appropriately. So your body has these ways of turning down hormonally your your energy production system. Now, one way to do that is through the production of antibodies.

And these are actual autoantibodies, meaning against us, and they can turn on during these acute illnesses and chronic illnesses, and they can be against our thyroid function. Now, the thyroid function is heavily dependent on taking basic things like iodine and the amino acid tyrosine and putting them together into either a triiodothyronine the T three molecule, or a

tetra iodothyronine the T four molecule. And so our body does this through a bunch of little processes in our thyroid gland, which is right in the lower part of your throat. And so there are places when you inflame the thyroid or the system is backed up, et cetera, where the immuneesystem can go start attacking that production system. So it can start attacking in two major places to slow down production. And so a lot of times what

happens is that people will get. You know, they have normal thyroid before and they're sick afterwards, and sometimes those antibodies don't get checked and you'll see that they went up because of the illness. So that has to be worked on to get the antibodies to come down, which is a long, slow process. But the longer the antibodies

are elevated, the worst your thyroid function is going to be. Well, the other thing that your thyroid will do is it will actually start to trigger a mirror image molecule of the active T three hormone, and it's called reverse T three, and so they both can go sit on the receptor sites to turn things on. Right, So your metabolism has put T three in your system turned and on works faster by the T three binding to the receptor. Well, if you have reverse TE three, it will bind to

the receptors, but it won't turn them on. It's sort of a blocking hormone. Now, a lot of folks in medicine will say, well, reverse T three is probably meaningless, It probably doesn't really help your clinical guidance, etc. And I would say for the average human who's healthy, that's probably true. Reverse T three is probably not a great measurement for healthy people. But because my world is chronically

ill people or people with cancer, which is chronically ill patient. Also, what we see in the chronically ill patients, especially when they've had these inciting traumas and stuff, is that the reverse T three will go up, and that's your body's way of blocking the thyroid from turning on your energy. And so what will happen then is your energy production doesn't shut off or you'd be dead. It slows way down. Now, those symptoms then can be things such as fatigue, usually

severe tiredness, sleeping too much. You can also have disturbed sleep. Sometimes you can gain weight really easy. Your water retention can be very bad. A whole number of things happen when your metabolism slows down. But another thing that's super important there is that the metabolism slowing down will also make that mitochondrial problem that we talked about in the other segment more magnified. So let's say the mitochondria are already kind of sick and they're recovering from your illness,

they're feeling slow. You're feeling slow if now you're blocking your thyroid, either through autoimmune issues or reverse T three or whatever, or you're just your levels of T three and T four go down, your mitochondria are going to be double slow, and so you're going to be double slow. So the things that you have to do first is realize that even if your thyroid was normal prior, even if you didn't have any antibodies to your thyroid or reverse T three prior, now your body is in a

new situation. And so every chronically ill patient on the screening side, when we're trying to sort out how many problems they have creating their chronic illness, all of those patients really need to have the thyroid looked at in a multi dimensional way, and so that that would be the normal screening of the TSH test, and then usually they do a T four that's the primary output hormone, and sometimes now they'll do a T three as well. So those are the hormonal and the feedback parts. But

then we also add on three other things. So that would be the two main thyroid antibodies that are blocking. There's others that do other things, but the two main blocking antibodies, which would be the antithybroglobulin and the thyroid peroxtase antibodies, and then we do a reverse T three just to get a three sixty. Look at the thyroid function. Now, maybe it's doing great, no problems anywhere there. Then you

kind of focus on other things. You focus on the mitochondria more, You focus on many of these other things we talk about, but a lot of times in chronically other people, that's one of the factors that comes up. Now, the thing you have to keep in mind is that that's all you fix, and you've got all this other junk in your system, and your mitochondria can't work as there's a lot of metabolic toxicity and all that stuff.

You're going to turn your thyroid on and you're going to feel actually worse because your thyroid's working hard in a system than sick. So a lot of times in chronic illness we have to play a little bit of a balancing game of getting the thyroid back online slowly so that your body starts to work faster and better, and then kind of start to fix the other things that are contributing. That's all these other sections that we're doing.

On one, I can't I get better, and you fix all of those kind of at the same time or at least in a rotation and then your thyroid can get back to being normal. So there's a whole number of other things, but that's why the theroid is so critical, and that's why it gets feedback to it that slow it down. Now, one thing I like to say is, wherever you're seeing or hearing this, we're on all the

pod burners. We're on CTR Radio, Facebook Live, and then on YouTube on DRA online, doctor Online, Please like, share and subscribe, do the notifications. It really helps. We need subscribers on all the platforms, especially over on YouTube where there's a really growing community for this sort of information. Also, I will put in the show notes some links. There will be some links to some information around this, and also some links to some provider referral services, etc. That

may be of help to you. But that's about all the time that we have for thyroid. One of the things that we usually say is with thyroid, it's because it's a hormonal problem and there's all these things to test.

You really need to work with a healthcare provider who's used to looking at chronically old people's thyroid so you can do all the testing, but also then they can treat you appropriately and that might mean hormonal treatment, it might mean non hormonal treatment, but that's really dependent upon how you're doing in that respect with your thyroid, how your labs are, and how you physically are doing in

your body. Well, we're going to move on right now to our next segment, and I want to thank you for listening to this one and why it came better. Thybrid addition