Hashimoto's & Normal Thyroid Labs: Still Feel Awful

hello everyone welcome to our April series we are kicking off talking all about hormones this month so today in particular you guys might see the dog Papa I'm at my office today so I'm in a little bit different of scenery but it's been a it's been a good busy day but as we kick off and talk more about hormones this month we're really going to start by talking about thyroid conditions I feel that this is something that's really important to create some clarity around primarily because there are so many people that are dealing with some level of a thyroid condition some of us are dealing with a hypo or hyper thyroid either just a low functioning or high functioning and then some of us are dealing with autoimmune thyroid conditions as well so I think it's really important for us to really establish what is the big culprit behind why so many people are dealing with different types of hormonal issues too as a whole but also why is there such an epidemic of thyroid conditions as well so as we dive in tonight we're going to really uncover a lot of those different topics and really understanding some of the limitations with the testing that exists and also some of the limitations with our conventional methods of working with thyroid conditions as well so for those of you that are here either on the webinar or on the Instagram live definitely feel free to ask questions you can post them in either the comment area if you're on Instagram or you can also post them in the chat box we're going to be doing a live Q&A towards the end so I'm happy to answer any questions that come up through the process but as we get into it I might actually be answering some of those as I go through the presentation tonight so with that being said for those of you that are on my webinar I do have a wonderful PowerPoint slide for you guys mainly to make sure that I don't go off on tangents but tonight we're going to be talking about hormones we're gonna talk about thyroid we're really gonna establish that you don't know what you don't know when it to your hormonal imbalance because there is a lot of issues the way that we look at hormones we think that they are just dis functioning on their own and that the hormones are not being affected by infections toxins stressors and even just emotional stress so we're gonna connect the dots a little bit more to understand the bigger picture and we're also gonna really talk more about what are some of the limitations with the testing that's available for hormones because our run-of-the-mill blood work is not always necessarily giving us all the information that we need and when you get your thyroid levels back and they're either higher low that also doesn't really give you much insight as to why that's happening so it's really understanding what can you do that could give you more information about really getting to the root and resolving your thyroid condition once and for all so with that being said just to kind of understand a little bit about myself a little bit more about what I do and my practice so if you can see my wonderful practice the back with me so we're here in Belmar in new jersey what's great about it is we do work with people from all over the world actually have someone coming from Italy in about a week but overall from day one of practicing we always asked more questions and kind of challenged the things that we were taught and primarily I just felt that a lot of the ways things were being done and a lot of the ways that we were looking at the body or we were being taught to look at the body didn't always make sense to me and I really mean that I felt that we were we were segregating all of the systems of the body and we were not necessarily looking at people as a whole and we were not necessarily considering that people didn't always match a textbook and I think that's really the biggest thing I've learned in clinical practice is very rarely do any of us match what the textbook tells us so if you don't match the textbook then you shouldn't really be treated the way that the textbook tells you to treat so we really evolved our clinical process to challenge the body and to look at the body in a different way and really to figure out what the root cause is and that really requires us to spend more time to ask that our questions and also to just dig deeper and what I think is really amazing about that is when we work with our patients very often they're just like wow that really makes sense and I finally feel like I have an understanding as to why I feel the way that I do but also how I got here so hormones is one of the many things that I work with I do work with a variety of other conditions and the only reason that I can say that I work with so many different types of conditions everything from autoimmunity to Lyme disease to gut issues to hormonal hormonal issues it's because I'm not looking at the body in a linear view I'm not looking at you as a thyroid patient I'm not looking at you as an infertility patient I'm not looking at you from that lens I'm looking at you as a collaboration of different symptoms and trying to find the common denominator of what is causing the umbrella of your symptoms because you might think your gut issues are completely separate from your hormonal issues or your thyroid condition but chances are they're not and they're very very much connected and there are many many things that can affect the hormones not just the gut but the brain and the adrenals and inflammation and infections and we're gonna dive more into those and understand a little bit more about how these things affect us so overall working with hormones is always so fascinating to me because I even have so many women that come to me for their hormonal issues and after we uncover the foundation very rarely do we actually do a hormonal protocol and that's because most of their hormones self-correct after removing the foundational problem and the foundational stress from their system and this is kind of interesting because for myself part of my story is that I wasn't sick I this sick person I sought out functional medicine to get better because nobody else could help me I actually thought that I was a pretty healthy person I thought that I was really conscious of my diet I thought that I really knew what I was doing from an exercise standpoint and when I did my testing I really thought everything was perfect there's nothing so when my testing didn't come back perfect I was almost a little bit confused and what I realized is that there were so many things that I classified as my normal I really just adapted to my fatigue I adapted to my brain fog I adapted to my gut issues and there was a lot of excuses that I made for these reasons or the for the reasons for these symptoms I was like oh well I ate out oh well I didn't get good enough sleep oh well you know I I did a really hard workout and there was all these reasons for why I had these symptoms that came and went and really at the end of the day there was a reason those symptoms were around they were warning signs to tell me that my body was not at its best and part of that was my hormones and I always have regular periods I always had like pretty consistent you know menstrual cycles but what was happening is I started to have fainting spells leading up to my menstrual cycle and this was something that was blamed on hormones by my gynecologist but what it actually turned out to be was a neurological dwell as an infectious condition so there are many many things that can contribute to why your hormones might be off and especially if you're just dealing with PMS we all kind of accept that that's the norm and we're just have to deal with it but there are there a lot of women that don't deal with PMS and it's like what's the difference between them and the woman who does so it really comes down to there's going to be a reason for why your hormones are off or wire thyroid is dis functioning so I know that it is past seven o'clock there is a lot of things going on around so I want to give you guys the opportunity to just kind of be able to shut you know your email browser down you know slide the cell phone away from you you know give yourself the opportunity to dive in with me because I'm going to give you guys information that is not necessarily your run-of-the-mill information I'm not gonna sit here and tell you you know all the foods you need to avoid because you have a thyroid condition I'm not gonna tell you the magical supplement protocol that you need to take to fix your thyroid problems I'm gonna literally give you information that is gonna help you understand the bigger picture behind why you feel the way you do why your thyroid is still not corrected despite your efforts or despite your medication and really give you some tools to take the step in the right direction so first and foremost I always bring this up in my webinars is that you don't know what you don't know and it is not your fault that you don't know and it's very very difficult to navigate the sea of information that we are dealing with we are dealing with an abundance of information that is telling us that we should avoid you know we should avoid voyage in foods because that's going to affect our thigh rate and then we should also make sure that we're on an anti-inflammatory diet and then we should make sure we take adrenal supplements because our adrenals might be burnt out and that might be causing our thyroid dysfunction and then we need you know drink celery juice so we can do all these different things and what it comes down to is that what your body needs is gonna be very different than somebody else who maybe has a similar thyroid condition every single person's needs is very very different and it is important for you to seek out testing so that you can understand what is going on with your body and what is the root cause for why you feel the way you do so it's extremely extremely important for us to kind of take this away and also not be paralyzed by the amount of information that's out there because I get it I get how it can be so confusing that you just throw your hands up and you're just like I can't I can't even navigate all this so I'm just not gonna do anything at all so a very very important piece to kind of understand before we really get into the thyroid and hormone piece is that when it comes to understanding integrative and functional medicine and the way that we think differently about the body is that we're thinking of the body as an integration of systems and I personally feel that one of the biggest detriment to the way medicine is being done is we are assuming that everything is working independently we are assuming that the gut has no relation to the thyroid that the thyroid has no relation to the brain and that the brain has no relation to the reproductive organs and this also causes us to seek out a specialist and/or the expert in our hormonal condition and one of the stories that I'm going to tell you guys in the next few minutes is gonna blow your mind because this is a person who came to me so I'm going to help you guys connect the dots that this is a person that came to me with a thyroid condition but the root cause of her thyroid condition was completely completely off of her radar and really this brings me to the second point of understanding that when it comes to basic physiology when you look at the connection one of the biggest connections to our hormones is actually how well our liver functions and that's because your liver is actually in charge of getting rid of excess hormones like estrogen so you might be thinking what's going on with my thyroid I can't seem to lose weight but sometimes you can't lose weight because you have so much excess estrogen in your body that is actually not being filtered out by your liver so there is a massive connection when it comes to your liver as well as your hormones so one of the most common things that people ask me is why doesn't everybody do what you do why doesn't everybody look at the body the way that integrated Wellness Group does and my response to them is that the foundation of medicine is based on chemistry so when we look at the body from a chemistry standpoint aka blood work we are really looking for things that are off in the chemistry okay your hormone is too high or it's too low and then we're going to use a solution to try to manipulate that chemistry and the way that we primarily do that is going to be pharmacology medicine so when we look beyond just what's going on in our blood work and we look beyond what is showing up in our chemistry we start to have other tools that are outside of just relying on medicine and that's how you're really able to decipher what is the root cause but you're able to then get results that actually last so the other piece of this too is when especially when we're dealing in a thyroid condition we're always thinking that if we just take the medication that were prescribes that that is going to solve our issues and yes that medication or that thyroid pill might actually manipulate your chemistry and make it look like your thyroid is improved but so many of the people that I work with still tell me that they feel like crap and they're still tired and they're still freezing and their hair is still falling out and they still can't lose weight so despite your blood were looking better that doesn't always mean that your thyroid is actually functioning better and you are healing so it's really not always about those chemistry levels it also is about how do you feel do you actually feel better do you actually feel like you're improving so one of the really fascinating things one of the the patients I worked with in the past is she had a very very rare situation she actually came to me and had Hashimoto's which is autoimmune low functioning thyroid and she also had Graves disease which is autoimmune hyper thyroid high functioning thyroid that's pretty rare to see that so this woman's thyroid was in such disarray that she was manifesting both autoimmune conditions and her thyroid was on a seesaw she would have days that she was having racy heart heart pop you tations that was when the thyroid was really high and then she would bottom out and crash and not even be able to get out of bed so this actually manifested after she had some dental work so if you really just think about Anatomy and you think about the mouth and you think about the location of a thyroid being in the throat very close in proximity the major thing between the two organs is tonsils which unfortunately a lot of us don't have because your tonsils are actually a filter there are protective mechanisms to keep things out of the lungs and also to keep things out of the throat and keep things out of the thyroid so this was a woman who had 12 amalgam fillings those are the silver fillings in the mouth she had these for many many many many years so she started to read up on maybe this was bad and that she really wanted to get her fillings out and she wanted to get them swapped to the white because she wanted to potentially resolve any capabilities of getting dementia or Alzheimer's because her mom passed away from Alzheimer's and she was very it was a very devastating thing for her to deal with so she was like okay how can I prevent Alzheimer's and one of the ways was to make sure that you get your silver fillings out of your mouth so she went and she didn't know that you actually need to seek out a very very special dentist to do this so she sought out a traditional dentist a dentist that she was going to for many years and what the dentist did was he went in and he started to crack and pop out all of her silver amalgam fillings and he did them all in one shot so all 12 were removed over the course of a couple of hours and then they were all replaced with the white so she slowly started to have some symptom she started to have some pretty significant brain fog she was having a lot of headaches and that is when she also started to have a lot of issues with her publications racy heart fatigue temperature regulation and she read up on that and realized oh I might be having a thyroid issue and that's when she was diagnosed with the Hashimoto's and Graves combination so the thing that you have to understand about this is that this was a person who had dental work that went in cracked these silver amalgam fillings that released mercury vapor that murder was then absorbed into the lymph nodes which then started to also absorb into the thyroid and that was the primary stress on why she had all of this dysfunction in her thyroid so when it comes to toxicity there is a lot of other components to this but having dental work especially dental work that is not properly done can be a huge huge reason for why you developed a thyroid condition in the first place especially an autoimmune thyroid condition when you actually get your silver amalgam fillings removed you as well as the dentist are supposed to be wearing pretty much a hazmat suit to protect you from the mercury vapor so if you were wearing anything less than that then chances are you released mercury vapor into your body which may be it's causing a thyroid issue maybe it's causing a neurological issue there are many many possibilities when you're talking about toxicity because some people it will affect thyroid some people will actually affect their brain and neurological system so when it comes to what some of the ways that we look at hormones and some of the ways that we really understand the bigger picture behind thyroid conditions is we're looking to at all different factors we're looking to see is toxicity a part of the puzzle is dental work part of the puzzle is this person having a lot of chemical exposure due to personal products is there a lot of blood sugar instability is there circulation issues is there just a ton of stress and emotional trauma the person's been through are their gut issues or are there other types of infections that are affecting either the sinuses or even the reproductive organs all of these things are extremely extremely important because they can all dramatically affect your thyroid so some of the biggest myths about your hormones is number one that your PMS is normal number two if that food has nothing to do with your hormones also that your hormones do not play a role in your mood physiologically I think every woman can attest to having you know a menstrual cycle that made their mood shift but I'm talking about your sex hormones that actually manipulate your neurotransmitters like your serotonin and your dopamine which are your feel-good hormones and then that your hormones are completely not affected by any type of infections or or autoimmune conditions and that your hormones are also not affected by toxicity all of these things are not true and now we're going to uncover why so number one PMS is normal and we just have to deal with it so why do some women have PMS and what is other women not a PMS so it comes down to there's clearly a difference for why some women deal with it in some women don't so number one is that PMS is heavily influenced by hormones that can be in the body and this could be due to hormones that we were exposed to through our food through personal products as well as through our liver function so for those of you that have been listening for a while one of the things that I mentioned is that your liver is in charge of getting rid of excess estrogen so if you have had a lot of liver issues maybe you had your gallbladder removed which is connected to your liver then you might actually have trouble getting rid of excess estrogen because your liver is not working at its fast also more relatable if you have high cholesterol chances are your your liver is stressed because your cholesterol is made by your liver as well so secondary to that you might be thinking well why do I have excess estrogen in my system so we can have excess estrogen in our system because there are different things that come from food one of them is soy you might be thinking why don't drink soy milk and I don't eat soy well if you eat conventional meat aka you don't necessarily always eat organic or grass-fed then you are being exposed to soy every time you eat animal products and that's because most animals are being fed a soy diet so despite you consuming soy tofu all that you're being exposed to soy if you consume animal products that are not organic and not breastfed so then in addition to that we also deal with a lot of different things that are hormone disruptors from a personal product perspective which I'm going to talk a little bit more on in the next few minutes so the other most fascinating thing about PMS is that your PMS can actually be heavily influenced by your immune system so let me explain this so what happens is that when you are leading up to getting your menstrual cycle your body has to kind of derail so if your energy of your body and the energy of your cells is consumed because maybe you're dealing with a low-grade infection or maybe you get a lot of sore throats maybe you have a lot of sinus infections maybe you get a lot of UTIs maybe you have a lot of gut problems then your immune system can be really busy trying to handle all of that so then you start getting close to your period and then your all of your your body has to shift into preparation for your menstrual cycle which takes a lot of energy so all that energy that was being given to your immune system now starts to hone in on preparing your body for your menstrual cycle so now different infections can start to come to the surface because the immune system can't deal with it because it's getting you ready for your menstrual cycle so this is why some women get headaches some women get loose bowel movements some women get constipation some women just get moody and this has a lot to do with things that are going on in your system that you're unaware of that are moreso stressing your immune system so when it comes to PMS PMS is not normal and it is not something that we have to deal with it's really happening because there is either an overabundance of hormones that are not being filtered out properly or it comes down to there is something stressing your immune system that hasn't come to the surface yet because you haven't done the right testing so another big piece of this which I've already scratched the surface on is food and hormones so for those of you that are you know maybe in your 50 is a little bit older one of the most common conversations that I have is people not getting the organic thing they're just like I don't get it why should I spend the money on it you know I never used eat organic growing up we were all fine then one of the things that I always explain to people is that when we look at the younger generations of females I think it's safe to say that a lot of us are noticing that females in their early early teens look like they're in their 20s they're very developed they're tall they have breasts and people are noticing this and they're like you know what's the deal with these girls being so developed at such a young age well the reason is is all of the hormones in the food there is a ton of hormones that is going into the livestock so not only are we having these hormone disruptors from the soy that is either hidden in our cereals granola bars etc but they're also feeding soy because it's cheap to the animals so every time your kid consumes cheese milk beef that is non-organic that is not grass-fed none of that they're getting exposed to soy and they're also getting exposed to growth hormone so it's very very important for us to not necessarily just kind of brush that under the rug because food is a huge reason for why our hormones are really off so you might be thinking okay well let me just like be really really cautious avoid all of those foods and my hormones will completely correct on their own unfortunately it's not always how it works because if you've already accumulated some of these toxins and you've already accumulated this abundance of hormones you might need to go in and help your liver to function more optimally to flush this stuff out and also to open up that filtration pathway again so it's really really significant to know that it's not always just about altering your diet it also has a lot to do with fixing the damage that may have already been done and having the right tools to do that so you're not always trying to figure out on your own so in addition to that when it comes to your the soy and it comes to the growth hormone there's a lot of other things that mess up our hormones that's in our food and that's everything from pesticides things that are called dioxins dioxins are in a lot of fish dioxins are also found in tampons which are massive hormone disruptors so females think about that we're putting a hormone disruptor into the vaginal tract which is one of the most absorbent areas of the body and that is getting absorbed directly into our bloodstream like this is a huge huge problem and it is something that nobody's really talking about so outside of that there's also different things when it comes to you BPA's phthalates these are not just in food these are in plastic water bottles these are also in a lot of personal products which is one of the things that we're going to talk about as well so it's really really important for us to really understand that things that we're doing on a day to day basis can be a huge contributing factor to why our hormones are off in the first place so another very interesting connection is that a lot of times when we feel hormonal eeyow or we have that PMS or we have really rough menstrual cycles we also find ourselves feeling anxious or we feel depressed and what's interesting about this is there is a massive massive connection to our fielded hormones as well as our sex hormones so it's not that one affects the other they actually affect each other inversely so what I mean by that is you can have excess estrogen and maybe that's because of all the soy in your diet or all the on non-organic meats but if you have excess estrogen you can actually then have excess serotonin serotonin is what we call feel-good hormone that everybody gets put on SSRIs which are serotonin reuptake inhibitors when we're depressed so that's what an antidepressant is but the tricky thing about this is that neurotransmitters have to be in perfect balance this is not about them being too high this is not about them being too low so if you have excess serotonin you might think like I should feel amazing but you don't you actually feel anxious so it's very important to acknowledge these things because the other thing too is if you think about this vice-versa if you've been on an antidepressant for many many years and maybe you have excess serotonin because of that you can easily have access estrogen and that could be the big culprit why you can't lose weight or why your periods are so painful so on another token we also have dopamine dopamine is another feel-good hormone dopamine is the hormone that's actually very connected to addictive behaviors so if you have low dopamine it's very typical that you are have an addictive you call it an addictive behavior but all you're doing by consuming either alcohol or cigarettes or even a mocha latte or a chocolate bar all you're doing with those things is boosting your dopamine temporarily to make you feel good in the moment but because your dopamine is not fixed that's why you go back for that food or that advice over and over again so the interesting thing about this is dopamine low dopamine specifically will cause your luteinizing hormone to be low which then will cause your progesterone to be low so if your progesterone is low you're gonna have irregular periods you might not even get your period that is a big big culprit behind being irregular with your menstrual cycle so this can definitely be connected and it can also work vice-versa so having low progesterone can also be a culprit behind incoming third behind having low dopamine which can definitely induce those addictive behaviors so it's not about you know this [ __ ] I don't want this to be like oh my gosh this is so confusing this is so overwhelming like how do you possibly fix all of this is that when you do the right testing you figure out how the body needs to be supported you figure out like what is the root cause and does this come down to you're just cleaning some things out of the body or does this come down to yes we need to support the hormones or yes we need to support the neurotransmitters it's really just a matter of doing the testing so that this doesn't seem overwhelming to you the other big thing too is when it comes to low dopamine in men this is a big part of low testosterone so I'm not gonna say that every man that has low testosterone has low dopamine levels but it is definitely a very common connection and then women that are dealing with higher testosterone this is a big reason why women develop sis on her other ovaries and especially if it's polycystic ovarian syndrome this is what we have an abundance of cysts on our ovaries but we're also dealing with a lot of weight gain because we're having something called insulin resistance so the biggest thing to take away from this is that your mood and your hormones are very connected and it's not because you're a crazy person and it's not because you know it's not for no reason there is a physiological connection and if you can correct your hormones you can definitely improve your mood or if you can correct your neurotransmitters you can correct your hormones as well and sometimes that's what the person needs but sometimes you really just need to fix the liver function or even any stress that's happening on the immune system and that's gonna kind of dive into some of the other pieces that we're going to talk about so hormones are very very very affected by infections so if we want to get really specific on the thyroid we just need to think about this logistical e and we need to think about anatomy here so if we have we have mouth we have sinuses we have tonsils again a lot of us don't have these and then we also have lymph nodes and then we have our thyroid so if you are a person who has had a lot of sinus infections you have post nasal drip you've had a lot of dental work you've had a lot of oral infections maybe you get cold score cold sores maybe you get canker sores maybe you have a lot of store throats maybe you have so many sore throats that's the reason why your tonsils were removed or you get swollen glands or swollen lymph nodes all of these things are going to impact your thyroid the most common thing that I see affecting the thyroid is strep epstein-barr virus the virus that causes mono sometimes staff because you can get staph infections in your sinuses and mold those are the absolute top reasons that people have thyroid dysfunction I see it every day in my practice most of the women that have autoimmune great conditions have had their tonsils removed or they have had a variety of different procedures done orally everything from fillings to bridges to root canals etc so there is a huge huge connection and if you think about this logistical e so autoimmune conditions are when the immune system is attacking tissue and they say this just happens we don't know why but you know your immune system turned on your thyroid and now it's attacking it and you just have to manage it through sensory so your immune systems job is to fight bad stuff to fight infections toxins or anything that is foreign to your body so if your thyroid is being affected by infections that have maybe come from your sinuses maybe have come from ear infections maybe have come from throat infections then it makes sense that your thyroid can easily be in the line of fire one of my patients husbands that was here and I was explaining this to him because she had a very severe case of Hashimoto's he's like so you're saying that her thyroid is in a bad neighborhood I was like that is exactly what I'm saying so I feel like that was just such a good way to put it because it's not always that the it's just the thyroid it can easily be that either there is an infection in your tonsils or an infection in the lymph nodes and your immune system is coming to the scene to clean everything up and do its job but unfortunately it's creating a massive inflammatory process which is starting to affect your thyroid so the same thing really goes for reproductive infections so for those of you that are familiar your thyroid talks to your pituitary gland which is the control center your thyroid pituitary gland also talk to your adrenals they also talk to your reproductive organs so that's what we call the HPA access so all of those dogs have to communicate with each other in in synchrony in order for you to have balance hormones so going in and trying to just manipulate one of those aka thyroid medication just trying to fix the thyroid chances are you can't because you haven't maybe considered is this coming from the pituitary plan is there an adrenal involvement or is there something going on in the reproductive organs and one of the most common things in the reproductive organs is infections a lot of women are dealing with yeast infections they're dealing with bacterial vaginosis they're dealing with discharge they're dealing even with UTIs urinary tract infections so the urinary tract and the vaginal tract are in extreme close proximity and most of the time the same things that are in your urinary tract are also affecting your vaginal tract so if you have about constant Qin's like yeast infections or bacterial issues that can definitely throw off the hormones being produced by your ovaries which can then start to affect the access it can affect your adrenals it can affect your thyroid so we cannot just look at the thyroid as being this this organ that functions independently because it is known physiologically to work with the brain work with the adrenals and also to work with the reproductive organs and it's a matter of making sure that they are all synced up and that they are all working in conjunction with each other so sometimes when I work with women sometimes just being able to work on their chronic yeast infections is actually what resolves their thyroid issue because now the communication is working again and everything is in balance so the other big thing outside of infections is toxicity and one of the most common things that I find to be a massive massive massive hormone disruptor is mold and mold is something that is getting a little bit more press these days primarily because a lot of physicians especially Integrative physicians are looking at mold when they run into roadblocks with helping their patients to get better because mold is something that's not always the easiest to to test for but mold is one of these things that yes it can come from mold in your house yes it can come from a water damage building but it can also come from frequent use of antibiotics it can also come from food so some of the most common high mold foods are peanuts peanut butter cheese especially the stinky ones like blue cheese gorgonzola cheese coffee wine and wheat or gluten so these are some of the foods that are highest in mold so most of those foods we all love so it's very important to know that when it comes to the mold conversation yes this can be from you know knowing that you lived or worked in mole but this can also be from too many antibiotics for whatever for whatever reason but this can also be from consumption of foods that are high in mold and wine is a huge one and peanut butter cheese is like I said coffee most of us drink coffee every single day so with that being said when it comes to moles one of the things that it does the most is it lowers your progesterone levels so lower progesterone levels will definitely lead to lower dopamine levels which makes you have more addictive behavior it also really throws off your mental cycle it makes you extremely irregular or it can even cause you to not have home or not have periods at all so outside of the mold which is definitely the most common thing that I see affecting women's hormones we also deal with an array of different things that we get exposed to from our personal products so for those of you listening definitely definitely download an app called think dirty it's a free app you can download it onto your phone thing will blow your mind because it will analyze the personal products that you use and in a war viel the toxicity of that personal product but it will also reveal if you are being exposed to hormone disruptors which a lot of these hormone disruptors are in these personal products in the form of fragrance or in the form of parabens BPA that's the big thing that we keep hearing about with plastic all the plastics are BPA free now because they found that the BPA in plastics was a huge hormone disruptor sali dioxin for those of you that have been listening the whole time dioxins are the primary thing that is in tampons so again we're taking a tampon that is toxic putting into a the most absorbent part of our body our vaginal tract and if I told you more about tampons either you completely horrified but outside of the dioxin one of the other things I actually did a toxicology report on tampons and one of the most interesting things about them is that they contained fiberglass and the reason they contain fiber fiberglass is because if they do you bleed more and you use more tampons which is a big marketing ploy to buy more tampons so yes this is how corrupt this industry is there are many many toxins in most of the things that we are using and if you're getting these big-name brands from your traditional Rite Aid Walgreens etc you are being exposed to these chemicals that I'm talking about so use the app think dirty it will definitely be amazing for you to be able to get that clarity on things that you're using and if they are hormone disruptors so this is one of my favorite patient stories um so I had a woman she came in to see me and she was adamant about her thyroid she is like listen I have a thyroid condition and I need you to fix it because I need to lose weight and that's the end of the story this is my primary problem and I need you to just give me support to fix my thyroid so I can lose weight and I was like okay I was like well you know we're gonna figure out that all the pieces of the puzzle and we're gonna make or that you know it is your thyroid and we're also gonna address if there's anything else going on and she was like no no no it is my thyroid I know that it is so just fix it I was like okay let's just do the testing and we'll go from there so so we did the testing and also as we did her consultation we talked about a lot of different things but some of the other things she revealed is she was having pretty bad mood swings and memory loss so she actually owned her own business she had a pretty successful business and one of the things that she said was that she had to have her assistant follow her around and write everything down through the day because she could not remember things that she said or did almost ten minutes after she said or did not and then in addition she was also lashing out at a lot of her employees and then having to apologize because she was almost like she's like I almost don't know why but I'm very like I'm not in control and I do it and then I i'm you know apologetic because i don't really know where it came from so she also was dealing with adrenal fatigue that was one of her diagnosis she had really um low cortisol levels and then she also said that she had headaches she didn't have migraines but she had pretty low-level headache she had him for a long time they were pretty much her normal she she honestly didn't even really want to talk about the headaches she's like listen they're no big deal you know I have a pretty consistent headache but it's low-grade and I I power through I was like okay so we did her testing and we pieced it together with her history so as we started to pieces together one of the things that came up was she had her tonsils removed at two years old because of chronic sore throats she had a lot of antibiotic use because of the sore throats and also ear infections as a child the other thing that she said is that growing up she was always really small for her age um so for those of you listening you might be like I don't know how that's relevant but being really small for your age growing up means that there's something that is prohibiting your and one of the most common things for that is a small pituitary gland so the pituitary gland is in the brain it is the control center of your hormones so when you have hypoplasia or a shrinking of the pituitary gland that is a huge part of very very slow development and slow growth as a child so I started to kind of think okay I wonder if something's been going on with her pituitary gland since she was a kid so another thing that she said was that she had cold hands and feet she was eventually diagnosed with rain odds rain exists like very extreme cold hands and feet and really poor circulation and even poor nerve firing into the hands so outside of that she also had started to have the severe memory loss so she mentioned that in the history saying you know my memory is really bad and that's why I have my assistant follow me around and I said okay so really piecing all of this together is I started to think okay she had her tonsils removed so clearly there's potentially some infections that are affecting her lymphatic system that are causing her thyroid to maybe be stressed the other thing is that maybe she has some bold exposure because of all the antibiotics that she used cuz by the way when it comes to antibiotics penicillin amoxicillin ampicillin anything in the cylinder is made from my mold called Penicillium so most antibiotics are made from mold for those of you that did not know that also if you're allergic to penicillin amoxicillin ampicillin you have toxic mold on your body that's the reality of it so again so I'm thinking okay is there something going on in the lymphatic system is there something that is around the thyroid stressing it out does she have mold in her system because of all the antibiotics does she have a pituitary problem because of her development and also does she have a circulatory problem because of the cold hands and feet so the connection here is that when you have circulatory issues especially cold hands and feet think about it so your heart is it chest their hands and your feet the other thing that is farthest from your heart is your brain but in addition your heart has to pump blood up against gravity so getting blood into the head is actually a lot more difficult than people realize so with that being said this is a huge red flag for me because if you're not getting proper blood flow to the head yes you can get low-grade headaches yes you could have memory loss yes you can also have a very small pituitary gland which then can cause you to have a thyroid issue or other hormonal issues and that's exactly what was going on for this person it also turned out she was talking about her stress level and she's like listen I think a lot of this comes back to stress for me and I was like well what are some of your biggest stressors and she said well one of the stressors is that you know I obviously have a lot of demands because I run a big company and the other one is is I'm taking care of my mother who has vascular dementia and I was just like oh this makes a lot of sense so genetically this is a woman who definitely had a predisposition to circulatory issues and then due to strep and some toxins and things she was exposed to over time she started to develop what we call atherosclerosis which was a narrowing of her vascular system and this really really started to affect circulation everywhere but it was extremely it was affecting her brain to his severe capacity so this was causing what we called the early stages of vascular dementia which starts with something called CCSVI which is a venous insufficiency so blood was getting in and it was very difficult for the for the blood to drain out through the venous system so this was the reason for her memory loss this was the for her neurotransmitters being imbalance which was making her super angry and irritable this was also the reason why her hormones were off and also her thyroid conditions off so this is should be so eye opening to those of you listening because this is not something that your endocrinologist is looking at no one's looking at you for for vascular dementia because think about it dementia is neurologist vascular dementia is cardiologist and then thyroid is endocrinologist these are all separate the separate specialties and nobody's talking to each other nobody's piecing the puzzle together so when you work with integrative physicians we look at the bigger picture so that you can actually get to the root cause and not be on this merry-go-round of okay here's my thyroid medication I've been on this this isn't working let me up the dose let me lower the dose let me let me add another one let me switch medications I have people that have come to me that have been on thyroid medication for 30 years and their thyroid still looks bad it's still dysfunctioning it still has an autoimmune attack on it so when we think that we're just gonna fix our thyroid with synthroid it's not there work also for those of you listening that are maybe celiac or maybe you know that you have a gluten sensitivity there is gluten in synthroid so you potentially are causing more inflammation in your body by taking a medication that you're hoping will help your thyroid so it's really really important to know that these thyroid medications most of them contain fluoride most of them contain aluminum and then most of them also contain gluten so it's really really important to seek out what can you do naturally that will help this so if you haven't figured this out by now you don't know what you don't know and it's impossible for you and this woman that I just told you the story about it was impossible for her to know that her early onset of vascular dementia was the cause to why she had a thyroid condition and if you don't do the right testing and you don't work with someone who looks beyond your thyroid you're also not going to know and you're not gonna figure that out and you're not necessarily gonna get the results that you hope for so the point of all of this is that it's really a matter of stop just accepting that this is your new normal oh I have Hashimoto's this is my new normal oh I have a low functioning fibery this is my new normal it's really trying to understand why and knowing that there is a solution out there to fix it that maybe you just haven't heard of yet so it's really just stop accepting these symptoms as your new normal and also stop thinking that all of your symptoms are separate because if we have fatigue and depression and we can't lose weight and we feel cold all the time we kind of assume that all of those things are really separate and we don't necessarily think that there is a connection or a common Jinan denominator that's causing it so a lot of times your symptoms are overlapping and they're very connected to the root and the foundation so the other biggest thing to know is that if you understand the root cause anything is possible I know for those of you that are listening that have been diagnosed with Hashimoto's or you've been diagnosed with Graves disease as an autoimmune thyroid condition they've told you that this is permanent there's nothing you could do about it and it will never go away and that's not true and especially if your antibody levels are low and you know they're barely out of range yes you can reverse it you can stop that but I have seen antibody markers drop hundreds of points without me even working on the thyroid just by helping someone detox from bold or helping someone get their circulation working better or helping somebody to heal their gut so it's really just a matter of knowing what is your root cause because your root cause is probably very different from someone else so something that I said early on in the presentation is that rarely do things look like the textbook so very rarely are you going to look like the textbook of a hypothyroid person or you might actually match it completely because unfortunately thyroid symptoms are all too relatable you know talking about can't lose weight talking about feeling cold all the time talking about fatigue how many of us are dealing with that there's so many of us dealing with that but it doesn't mean that that is what needs to be fixed your thyroid very easily can be an effect of other things that are dysfunctioning so it really is a matter of maybe your treatment protocol should it match the thyroid protocol maybe it needs to be completely different so this one it brings me to understanding a little bit more about this concept of functional integrative medicine so number one when it comes to conventional which is you know traditional medicine working with an endocrinologist so for those of you that have been with me the whole time it's really establishing that yes they're gonna love your thyroid they're gonna constantly measure your TSH and maybe your antibody levels and they're just gonna make sure that that TSH level is right where it needs to be to be clinically okay they're not gonna ask you how your symptoms are they're not gonna ask you if you feel better they're gonna say I did my job because your level is within normal ranges so that's that's conventional and then they're also going to put you on a medication that maybe has gluten in it and maybe you have a gluten sensitivity I can't tell you how many endocrinologist don't even know that there's gluten synthroid so then be moving to the functional medicine model and the function that functional medicine model is going to do better testing may be you vill do you know they'll do blood testing on your your thyroid do a more expansive panel maybe we'll do a urinary task or your neurotransmitters maybe we'll do a a saliva task to look at your cortisol levels and really be able to look at the interconnection of all of your hormones but then when it comes to the tools the toolbox is diet and supplements so instead of us may be doing synthroid maybe we're doing a natural product that will manipulate your thyroid and then maybe we're going to you know make sure that we cut things out of your diet that cause inflammation or cut things out of your diet that could cause your thyroid to the inflamed like goitrogens maybe we'll do that but unfortunately that doesn't always work so that's where the integrative model comes in and that's really where I have moved towards in the past eight years and I did this because I used to work with people and focus on hormones you used to come to me you know I would say you would have all these hormone symptoms and I'd say okay let's hone in on the hormones let's do a bunch of fancy tasks on the hormones and then we would work on the hormones they would feel better but as soon as you changed your diet or got off your supplements you went right back where you were and I didn't like that I didn't feel that I was serving people by creating no level of sustainability with their healing process so when we decided to explore this concept of Integrative Medicine which really is just looking at all of the pieces it's looking at the brain it's looking at the gut it's looking at the the adrenals it's looking at the thyroid is piecing every single one of those aspects together and it's also working with a bigger toolbox it's working with does this person need to detox does this person need to rehab their neurological system does this person need to do physical therapy because they have a lot of scar tissue around their reproductive organs because they had c-sections in so many different pieces of the puzzle so that you can fix the foundation and not just assume that it's a thyroid condition that needs to be addressed through either supplements or diets for the rest of their lives so for those of you that are on Instagram live by the way this is going to cut me off in about a minute so if you guys are looking to have the rest of the presentation just DM me your email and I will shoot you over the webinar presentation obviously you can watch the rest and if you are interested in learning a little bit more about article process definitely check out our website so you can schedule a strategy call with our client services team thank you guys for being with me I appreciate it and it's gonna kick me off in a minute but I appreciate for all of you that have been with me the whole time okay webinar friends back to it so when it comes to working with people people always want to know you know how do you how do you work with people how does it all you know work what is the testing that you guys do etc and everybody obviously wants to know how does insurance work with all of this so the great thing about it is when it comes to your lab test your blood work and all of that good stuff that's all going to go through your insurance but when it comes to all of the other modalities that we use to fix the root cause we are out of network and we choose to be out of network because we choose to serve people and not insurance providers so it's really important to understand that when it comes to integrated physicians this is not about you know we just want to be a cash practice and we want to you know not necessarily be compliant with insurance it's more so about we can only spend 15 minutes of our time with you and clearly if you've understood from this presentation that it is impossible for me to dig into your history and understand the snowball of how you got where you are now within 15 minutes I spend an hour and a half in my initial consultation and then when I see you next I spend another hour and a half to review all of your results and then tell you how we're gonna fix you so when it comes to the insurance people use out-of-network people use their health savings accounts and select savings accounts to cover all of the cost but I do really really hope that this changes in the future and we can move towards a system that supports this type of care unfortunately we're just not there yet but I think I think it's going in the right direction really because people like you that are listening right now are tired you're tired of it always being the same solution which is drugs or surgery so so I think it's you know we really we're really going to move healthcare forward by by demanding more from our doctors and that's kind of brings me to this slide is I think we forget that healthcare is supposed to be about answers and solutions you know a lot of us just settle for oh you have hypothyroid we don't know why but you do and this is your long-term solution of medication which is actually not really fixing the foundation at all and we've just gotten to a place of accepting this and we've gotten to a place of just saying well this is just is what it is I guess there's nothing else that I can do about it and a lot of people are now becoming their own health advocate they're researching diets and they're they're trying to figure it out on their own but unfortunately it gets very overwhelming it gets very frustrating especially when you run into roadblocks so that's kind of why we do some of the testing that we do we do an onboarding process in our practice the onboarding process is pretty amazing we've worked towards this over time and we did this primarily because we really want it to give you as much information as possible but we wanted to do it at a smaller cost because for those of you that are not new to this world and you've picked on the road of working with social medicine practitioners you may already know that a lot of these like hormone testing kits and stool samples and nizzle swabs and cortisol tests all of those things can rack up to thousands of dollars so you go into your practitioner you know at a two hundred three hundred dollar or consultation fee but then you're spending a boatload of money on all of these different tests hoping that you actually get answers so for us we searched long and hard and did a lot of trial and error to find the way that we do our onboarding process but we use a combination of technologies our technologies reveal everything from heavy metal toxicity to mineral deficiencies we do very comprehensive bloodwork which all goes through insurance which is amazing we do food allergies environmental allergies we look at emotional stressors and we also look at down to the DNA and chromosome level using a technology called the bio resonance which I'm actually going to show you guys in a minute and then the other thing on here is called autonomic response testing which I'm going to just switch over to this slide really quick so the autonomic response testing is one of the most amazing tests that we do here because when it comes to the healing process and knowing what your he needs every single one of you are completely different so the supplements that someone needs that has Hashimoto's it's completely different than someone else that also has Hashimoto's so we took all of the guessing and all of the trial and error out of this process by using something called autonomic response testing which is actually created by dr. Kling Hart if any of you are familiar with him so when we do this task we use your DNA which is in your hair by the way we use your DNA to test for what supplements are good for you and your body what remedies are good for you what types of detox therapies are good for you do you need physical therapies like rehab like chiropractic do you need emotional work do you need neurological work like neurofeedback we look at all of these things and we test them against your DNA to know what is going to get you better in the fastest amount of time for the least amount of money so it is extremely extremely extremely strategic how we do things and that's why we get people better within about three months our programs range between three months to six months and six months is only for someone who's coming in with a very serious neurological case like Parkinson's pandas um dementia early onset Alzheimer's things like that or even brain injuries so I want to show you guys this video really quick hopefully it will work so this video is showing you the bioresonance technology and I think it's really great to show you this because it gives you a really good visual of how how this works okay so I couldn't talk as I was showing you guys that but so the bioresonance like the photos that you obviously see are not representative of the patient but the icons that were overlaying are representative to the patient so it's really amazing because this is a test that is done in office and it's done by analyzing down to the DNA level so we get information extremely fast but we also can pick up on things that are often missed through bloodwork because in reality blood work is a snapshot in time hence if you have a thyroid condition I can run your thyroid markers every single day for a week and they will look different every single day so it's not that I don't value blood work I do value it tremendously but I do like to use blood work with other types of technologies to piece everything together so that it makes sense and it also just allows us to not miss anything or give a diagnosis that's not correct because it's a snapshot in time so this technology specifically has the ability to look at all different types of tissues it can look at the thyroid adrenals the brain the pituitary gland the heart so what you were seeing in the video is it was actually looking at the heart it was also looking at the circulation to the hands so this has the ability to pick up on subtle changes in your DNA it also picks up on foreign DNA so DNA from bacteria fungus parasites viruses so we have the ability to also see is there a connection here with some type of infection that is in your system and then we use that information will one blood test to validate is it there or not and then we're able to really see the big picture as to what is going on and that's one of the most amazing technologies that we use that gives us so much information in such a short amount of time so when it comes to you what your goals are if you're a person that's been dealing with Hashimoto's or you know another type of thyroid condition and you just tired of being tired you're so sick of not feeling your bass you can't lose weight you can't you know you're trying to work out you're trying to eat well you're trying to do all these great things and you just keep falling flat with your progress then you being able to understand you know first of all what's affecting your thyroid is there other things that are affecting your thyroid or contributing to your symptoms is priceless and also being able to know exactly what you need to do to fix these issues is priceless so at the end of the day when it comes to the value on the testing it's very hard to put a number to it because it does give you so much information but obviously when it comes to cost everybody wants to know how does it all work but our onboarding price for those of you that are just jumping on I see a few people jumping on the onboarding is all encompassing it's the bioresonance it's your initial consultation it's your review of findings which is a total of three hours it also is gonna cover your heavy-metal tasks your blood work your emotional screening food allergies all of those things are covered under this bracket so I know for some of you that are you know new to this you might think wow that's really expensive and I totally get that but I will tell you again when you go into the functional medicine world you might end up paying anywhere between two to four thousand dollars on all of these fancy tests that cover your hormones and thyroid and adrenal etc so for this this is all encompassing for all of your testing and everything falls under this price point but definitely it's very important to know that we want to make sure that you are a good fit for us as we are a good fit for you so we do like for people to fill out a little application before they come to our practice we do work with people from all over the world for those of you that have been listening the whole time we have someone coming from Italy in about a week or so and it's something that we really really love doing because if you were listening to is you have DNA in your hair so we have the ability to test you from a distance just by you simply sending a hair sample in and then all of your blood work and everything is sourced local to you so with that being said I always forget to do this but I'm going to put it here so for those of you guys that want to potentially apply and also hop on a call with one of our client services team members there's the button for you but you can go on our website at any time to apply and chat with someone in our client services team so again you can access the testing from anywhere if you are if after we do all of your testing if you're like hey I love this this is the place I want to come and I really want to get treatment with you guys we do offer everything from an immersion weekend to week or an even up to two weeks the only people that do an immersion for two weeks are the people that have really significant neurological conditions but but the immersion weeks have been amazing we've been doing ton of them over the past few weeks and I would say one of my most amazing cases that just happened a few weeks ago was a little girl who had pandas which is a neurological condition when the immune system attacks the brain and she literally resolved all of her symptoms within a week of care which is just amazing you know we always we know we're very good at what we do and we always try to you know do as much as we can in those weeks we didn't expect for her to be do that well like she hasn't even done any maintenance care it's like it's amazing so so it's really really fantastic to be able to see people's lives changed from from doing this process so I want to check to see if we have any questions here so Nancy you definitely can call in and chat with our client services team if you have any additional questions you're more than welcome to do that if anybody has any questions in the next few minutes definitely post them here but overall I really want to thank all of you guys for being here with me because I really love doing these webinars because I love being able to help you guys piece the puzzle together to understand that there's more to the story when it comes to your thyroid condition or your hormonal imbalance it's not necessarily just a definitive of the is it for you this is how you have to just live and you just have to deal with this so I really hope that this was an amazing educational experience for you guys but when it comes to you doing your testing and figuring out what your body actually needs that's when this becomes a breakthrough experience because this can literally transform your life in such a deep way but also prevent you from going down a road of having you know living in fear of am I gonna get cancer am I gonna get two men shot you know am I gonna get something more serious it's kind of scary the world that we're in right now that so many people are suffering from these types of illnesses and we feel a little scared and powerless because we don't really know exactly what to do to prevent them and it really starts with digging a little bit deeper and doing better testing on yourself so not only can you feel good and like live your life and be happy and have energy and sleep great and do all those things but it's also to really be empowered to know what your body needs to stay healthy the biggest question I always get is if I lay out a three-month program for someone they always go to me well what do I do before that like I like you know what what's next how do I maintain this and I always say to them I go you will learn so much about your body through this process and you will learn where your weak points are and those weak points are what you need to maintain long term like for me my weak point was my lymphatic system so I was a person that I never sweat I thought it was great it actually turned out that my lymph nodes which is a major filtration system and a major part of your immune system was really really not healthy for me so instead of me taking a multivitamin every day thinking that that's my best Nathan's plan I actually use an infrared sauna once a week and that's how I maintain my health is by making sure that I sweat to cleanse out things that are gums up in my lymph nodes so that's the really cool thing about it is you're able to really understand your body in a way different level than you ever have before and you're able to walk away really and really empowered so thank you guys again for being here with me check out our website if you have any more questions I'll be have tons of podcast about hormones excuse me as well but we are going to be talking more about hormones as we go through the month and I really really enjoy doing this and I really hope you guys enjoyed it too alright I will see you next week definitely feel free to hop on one of those strategy calls if you guys have more questions