What type of tests do we run on our Thyroid patients?

This is a common question that I get quite often in the office: “What type of tests do we run in our practice on our thyroid patients?” And it’s mainly because most individuals that are suffering from a thyroid condition are going to get the run of the mill thyroid test, right? You go in and see your doctor, they run a TSH, Thyroid Stimulating Hormone tests, they evaluate if is it low, high, or normal? Well, number one, when you look at that average number on your lab test, it can range between point 4.5 to 5.5. Now that’s a huge range, by the way. Just so you know, the range that we look for on a TSH should be no higher than three, ideally is between one and two. Our range is if someone’s above that three, they may still be in range for their doctor. But they’re showing signs of hypothyroidism, which needs to be addressed and there’s something going off there when we start to look at the functional or healthy range of a patient. But when you’re only running TSH and you’re being evaluated off, that’s a management situation. You’re only being managed on your condition based upon what your TSH shows. So if your TSH goes up, you’re going to show signs of hypothyroidism. If your TSH goes down, you’re going to show signs of hyper and the doctor will adjust your medications reducing or increasing based upon what that number shows using that range from 4.5 to 5.5, or whatever the lab ranges. So when we look at that, someone may come into our office and they’re telling us, “What my doctor says my thyroid is normal,” but they still have symptoms, they still have problems, they don’t feel good, they’re still experiencing depression, they’re still experiencing hair loss, weight gain, extreme fatigue, they can’t sleep, they’re having digestive issues, fill in the blank for all the different types of symptoms that we see with thyroid conditions. So when we look at that, we first want to say, “Okay, what else is going on? What are the symptoms they experiencing?” So we’ll try to understand what symptoms they’re experiencing and then we can start to look at the types of tests that we want to run. To run a comprehensive analysis, we would run the traditional thyroid test, but we would look at the full expanded test, right? If you want to know more about that. I’ve done a previous article. But there’s essentially 10 markers that should be analyzed when you’re doing a full thyroid analysis, not your only just one or two tests, they’re typically running through the medical offices, basically doing that to change or address or adapt your medication based upon what those numbers are actually showing. Well, we want to understand what is causing the problem? Again, our goal is to understand what is causing the individual to be sick, what is causing their symptoms, what is the underlying problem, we’re not trying to address the symptoms. Of course, we want our patients to feel better, we want them to have a better quality of life, but we’re not going to give them recommendations based upon their symptoms, we’re going to give them recommendations based upon what we find with their cause.

So what are some of the tests that we’re going to run? Well, we would obviously run comprehensive bloodwork. Now, this is not your run of the mill broke bloodwork, we’re going to run very comprehensive testing. We’re gonna look at different systems, we’re gonna look at different cells, tissues, and organs in the body, so we can start to determine what areas are functioning properly and what areas are not functioning properly. I use this analogy a lot. If you’ve heard me speak before on one of my webinars or one of my live videos, it’s kind of like going to two different mechanics. The first mechanic is going to be the individual who listens to your car; does a couple of analysis and has been doing it forever. They kind of know cars really well and they make a couple of adjustments in your car and they say, “Let’s see how that works. Come back. If there’s a problem going on.” The second mechanic says, “No, we’re going to take things a little differently and we’re going to hook up a diagnostic machine to your car so then we can determine what areas in the car are working properly and what are not working properly. Then we can tell you exactly what the issues are and then give you the options of what you can do.” Well, option one is what the analogy I give for traditional medicine, they’re going to look and see if there is clicking, is there a hose leaking, or whatever. They’re going to try to find a solution to reduce that symptom and not really try to understand the overall cause of it. It is kind of like putting duct tape over a hose that’s leaking. The other model is more of what we do in functional medicine. Our goal is to analyze the individual to understand what the problem is, to figure out a solution, and customize it to their needs. Losing blood work obviously can give us some really important physiological changes. Now, we don’t look to see where the person’s having symptoms or a problem on the bloodwork, we also want to see if there are specific areas where they’re losing function. So the difference between someone who’s sick, who’s already showing symptoms, and someone who’s moving towards being sick. We can look at the physiology and a blood test to see where the problems are developing before they become a problem, so that we can address it beforehand, would not make sense. Does that make sense? Does that sound like what we should be doing is a true clinical model. Anyhow, that’s the type of thing we’re going to look at. When we look at the extensiveness of specific bloodwork.

Some other types of testing are an expanded male or female hormone panel. We want to see the hormones if they are functioning if they are too high or too low. Is there too much the body’s using? Is the body able to get rid of the excessive hormones? Are they doing his job to get rid of them appropriately? So we can look at different steps that are involved there, not just what’s in blood. Oftentimes, we’ll run the hormone panels through saliva or even urine. We’ll also look at a very important gland of the body called the adrenal gland. Some of you may have heard of the adrenal gland, some of you have not heard of an adrenal gland. And if you have not, I will stress that you really understand what that is. Essentially, the adrenal gland is your stress gland. So anytime your body is under stress physically, mentally, or chemically, the adrenal gland is going to respond. Now, imagine, if you were under stress, let’s say for a job and you worked in this job for 30 years, how much that would impact your body. Some other type of stress that just continued on for many years. Now you start compiling more stressors more and more over time, that’s going to cause the adrenal gland to cause dysfunction and symptoms will start to develop. What’s interesting about the adrenal gland is the different areas that it’s involved in. It’s involved in brain function, it can affect memory loss and the ability to remember things from short term memory. It can also cause increased brain fog or mental fatigue. Who would ever think it’d be the adrenal gland? It can affect your sleep patterns, it’s involved in what’s called a circadian rhythm, your ability to sleep when you’re supposed to sleep and be awake when you’re supposed to be awake. But for many people, they can’t sleep at night. They’re tired all day long. And they have this mixed up circadian rhythm process. It can increase weight gain. It also impacts blood sugars and immune systems. So we would look at the adrenal gland and that would be done in combination with the hormone testing we can do through urine or even on saliva, depending on the person of how we want to run that test.

We may need to look at certain types of immunological testing that could be: “Does the person have a leaky gut disease?” We can run a leaky gut analysis to see if that’s an underlying condition. “Do they have autoimmune diseases?” “Do they have food sensitivities” We can look at genetic testing, we can look at stool analysis to see if they have underlying infection patterns, like overgrowth of bacteria, if they have parasites, yeast fungus, what is the gut look like? There’s a whole slew of testing that can be analyzed to really understand what is going on in this individual’s body. Not every single patient that we see is going to run all these tests, that would be foolish, but just to give you an understanding of the complexity and how much we investigate to find out what’s really going on with this individual. One of the things that I love so much about functional medicine is that as a functional medicine doctor, we don’t give up, we continue to investigate, we continue to look for the problem, keep it going layer by layer to understand what is truly going on with the individual. We don’t stop, we eventually find the problem. In a traditional medical model, oftentimes, they would say, “We just don’t see anything going on and basically get out of my office” or refer you on to someone else to a specialist and they can’t figure it out either. So it becomes very frustrating for the individual going from doctor to doctor to doctor. Sometimes when we have to do toxicity screens like heavy metal toxicity or biotoxin screens. The point is that we have to comprehensively analyze every single person that we meet. And sometimes the tests are going to be similar to someone else’s, sometimes they’re going to be unique. So this is the reason why it’s so important that I meet with someone, have a conversation with them to find out what is going on, what sort of symptoms they’re experiencing, what sort of problems they’re experiencing. So then we can move into the next step in many cases, which would be to evaluate them. Now that may be running some specific types of testing, obviously, there will be independent of one person to the next, to start to understand what is causing their problem, what is causing their symptoms, what is causing their disease process. Once we understand that, then it becomes very simple to customize the right approaches. What type of foods should they be eating? What type of nutraceuticals should they be taking to help their body heal? We all have the ability to heal, we all have the ability to get into healthy environments, but most of us right now who are sick, or have diseases have an unhealthy environment, we have poor functioning environments. So once we understand what that environment looks like and what’s going on, we then can restore that environment to get back to being able to heal again. And that’s why we live that quality of life. It’s interesting to me how many patients that I talked to, and they’ll say, “Well, I don’t want to live that old, I’m gonna be old and decrepit and be sick.” In my opinion, age is just a number, of course, your knees aren’t going to be as good or your muscles are not gonna be as good. But just because you’re a certain age does not mean you can’t live a better quality of life, right? I’ve never read any textbook or any paper that says, “By this age, you’re gonna have these types of symptoms and this type of disease.” We see individuals right now that are wandering the 90s, still living alone, still driving, still doing everything they’re supposed to be doing on their own. And we see people in their 60s who can barely get a bed. Living a life of full capacity and full health is your choice. In my opinion, health is basically an investment. Just like when you put into investments, you’re investing in your future to have a quality life and your retirement. But what sense does it make to do all that, but your health is poor, you have a poor quality lifestyle, so you can enjoy your retirement. You work your whole life to get there and you can’t enjoy your retirement because you don’t have the ability to have quality health. So if you’re going to invest money into your future for a good retirement, why would you not invest in your health? If you’re in a situation now, where you’re saying, “I feel good, everything is great” Well, how do you know there’s a problem going on, we don’t have check engine lights on our forehead as our cars do. Maybe it’s been a little while since you’ve had a fully comprehensive analysis, maybe it’s time for you to be analyzed. Or maybe you are having symptoms where you’ve already been diagnosed with diseases, and you’re sick of doing the management approach, and you want to understand more about what’s going on. It’s maybe you need some more comprehensive analysis, comprehensive testing, testing is not going to tell us what type of medication you need. But the test is going to tell us what is really going on to the surface, what is causing your problems, and what needs to be done to get you healthy again. Maybe this is the time you need to be analyzed. If it’s not by me, it’s by some other functional medicine doctor, and you need to reach out to someone to see if they can help you. If it is by me, I’m more than happy to set up a consultation with you, either virtually or in my office, we can set up a time for us to talk and discuss your situation and your case. So then I can just see what the next steps would be in the evaluation process.