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Hashimoto's disease explained. So for me, who is embedded in Hashimoto's all day long, it's like, wow, people still need that explained. But yeah, they do and I know that from the consultations. I can tell you that most of the Hashimoto's seminars I've gone to have been about 24 hours long, over a period of three days. So I'm going to bring you the ultimate CliffsNotes of Hashimoto's disease explained.

So Hashimoto's, Dr. Hashimoto was a PhD in Japan back in the early 1900 and he was looking to see why are people getting thyroid problems? This was before the atomic bombs. I don't know if you know, the people who were in the areas of the testing in Las Vegas for atomic weapons all got thyroid problems. Radiation screwed up their iodine and stuff like that. But this was before that. This was before Hiroshima and all that type of stuff. So he's checking it out and he goes, you know what? All these people have autoimmune antibodies against their thyroid and nobody took him seriously.

So there were some doctors throughout the time, throughout the last century who checked for Hashimoto's. Occasionally I'll get a person who was checked for Hashimoto's in 1960 or 1970, which shocks me. But for the most part, nobody even knew what Hashimoto's was. And so Dr. Hashimoto figured out it was an immune attack against the thyroid and that's the defining factor. Okay. So for years and years, and years, and years, and years, and years and years in this country, and in most of the world, most thyroid doctors ignored what Dr. Hashimoto's findings were.

And so everybody was hypothyroid and everybody was being treated as a hypothyroid, meaning it's a thyroid problem. If your thyroid is low, then we give you a thyroid medication to bring it up. And if it's hyper, then we give you a medication to stop you from making thyroid problem. And that's how it was until probably 20 years ago. So basically what happens is let's go to the autoimmunity then. So basically what happens is you were born with a gene that says it is okay to attack your thyroid. And this is why I'm not yet fully embracing genetic testing because genetic testing tells you what could happen. It doesn't necessarily tell you what's going to happen.

So you can have a gene and never, ever, ever have Hashimoto's in your lifetime. And so basically, then the next thing that occurs is life. So there are a lot of triggers that can trigger autoimmunity, not just Hashimoto's, but autoimmunity in general, and those triggers are significant stress. Who's had significant stress over the last three or four or five or six years? It can be an overwhelming infection. So those of you know I have Hashimoto's. For me, it was a combination of an overwhelming infection and stress that hit me. I was under a lot of stress and I got pneumonia. Everything blew up.

After that, having a baby is probably the second most common one I hear after stress. Doc, I had a baby, it was my second child. It was the last child. It was my first child, whatever it was and after that, I've never been the same. 

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Does Hashimoto's go into remission, or Hashimoto's and remission. These are questions that have come in a variety of different forms, and I'll try to cover them all. The answer to does Hashimoto's go into remission is, yes. Yes. It actually is a normal part of it. Autoimmunity in general, the goal when you treat a patient with autoimmunity, whether you're treating with medication, immunoglobulins or steroids, or whatever, or whether you're doing the superior model of functional medicine for Hashimoto's, the goal is always the same. The goal is to take that person who is an active case, and normally I don't get cases coming in here in remission, and to get that person into remission. Let's go back a step. All autoimmunity has certain touchstone characteristics. When you have a patient that comes in, they don't know what the heck is going on. You're digging, and you're trying to say, "Okay, where do we go with this? Is it inflammation? Is it autoimmunity?" You start hearing a person going, "It was triggered by this. Then I had it for a while, and then it went away. I have no idea why it went away. I just know it went away." Then a year or two, I just had one yesterday. I just had one yesterday. And five years later, it came back. Then he did some herbs and botanicals, and he worked with a nutritionist and stuff, and then it went away. In five years it's went from like 2000, it went away. 2005, it came back, and then it went away. 2010, it came back, and then it went away. 2015, it came back, went away. Then yesterday, he's calling me. That's a natural... That was not a Hashimoto's case. That was a rheumatoid arthritis case, and that's a natural characteristic of autoimmunity. There's lots of people who don't understand about autoimmunity yet, but one thing we do know is it comes and goes. If it doesn't go, that's when you end up in your doctor's office, our office, your rheumatologist office, trying to figure out how to get it to go in remission. Why does it go into remission? Yeah, it's hard to say. Just from the understanding that I have of treating this for thousands of these cases over a period of a long time, it just seems like, there's so many different things that affect it. Everybody's immune system has a different, for lack of a better term, plasticity. Some of your immune systems are stronger than others.

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We’re going to talk about Hashimoto’s and heart problems. This is kind of an interesting one. And I’m going to speak to you strictly from experience on this because a lot of people are looking for, “Oh, it’s causing this exact thing, that to the heart and it’s creating the bundle branch to not work right,” and blah, blah, blah, and all that type of stuff. But I’m going to tell you the nuts and bolts, blue collar aspect of Hashimoto as a heart disease.

So I’ve been doing this for a long time, seen thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of patients. And here’s what I hear. I am going to grew greatly downplay how many times I think I’ve heard this, but I have heard this somewhere between 500,000 times. And I think probably more, but this is how common it is. The patient comes in and maybe they don’t even know that they have autoimmune disease at that time, maybe they don’t even know that they got a thyroid problem at that time. And so you’re sitting there are listening and digging and taking notes and trying to go, “Okay, what’s going on here? Does this person fit my practice? Do they have autoimmune problems?” And then it happens. Then I ask, “Do you have heart palpitations for no reason at all? Heart palpitations or anxiety for no reason at all? Would you call that PVCs, pre ventricular contractions? Would you call that SVPs?” These are all medical pathology that cause your heart to beat out of your chest. And then I’m like, “Well, tell me more about that.”

Here’s the story. “I was under a lot of stress and then all of a sudden, for no reason at all, for no reason at all, my heart started to really pound. And I really started to get big time arrhythmias. And I couldn’t breathe very well, and I was really getting anxiety and so on and so forth. [inaudible 00:02:05]. So I was at a hospital and then they did an EKG, they did an echogram, they did a cardiogram, they did everything. And everything was normal,” for the lucky ones. For the lucky ones. “And everything was normal. And they told me to go home and they told me to take some electrolytes and I’m probably just stressed and maybe I just need to deal with my stress and go to counseling. ‘But if it happens again, maybe you can go to cardiologist,’ even though everything was normal.”

The second person, who’s not always quite as fortunate, they’ll pick something up on some of the electrical diagnostics and they’ll go, “Okay, we’re going to go in and we’re going to ablate the nerves that are causing your heart to do that…” And then they do that. But the patient’s still sitting in front of me with heart palpitations for no reason at all, and anxiety for no reason at all, and those types of things, even though they’ve been ablated. So when I see questions that come in on does Hashimoto’s cause heart problems, technically the answer is no. However, not technically, the answer is yes. And here’s how it happens.

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is hashimoto’s an autoimmune disease, so i’ve been in this for so long. I that twists my brain around to think that there’s anybody that doesn’t know that hashimoto’s is an autoimmune disease at this point not to be an insult.

I i just i’m living in an alternative world, i’m living in a world where, all day long, like probably 80 percent of my patients, have automated thyroid disease. So the answer is yes, so hashimoto’s is an autoimmunity.

So here’s here’s how it works. Okay, so i’ll give you my family, okay, if well, that person asked that question. They may not know i have hashimoto’s, so i have hashimoto’s and um. So i have a. I have a mother who had her thyroid taken out.

I have an aunt who had her thyroid taken out. I had a grandmother all on the same side who had uh a goiter like until she died at like 96 or 97 years old, so this was back in 50s, 60s, um and and uh and and really nobody’s talking about hashimoto’s back then i mean it was Just like uh an afterthought in in in like somebody’s physiology book in medical school, but nobody really thought anybody got it.

Okay, but the point is, is you have to have the genetics first to get it um in a family where, if your mom’s got it um the chances uh and she has two daughters to change? There’S, there’s strong probability.

One of them is going to get it today. Okay, so you have to have the genetics to be turned on. That’s autoimmunity in general, whether it’s hashimoto’s, whether it’s a rheumatoid arthritis, whether it’s lupus you have to have the genetics, then what has to happen is you have to be unfortunate enough to get at a point in your life where your physiology crashes or you have a Trigger that is so significant that it overcomes the ability of your immune system to stop you from turning on that gene that will now cause you to have hashimoto’s and you can and and so you’re, so the immune system gets triggered and it can either attack the Thyroid tissue, so it’s called thyroglobulin tissue.

There’S a test called an anti-thyroglobulin test or much much more commonly the peroxidase enzyme and the peroxidase enzyme is an enzyme that that takes um tyrosine meta thyroid hormone is t4 and t3. The t is tyrosine the four iodines, so it takes this tyrosine and it mixes it with hydrogen peroxide, and then it sucks these four iodines in and now you have t4.

So this the thyroid peroxidase enzymes and the key player that makes your thyroid hormone. That can get attacked, so you can either attack the enzyme which is frankly way more common or you can attack the tissue or you can attack both i’ve.

You know i’d see it all. I see all that happening and then once that happens, that turns on your genetics and now your immune system has been given the the okay to attack you over and over and over again every time you trigger an attack, so the initial triggers that started for me.

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Okay, here we go again hashimoto’s and epstein-barr virus. You know um i’ve been involved in hashimoto’s literally since the beginning, i think, of when nobody even knew what the word hashimoto’s was because uh i studied with uh dr crossy, and if you don’t know who he is, you can get his book.

He wrote about it in 2009., he was the guy who said: hashimoto’s was actually causing most people’s thyroid problems and um and and the early understanding of it was that epstein-barr virus was the cause.

Then it was. Viral infections are the cause. So i curb these. Viruses. Can can be a trigger uh epstein-barr virus. We’Re going to talk about more can be a trigger. Um cytomegaloviruses can be a trigger, so there’s like six viruses that can be a trigger and that in early on it was this like it’s a viral infection.

It’S a virus in the thyroid and that’s what hashimoto says, and it isn’t even that. Okay, it’s it’s more, that it’s more, that um epstein-barr virus is a is a trigger. So i i i’m personally my personal case for those of you who have never seen me.

I have hashimoto’s and um and it’s kind of an interesting case because i probably got it at 21 years old and uh at 2021. I got mono and i was down for six weeks and i had to cancel an entire athletic season.

I played soccer. I uh played baseball. I wrestled i did. I literally had to cancel an entire year of sports because i was fatigued. I had mono mod is supposed to go away after, like four or five or six weeks, and then you get back to it.

What we now know is is that if you have epstein-barr virus, i mean, if you got mono and you had it for like a year like me and and i went to go on the soccer field like i was gonna be able to play again.

It was like i was like you know, like my legs felt like they were like 500 pounds each. You probably had gotten an epstein-barr infection and developed hashimoto’s at that point in time and for me being athletic.

It was kind of interesting because i never really had quite completely the energy that i had after that again, even when i got better – and i always you know wonder about that – i had sleep more and i and i had to battle my weight.

I mean, and i i stayed pretty active athletically through a lot of my life and yeah. I said i had to battle my weight and i had, and i was always like, had to sleep a lot and then in my 40s i ended up getting stressed and then i ended up getting pneumonia and then that blew up into fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and A ton of things, one of the things we found out was i had hashimoto’s now in retrospect.

We know that i probably developed it 20 some years earlier and what causes mono is or virus, so that was uh, so this is kind of the flow of it, and this is why you’ve heard a lot about epstein-barr virus and then a couple of years ago, There was a book that came out and by the intuitive psychic.

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If you’re a hashimoto's sufferer than in botox and hashimoto’s and so botox is a neurotoxin, most people know what botox is as soon as i mention it to my patients, and I start to tell them what I'm going to tell you about it.

They go. I’m not going to do botox, meaning I'm never going to go, get those shots and get my nerves totally paralyzed. So my wrinkles go away, and, and actually botox has been more popular over a long period of time for um neurological problems.

It’S a neurotoxin. It literally paralyzes your nerves and they’re, it’s usually administered in shots and uh, and it’s it’s most common medical use is migraines migraine headaches. I’Ve had a lot of patients that have had that have had it performed on them for migraine, headaches and then, of course, the now ever popular.

I have to look younger phase where we are getting um botox shots to um uh, to look younger to get rid of our wrinkles and so on and so forth, and you can tell i’m not a botox taker, so it’s uh. So i speak from my heart on this okay, so basically, but i speak more as a clinician who’s trying to help people to stay better and it’s interesting.

One of the things that all hashimoto’s patients for sure and autoimmune patients in general should know is that botox flares up immune inflammation now, particularly studies have been done, particularly on hashimoto’s, but but i’ve talked about other things like salt and autoimmunity and stuff like that, and These these and i talk them relative to hashimoto’s, but as time goes on, the studies have been done on hashimoto's as time goes on.

It turns out that that it turns out that salt is exacerbatory to all autoimmunity. Well, botox is kind of the same yeah. In my observation, but for sure for sure uh for hashimoto’s, so basically what happens is when you inject this into your system.

It increases immune, inflammatory mechanisms considerably for hashimoto’s for uh for thyroid problems. It it the uh, the largest study that was done, indicated that if you have antibodies attacking your thyroid, a shot of botox will increase them by as much as 72 and uh and across the board.

It’s been shown that different other studies have um have said that autoimmunity in general is flared up once that’s 35 percent, one says 52 and stuff like that, but the bottom line is is, if you have autoimmunity, you should just like you should just like you know, Have to come to grips with dealing with your wrinkles or and and maybe your migraine headaches.

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What high or low antibodies mean in terms of Hashimoto thyroid symptoms? This is a great question. It's a question I have gotten a zillion times. It's not actually a, a question I've gotten a zillion times, basically what happens in this person comes in with their, with their labs and, and, and, and then they're opining or agonizing over whether their antibodies have gone up. Whether they've gone down, my antibodies won't come down, but I gotta get my antibodies down. And, and, and none of that is exactly well, it's not correct at all. So here's, here's kind of the skinny on antibodies. So antibodies are, they are made by your system to to alert your immune system, to attack something that's bad, like a VI Iris or something like that. And then unfortunately for a lot of us, we have the genetics that say that once you've developed a certain trigger and your immune system flares up your immune system might look around and go, oh, that person's genetics say I can attack their thyroid tissue.

Okay. Now there's, and, and, and this is interesting because everybody talks about the thyroid peroxidase antibody. So there's two different types of antibodies. There's an antithyroglobulin antibody, which almost nobody ever talks about. And there there's the anti and the thyroid peroxidase antibody, the infamous T P O. And so these antibodies are attacked. Are these antibodies when when a trigger is introduced into the system a food or toxin or a stress or you over exercise or whatever your triggers are, okay, then, then this trigger will set off an immune response. And then, and then that immune response will, will cause the antibodies to go up because you have the genetic propensity and your antibodies have been tagged by your immune system. So now every time your immune system goes up, your thyroid antibodies will go up. And then, and then that will call your, your, your, your white blood cells to come in attack.

Okay. And so basically the antibodies I've had people come in here with antibodies of 20,000 or more now the range of zero to nine. And for those of you say, it's 0 32 and 0 64 and 60, and all that. It's not zero to nine. Okay. And if so, so if, so I, so if somebody comes in here and anybody's at 20,000, they're freaked outta their minds. Oh my God. They might be sitting there and not even feel that bad. Maybe their only symptoms are that they get occasional heart palpitations for no reason at all. And they get the hypothyroid symptoms of, of being overweight and their hair's falling out. So, which has nothing to do with their antibodies, has to do with them being hypothyroid, because their thyroids been beaten up. It's not working well. And so, so there's not a correlation really between numbers of antibody.

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What causes the swings between hyper and hypothyroid symptoms. We have a long presentation online called the nobs series on Hashimotos you should watch that. That would probably be the best answer, but the semi short answer is, is so many things. Okay. So there's 40 different triggers. So if you have, so here it is, you have autoimmune thyroid disease. All right. And there's various stages to it. There's a relatively stable Hashi patient where they just don't have a lot of thyroid symptoms, their antibodies aren't very reactive in, they don't go up and down like that. Then you get into the reactive, it's actually called the reactive hypo reactive Hashimoto's patient. And when you get into that patient, that's the patient that we're talking about right now that goes up and down. Okay. The the you'll go up and down based on not, not particularly the antibodies, they, they can sometimes be a good check.

You, you check antibodies to determine if you have Hashimoto's and I've already done videos to say the number is not the issue. I can have people who have Hashimoto's thyroid proxies, enzymes, which is the enzyme you measure of 50, and they'll be up and down and all over the place and hypo hyper. And, and then I could have somebody comes in and have Hashimoto's of 20,000 and, and they're, and they're in the, and they're stable to, to a, to a large degree. So that's, that's another whole subject, but the point is, is it, that's not the measure of, of going up and down. So the, it it's BA it is just based on your triggers, really it's based on how unstable your thyroid is. So what makes it unstable? What makes it unstable is we all have different microbiomes. We all have different immune systems.

We have different stress responses, and we all have different tissue resilience, see whose tissues have proper sugar and proper blood sugar and proper oxygen whose inflammation, inflammatory processes are low. All of these play into how susceptible a patient is to getting an immune response. Let's use gluten as an example, cuz gluten is the number one trigger probably for, for autoimmune thyroid disease. Iodine could be another one taking iodine, maybe you taking an iodine, multivitamin. It has iodine in it for autoimmune thyroid disease. That's one of the top. That's one of the top triggers for it. So you may be going along and everything's fine. And, and and, and then and then you expose yourself to one of these and then the immune system flares out to make a complex immune problem. Simple, the immune system, flares up inflammation, inflammation causes your antibodies to flare up.

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Links between thyroid health and brain health. Wow. That's a big subject. so I'll try to keep it short here. There's a link depending on who you are listening to, they might call it crosstalk between the thyroid and the brain. They might cause it the, the, the, the brain thyroid web, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of terms for it, but there's a vicious cycle between the brain and the thyroid usually starts, usually starts with the thyroid and to keep it basic when you have autoimmune thyroid disease, when you have Hashimoto's okay. Autoimmune thyroid will, when you get a trigger to your thyroid. In other words, if you have Hashimoto's thyroid disease and there's so many triggers, there's the gluten, there's the there's different types of whether they're night shades or lectins, or there's glyco glyphosates, or, I mean, there's just a ton of food ones.

There's chemical ones. There's, there's, there's pathogenic ones. There's there's just a hunt there's lifestyle ones. Whenever you introduce one of these triggers into your system depending on your sensitivities, you're likely to set off a thyroid response, cuz you're going to cause too much thyroid hormone to, to be ejected outta your system. This doesn't a lot of different things. Okay. It can cause it can cause heart palpitations, but it can in someone who is prone to anxiety or panic attacks, because they have a easily firing mid midbrain or it's called an a amygdala. That's not the midbrain an easily following a MIDD which is the fear center of the brain that extra thyroid hormone can set that off. And it can cause you to have anxiety or panic attacks in general. Hashimoto's is known to when, when, when it's, when it's active, it's known to increase inflammation to the frontal low and it's known to decrease oxygen to the brain.

In general, the inflammation can hit the frontal low when, when you have, so when you have inflammation in your brain, your neurons, which are the, which are the the nerve cells of nerve tissue nerve cells, the neurons, they when they become inflamed they'll become excitatory producing some of the symptoms I just mentioned, but also inflammation will cause your neurons to not be able to make proper neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, meaning serotonin and dopamine means serotonin. I'm not happy. I have seasonal effective disorder, depressed dopamine. I'm not motivated. I'm angry. I wake up tired. And so, and so you put the two of 'em together, you have significant depression and maybe someone who wants to do harm to themselves, this is a chemical issue. And, and so Hashimoto's literally is involved in of those, in all, in all of those factors, Hashimoto's is now being and migraines, migraines, what are migraines, MI migraines, if you break it down to the simplest aspects of it.

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Impact of adrenal exhaustion on Hashimotos bear with me on this one. This one might be a few minutes longer. I'll try not to make it too long. Okay. Because when I first got into functional medicine, it was, you can't fix the adrenals. You can't fix anything. There's a smidge in of truth to that, there's some truth to that. But the reality is, is the adrenals get the snot kicked out of him like every day, all day long. And it's not stress it's partially stress it's it's. And, and let me even refine that. What I meant to say was it's not particularly mental stress, everything that happens in your system that creates inflammatory responses and puts you outta balance, causes a stress on your adrenal glands. Okay? And so your adrenal glands are, they are affected by they're affected by food sensitivities. They're affected by leaky gut.

They're affected by lipo poly rights. They're affected by small intestinal bacteria overgrowth. They're affected by any type of an infection they're affected by any type of a chemical sensitivity. And in a lot of the, Hashimoto's patients they're affected by over exercising, they're affected by not sleeping enough, they're affected by not being too sedentary. I could go on for a long time with, to all the things that create and a stress on the, on the body that forces your adrenal glands to either put out stress hormones, which is a adrenaline epinephrine or epinephrine or adrenaline. It can put out, it can put out cortisol, which is the one that everybody seems to be really familiar with today. Everybody's familiar with cortisol now, as they should be, they can put out cortisol and cortisol knows it's a stress hormone, but it's also, it's also before it's an inflammatory hormone.

It's, it's actually an anti-inflammatory home run before it becomes too much. And it also helps to control your blood sugar. It also can. It's also helps to control all your sex hormones. If you're, if you're in menopause and prior to menopause, it's a secondary repository for making, for making sex hormone. So your adrenals do a lot and they are affected by all that. You go through menopause and you're going through menopause really badly. And you're having a bad time. You, you have bad adrenals, but your E imbalances that and progesterone imbalances, they're going, they're also screwing up your adrenal. So the point is when I attack a case, if the person has adrenal fatigue, and I hate that, I hate that term, but that's the term that a lot of people like to use, okay. Or adrenal exhaustion, or I it's just hypo adrenal function.

The adrenals are like, they're like a little factory. Somebody says, I need these hormones. They put 'em out. They put 'em out. They put 'em out. They put 'em out, they put 'em out. And all of a sudden they all have so, so much hormones that they can put out and they are amazingly, amazingly regenerative. I might add the adrenals. So really the adrenals are, are how do they affect how they affect Hashimoto's or, or how does Hashimoto's affect them? 

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