Low Thyroid Function
What’s Wrong With Me!
Cold. Exhausted. Depressed. No interest in sex. You know
it’s not “all in your head”, but your doctor calls you “normal” or he calls you
a hypochondriac and gives you antidepressants. So you search the internet
for the answer. Two things you need to know: you are not alone, and there is an
answer.
The Most Common Malady
Other symptoms of this common malady can include: brain fog
(maybe even appearing as senile dementia), weight gain, hair loss, puffy eyes
(making you appear tired and older than you are), menstrual problems in women
including cramping, heavy bleeding and infertility, and you may find yourself
tearing up at commercials on T.V. Also, you might have dry patches of
skin and the loss of the outer part of your eyebrows. Men might only
notice fatigue, and have high cholesterol.
What makes this baffling for doctors to treat is that the
symptoms appear all over. You might take your dry skin and hair loss to a
dermatologist who gives you cream A, and then cream B, to no avail. You
might take your menstrual problems to the gynecologist who gives you birth
control pills, and take everything else to your family doctor, who refers you
to counseling. Nothing really helps. What is it that they missing?
What identifies this malady is that it is a multi-system
failure, and it is this which baffles your doctor. That which is common
to the functioning of the whole body, is the thyroid hormone. It is the
power that runs your whole system. When it is at an optimal level, you
feel good and all your systems work right. When it is suboptimal, you
start losing health and function, and when it is low everything falls apart;
your hair won’t stay in your head, you are cold even on warm days, you may sit
and stare at the wall like a zombie, and sex? Are you kidding?
Why You Can’t Get Help
Although millions of women experience these symptoms, they are
universally getting the same unhelpful answer. As George Patton
said, ““If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking.” The
reason is that most doctors use the same formula for treatment. The
formula is simplistic, and was developed by corporate medicine to give general
care to hordes of people on a ten-minute-interval medical assembly line.
It is a formula; it does not “see” the individual patient, or take into
account complex systems. Also, it takes treatment of disease rather than
optimal health as it’s goal. Patient advocate Mary Shoman at http://thyroid.about.com is better informed than most doctors.
A Paradigm Shift
The baby-boom generation is a bunch of rebels. Our parents
expected to get tired, sick, and die, and the medical machine operates
according to their expectations. However, we boomers want to continue to
feel good and even look good as our years advance. We are not content
with illness and death as an inevitability. This has given rise to a paradigm
shift, a change in thinking, especially among many of the aging baby-boom
medical professionals.
We began to consider the reasons that health declined in aging,
and discovered that much of it was due to easily preventable and treatable
deficiencies in hormones, with thyroid the most common denominator in many
diseases of old age. Keep in mind, thyroid deficiency can occur at any
age; babies can be born with it, many women have disruptions around
child-bearing, and it is universally deficient in old people.
The old paradigm says that hormone deficiencies are a normal part
of aging. The new paradigm says that aging occurs because of
hormone deficiencies. It is preventable; it is treatable, and it should
be treated.
The Anti-aging Paradigm
Hormone decline becomes a problem for everyone between their
40’s and 50’s. This is the point at which health problems begin to
accelerate, with the nosedive of hormones. Intervention here will make a
dramatic difference in quality of life as the years advance. For
instance, a distressing problem for many menopausal women is that they wet
their pants when they cough or sneeze. It’s not life-threatening, but if
is certainly life-affecting. This is simply a deficiency in the hormone
testosterone; the same testosterone that stimulates sexual desire. Each
hormone has a different important effect on the body. Anti-aging doctors
are not content with "normal", that is, "as sick as everyone
else". We aim for "optimal".
With my patients, I spend up to three hours in consultation with
them. I get a detailed symptom history. I order a complete set of
blood studies. These include full hormone profiles, but I am also looking
at all health factors. It is as important to prevent heart disease,
strokes, cancer, liver and kidney failure, as it is to treat them.
At the initial consultation, I carefully review my findings with
my patients, and set them up on program of total health, including hormone and
vitamin recommendations. It may also include food and exercise
recommendations, and possibly a weight-loss program. Finally, they are
put on a follow-up schedule so that our goal of optimal health is achieved, and
they don’t “fall through the cracks”. I welcome and encourage follow-up
questions. My goal for them is optimal health, so I expect their program
may require “tweaking”.
To get started toward a healthy future, call 888-806-5660. It
will be the difference between an active healthy future, and an impaired
diseased future. And it may, literally, be a matter of life and death.