Southwest Florida's Health and Wellness Magazine Health and Wellness Articles
By Dr. Robert Gilliland, DC
Over 20 million Americans continue to suffer with low or hypothyroid symptoms even though they medicate appropriately and have normal test results. The reason why? Most doctors only treat the medical problem and ignore the Functional problem!
Hypothyroid Symptoms may include:
Fatigue, Unexpected Weight Gain, Thinning Hair, Dry/Brittle Hair, Skin and Nails, Brain Fog, Headaches, Constipation, and Cold Sensitivity
The Medical Approach To Hypothyroidism
The medical approach for an under-active thyroid gland is pretty straightforward; your doctor orders a blood test (TSH) to see how much thyroid hormone your thyroid gland is producing. If it’s not producing enough, your doctor will prescribe medication (Synthroid®, Levothyroxine Armour®, Nature Throid®, or Cytomel®) at a dose high enough to bring your TSH back into the normal laboratory reference range. Then, once your TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) goes back into the normal range, your medical problem is considered ‘well managed’ – even if you still have symptoms.
Why You Still Have Symptoms
Taking a ‘medical only’ approach to an under-active thyroid is like taking your car to a gas station – the only thing a gas station has that could possibly help you is more gas (thyroid hormone replacement). Therefore, the only thing they need to know is – how much gas do you have? To find out, all they have to do is look at your fuel gauge (TSH levels).
So, let’s say you pull your car into a gas station and explain to the attendant that your car sputters and jerks back and forth whenever you put your foot on the gas pedal. So, he checks your fuel gauge (TSH), finds that it’s low on fuel, fills your tank up and says, “That should take care of your problem.”
How confident would you feel if that was all that was done? Do you really think that filling up your car with gas would be enough to fix your car and make it run smoothly?
It would be a long shot at best. In fact, you could probably think of half a dozen things off the top of your head that could cause your car to sputter and jerk like that; a clogged fuel line, a faulty fuel injector, or even bad spark plugs, just to name a few.
So, if ‘filling up your tank’ with thyroid hormones didn’t eliminate your symptoms – it shouldn’t come as a big surprise. The question is – what more can you do?
A Functional Medicine Approach To Hypothyroidism
A Functional medicine approach to an under-active thyroid is like taking your car to a garage, hooking it up to a computer and getting a thorough diagnostic work up to find the underlying cause of your problem.
So, instead of running a single marker, we run a complete thyroid panel to identify where your thyroid hormone is getting ‘stuck’; is it a transportation problem, a conversion problem or a delivery problem? A complete thyroid panel will also tell us if you have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune condition, and the #1 cause of all cases of hypothyroidism in the United States.
In Functional medicine, once we have identified your problem, we then develop a remedy that will give your body the support it needs to address the problem. So, in Functional medicine, we aren’t just treating your symptoms, we’re going after the root cause of your problem.
Functional medicine’s remedy is a customized nutritional plan consisting of diet and supplements designed to give your body specifically what it needs to overcome the problem.
PEMF (Pulsed Electro-Magnetic Field) Therapy
As effective as Functional medicine is for an unresolved thyroid, there are some people who won’t respond to Functional medicine alone. This is why we have added PEMF therapy into our 90-day thyroid recovery plan. The way that PEMF therapy works is it ‘clears a path’ to the cells to ensure that Functional medicine’s remedy can make its way into the cell – otherwise, the remedy would have no effect.
The way that PEMF therapy works is it uses pulsed magnetic fields to decrease inflammation, increase circulation, increase cellular oxygenation, it aids in cellular detoxification and it increases energy (ATP production) at the cellular level, which aids in ‘clearing a path to the cells’ to ensure that Functional medicine’s remedy is able to get inside the cell.
To learn more about our 90-day Thyroid Recovery Plan, Functional medicine and PEMF therapy please visit our website at www.SWFthyroid.com or call our office at 239-444-3106
