Hope that you are all enjoying this incredible late spring weather, and making time to get yourself outdoors everyday.
This past week there was a lot of conversation with clients around thyroid health, and how to know if your thyroid is functioning properly. For many of you, you may be experiencing symptoms of hypothyroidism, like ongoing fatigue, poor memory, constipation, hair loss (particularly on the out 1/3rd of your eyebrows), cold much of the time, elevated LDL cholesterol, low sex drive and most importantly struggling to lose weight despite your best effort. Although these symptoms can be linked to a number of other health issues and lifestyle choices, thyroid should be at top of mind if you are experiencing a cluster of these symptoms.
Challenges with Lab Work
Sadly, many of you may have spoken to your practitioners about these symptoms, had less than thorough lab work done, and been told that your labs all look “fine”. I have to tell you this really fires me up! I want you to know that you are not alone, and these symptoms do not have to be accepted as your new “normal”.
Understanding Thyroid Labs
So today I want to teach you about the labs that I refer to most. Before I get into those juicy details let me say a few things about lab work. First, the “normal” reference ranges are not there to tell you that you are in optimal health if your value falls within them. They are the highest and lowest threshold that 95% of apparently healthy individuals would fall within.
This is why, when studying a client’s lab work, I am looking at patterns, relationships between values, along with your complaints, and my own set of much smaller reference ranges, that better represent optimal health. Below I am going to share with you the values I look at when trying to better understand thyroid health in my clients. This group of findings will help us see the full picture of what could be at play with your thyroid. All too often I hear stories of client’s only receiving TSH, and told their thyroid is doing great.
The Role of TSH
To put this in perspective, TSH or Thyroid Stimulating Hormone is a brain hormone. That’s right, it is secreted by a gland in the brain to send the message to your thyroid to make thyroid hormone. This hormone alone is not even close to the full picture. For example, perhaps your TSH is normal, but your body is high in REVERSE T3, which deactivates your FREE T3 ( thyroid hormone). This means you could have normal TSH, and still be suffering from hypothyroidism.
Key Thyroid Values to Monitor
Here are the values that I like to look at…
- TSH
- FREE T4
- FREE T3
- REVERSE T3
- TPO
- TG
The Bigger Picture in Functional Medicine
As always in functional medicine, uncovering a thyroid issue is only part of the picture. My passion and the reason I love what I get to do everyday, is helping people uncover what the upstream root causes of dis-ease are for them. These are always unique and different for each person that I work with, and when we resolve these root causes, that’s where the real magic happens.
