What is Hashimoto's Thyroiditis?
By Dr. Martin Rutherford, DC, CFMP
What is Hashimoto's Thyroiditis?Aug 09, 2023
Decoding Digestion: Unraveling the Mystery of Gas, Bloating, and Distension - Dr. Martin Rutherford
Today Dr. Martin Rutherford, DC, CFMP dives deep into the issue of gas, bloating, and distension, dispelling common myths and shedding light on what these symptoms might reveal about one's digestive health. He emphasizes that while occasional gas is normal, regular episodes indicate an underlying issue. By tracing when the bloating or gas occurs after eating, one can identify potential problems areas such as the stomach, pancreas, gallbladder, liver, or even conditions like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). Dr. Rutherford underscores the diagnostic value of observing these patterns and offers listeners insights into managing and addressing these digestive dilemmas.
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Importance of Vitamin D - Dr. Martin Rutherford
In the latest episode, Dr. Martin Rutherford discusses the often-underestimated importance of vitamin D in maintaining overall health. He challenges traditional views about vitamin D, highlighting how common outdoor professions often still fall short on this essential vitamin. Dr. Rutherford suggests that low levels of vitamin D could signal autoimmunity, as it works in conjunction with an antioxidant to boost the T regulatory cells responsible for immune system regulation.
He suggests maintaining a higher-than-average level of vitamin D, as it morphs into an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory steroid at these levels, strengthening the immune system and potentially fighting viruses. Observing different global standards, he asserts that the ideal range for vitamin D levels remains contested.
Dr. Rutherford also discusses the potent effects of vitamin D supplementation in mitigating symptoms of autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto's, as it can dampen inflammatory responses. In his practice, he considers vitamin D a key component in a personal health maintenance protocol.
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Is it Hashimoto's or Menopause? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
In this insightful podcast episode, Dr. Martin Rutherford discusses the complex interplay between Hashimoto's disease and menopause. He identifies a trend of women in their late 30s and early 40s being misdiagnosed with early menopause, when in fact they are experiencing symptoms related to Hashimoto's, an autoimmune thyroid disorder. Dr. Rutherford emphasizes that Hashimoto's has far-reaching effects, influencing various physiological processes like gut health, adrenal function, and blood sugar regulation, all of which can cause hormonal imbalances.
Through a functional medicine approach, he suggests focusing on treating the underlying causes like poor gut function and chronic stress, rather than simply addressing the symptoms. Dr. Rutherford also explores the role of thyroid function in managing progesterone levels, stressing the importance of a healthy thyroid in maintaining normal hormonal cycles. He advocates for a comprehensive treatment that includes managing stress hormones, stabilizing blood sugar, and detoxification. This episode underscores the need for a nuanced understanding of hormonal health and the role of thyroid function in women's health.
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Controlling Inflammation With Autoimmunity - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
In this podcast episode, Dr. Martin Rutherford delves into the topic of inflammation and its connection to autoimmunity. The discussion emphasizes that inflammation plays a significant role in various aspects of life, including triggers for autoimmune conditions. The host highlights that events like childbirth, surgery, infections, trauma, and stress can all initiate autoimmune responses by activating inflammatory pathways. Furthermore, the episode emphasizes that inflammation is a natural reaction of the immune system to various stimuli.
Dr. Rutherford explores the importance of identifying the root causes of inflammation in autoimmunity, beyond simply using natural anti-inflammatory remedies like turmeric, resveratrol, CBD oil, and fish oils. While these natural alternatives can be effective in reducing inflammation, it is essential to address the underlying factors contributing to inflammation. The podcast highlights the role of factors such as diet, food sensitivities, chronic infections, leaky gut, and toxins in triggering inflammatory responses.
Dr. Rutherford recommends a comprehensive approach that involves investigating and addressing potential sources of inflammation specific to each individual. This personalized approach aims to identify and eliminate the underlying causes of inflammation rather than solely relying on anti-inflammatory supplements. By understanding the individual triggers of inflammation, it becomes possible to create a barrier against autoimmunity and promote overall well-being.
The episode also raises concerns about relying solely on natural anti-inflammatory products without understanding the underlying causes of pain and inflammation. It encourages listeners to look beyond surface-level relief and explore the factors contributing to their symptoms.
Overall, this engaging podcast episode emphasizes the importance of taking a holistic approach to control inflammation in the context of autoimmunity. By addressing the root causes of inflammation, individuals can aim for long-term relief and improved quality of life.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Decoding the Gut-Brain Connection: Insights into Depression and Anxiety
In this episode, Dr. Rutherford delves into the intricate relationship between gut health and mental wellness, specifically focusing on conditions like depression and anxiety. Contradicting traditional medical perspectives, he asserts that these conditions should not be pigeonholed as purely mental disorders due to their substantial physiological influences, particularly emphasizing the role of gut health in controlling brain chemistry.
Dr. Rutherford draws upon the groundbreaking research from Harvard's Microbiome Project to illustrate the profound connections between gut health and all bodily functions, most notably the brain. He further expounds on the significant role that an imbalance of gut bacteria and leaky gut syndrome can play in contributing to mental health disorders like depression and anxiety. This happens when bacteria leak into the bloodstream, travel to the brain, and instigate an inflammatory response harmful to neural health.
Our diet's vital role in mental health is another significant theme in Dr. Rutherford's discussion. He explains how unhealthy eating habits can contribute to inflammation, negatively impacting gut health and, consequently, mood. Dr. Rutherford points out that 90-95% of serotonin, a neurotransmitter crucial for happiness, is produced in our gut, emphasizing gut health's critical importance in mental well-being.
Encouraging listeners to consider both mental and physiological aspects, Dr. Rutherford suggests dietary changes and improved gut health as potential solutions for alleviating depression and anxiety symptoms. While acknowledging the benefits of counseling and medications, he asserts that addressing the underlying physiological conditions is key for achieving improved mental health. The episode illuminatively underscores the deep link between gut and brain health, advocating for a more holistic approach to treating depression and anxiety.
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
From Table to Thyroid: Salt’s Surprising Role in Hashimoto’s Disease - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Salt, often overlooked, plays a significant role in autoimmune thyroid diseases such as Hashimoto’s. Not only does iodized salt affect thyroid health due to its iodine content, but salt itself can also trigger detrimental immune responses. Counterbalancing salt with potassium supplements can be a game changer in managing Hashimoto’s symptoms and maintaining blood pressure levels.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Unraveling the Mystery: Stress, Digestion, and the Battle with SIBO
Today we are delving into the enigmatic world of Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO). SIBO is a condition where there is an excess of harmful bacteria in the small intestine. Our expert sheds light on the physiology behind SIBO and unravels the mystery of what causes it. Discover how the breakdown of the digestive process, starting with the stomach's failure to properly sterilize food, can set off a chain reaction that ultimately leads to SIBO. Understand the critical roles of stomach acids, gallbladder, and pancreas, and how their dysfunction leads to leaky gut, inflammation, and food sensitivities, which further contribute to SIBO.
You might be surprised to learn that chronic stress is identified as the primary culprit behind SIBO. It triggers the fight-or-flight response, affecting the digestive system. Stress and hypothyroidism, especially as seen in Hashimoto's disease, are key players in slowing down the digestive system, creating an environment conducive to bacterial overgrowth. Moreover, SIBO itself can perpetuate a vicious cycle by affecting other parts of the digestive system.
Tune in to grasp the nuances of treating SIBO, the importance of addressing underlying causes such as stress, and how solely depending on diets and supplements might not be enough. It's time to explore the brain-gut connection and take control of your digestive health!
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Is Your Diet Triggering Your Chronic Fatigue, Pain, or Condition? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Is your diet triggering your chronic condition or your chronic pain or your chronic fatigue? So the answer to that is, yeah, for sure, absolutely, there is no question about it. Any of those things that you are experiencing and you're not figuring out what is the right diet for you first before you try any of the billions of supplements that people are taking out there. Anybody who doesn't think diet is a part of that is never going to get well.
I mean, I don't think I could say it any more succinctly than that. It's interesting. I remember when I first started doing this and we started with fibromyalgia, that was it, because that encompassed everything, pain, fatigue, everything. And I just remember my first patient and I said, "Well, you're not going to be eating gluten and you're going to have to stop drinking alcohol." Not everybody has to stop drinking alcohol, so don't start throwing things at me, and the lady's like, "I'm going to stop drinking my martinis?" Now I know that's kind of not food, but it's kind of in the same similar swimming pool there. And then husbands are like, "What's gluten?" And I'm like, "Well, it's pasta, it's bread." They literally looked at me and go, "That's not happening." He literally grabbed her hand, he pulled her out of her chair and they walked out of my exam room. I was like, "Okay, maybe I need to go about this a different way."
But the reality is, more than back then, God knows how many years ago that was, food is a baseline for so much of this, and it varies. As I'm saying this I'm thinking about a million different things because it varies from case to case, like chronic fatigue. If you have chronic fatigue, there are just a lot of things that are related to that that are not food related. However, food sensitivities can be a big player in chronic fatigue. Food sensitivity alone will cause inflammation. They'll cause blood sugar swings. When your blood sugar drops, you get fatigue. If you have blood sugar that's going up and down like this or you have diabetes, those things are going to be affected by food, okay? And those are going to create fatigue.
But on a wider level, a lot of what's happening out there today is that we're stressed. When my parents would say, "Oh, that person got cancer because of [inaudible 00:02:52]", or, "That person got this because they were stressed." I used to think that was really mean. I was like, "You're mean. Why are you saying stuff like that?"
But you know what? They were largely correct, and my dad knew what stress was. He was in World War II and he had PTSD and he had all kinds of things. "It's my stress, my stress," and I thought, "Dad," you know, but he was right. He was right. The vast majority of patients that come into me of chronic conditions have a chronic stress response, and what does that do? Okay, what does that do? Chronic stress response, it affects every single cell in your body.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Importance of Managing Stress - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
the importance of managing your stress response. I think people are starting to get that it's important to manage your stress response, a growing problem. I think most... I don't know, maybe I live my little world, but it seems like most people are probably aware of this, that it's important, we're going to talk about why. I mean, I've been in this a while now, quite a long time. And everybody who comes in here now, everybody has anxiety, depression, chronic stress. I have a section on my intake form on my questionnaire that I have a patient fill out once we've decided that their case looks like something that we can help. And there's just one whole section in there on are you accomplishing your life's purpose? Do you feel like you have enough time to exercise? Do you feel like you have enough? Are you overwhelmed with things to do?
A lot of times stress isn't stressed. A lot of times it's the daily stuff. And then you have all the news over the last five years and you have the continual at you by listening to the news or looking at your phone all the time. I have... I've done... I've worked at stress literally my whole career and in the beginning I was primarily doing chiropractic and diet and nutrition. And you noticed that the people who were stressed were not going to respond well to their chiropractic adjustments. And we've had physical therapy here and so on and so forth. So they wouldn't respond well to physical therapy. They wouldn't respond well to chiropractic. They just wouldn't respond well and was it was very... We started to screen them out and say, "Listen, we can do this, but as long as you're under stress, you just need to know this may not work very well."
But since then, it has become so ramped up. Back then, it used to be those people stood out. Now every single person that comes in here has on their intake form, anxiety, stress, depression, it's unbelievable. And it's concerning. All right?
When I was younger, people knew stress kind of wore you out and they'd say, look at that person. They're a look older than they should be, than they're biological ages. Or somebody would get cancer and they'd go, "Oh, that person probably was stressed." And there was just this general understanding of stress. But it's a big player in these chronic conditions. And stress is, for example, most of the chronic conditions that come in here, not all, but even well, the vast majority that come in here are autoimmune.
But I had a couple yesterday that're not, and even in their cases, or I think they're on their way to potentially developing autoimmune problems, but they haven't yet. But the problems that they have in their particular case, they were gut problems. Those gut problems definitely have come from their chronic stress because why do you have to manage stress? Those of you who have watched me have probably heard me say many times, if you have an autoimmune problem, if you have an autoimmune thyroid problem, if you have a gut problem, if you have lung problems, if you have a lot of these problems and you're under stress, what's happening is you are putting out hormones that are at a certain level, supposed to be good for you. At a certain level the cortisol that is put out when you're under stress, which everybody now knows what cortisol is, they come in and I go, "Cortisol." They go, "Oh yeah, stress hormone." Well, cortisol first is part of your immune system that goes up to dampen inflammation. Cortisol good, okay?
Cortisol is also a hormone that, it's called a glucocorticoid. Gluco stands for blood sugar.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Managing a Thyroid Dump - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Managing a Thyroid dump, I'm taking that the person that asked this question means I get an exacerbation. All of a sudden I got thyroid hormones running into my body, and although the question didn't expand upon the symptoms, I would assume you maybe get shaky, jittery, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, tremors, those types of things when you get this thyroid dump, and it was relative to my medical doctor is trying different things. This is with the medication that they're already taking, and the things that I see that the medical doctors are trying, the endocrinologists, the alternative MDs are we're going to try to, of course, change your dosages.
We're going to try to do the different timing. We're going to have you take it at four o'clock in the morning. We're going to have you take it every other day. We're going to have you take that plus T3, and just all those types of things. That works for some people, but it doesn't work for a lot of people. It just doesn't, because we're talking about autoimmune thyroid disease here. The question was relative to Hashimoto's and autoimmune thyroid disease, and I still get these thyroid dumps and it drives me crazy, and so on and so forth. It's because you have to go back and understand that it's really primarily not a thyroid problem. It's really primarily an immune response, and you're getting the thyroid dumps because you have different triggers that are intermittently triggering your immune system to create what's called a little mini cytokine storm, or just a cytokine exacerbation.
All of your cells have these little cells called cytokines or inflammatory proteins. They go up and then they flare up, and then they either attack your thyroid peroxidase enzymes to cause you to make more thyroid hormone, or they attack your thyroid tissue, which may just beat you up and make you feel tired. They're two separate things, and some of you have both of those. Some of you have one. Some of you have the other. So basically what happens is you're missing the point when you say, "Well, I'm trying everything with the medications." What causes thyroid dumps? To the person who wrote this question, I hope I am translating your question properly, but what happens is there's like 40 things that could happen if you have not addressed it as a multi-systems problem that has to be corrected to dampen thyroid inflammation. Then it could be, oh my God, let me go down the list. It could be a stress response. It could be a broken down gut and you're eating a food, and you're having a sensitivity response.
It could be that you have small intestinal bacteria overgrowth and you haven't fixed that gas, bloating, distension when you're eating starches, fibers, or sugars. You eat one of those and then you blow. That could blow you up. It could be poor gallbladder function, and you're eating something that's making your gallbladder work too hard and that could flare it up. You could have blood sugar fluctuations where maybe some of you can't... You start dumping and you start not feeling good, and you eat and you feel better. That's a low blood sugar response, or you could have a response where you eat and you get fatigue after meals. That's a high blood sugar response and an insulin spike dropping. Those are inflammatory responses. The inflammation causes those cytokines to flare up. Has nothing to do with your thyroid medication. This is where the nice thing is, there's a lot more data coming out on this from the medical research communities, but they don't know what to do with it because they're not looking at it as an autoimmune problem.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Vitiligo and Hashimoto's - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
So, vitiligo and Hashimoto's. So, vitiligo's a skin disease. It discolors. Those of you who are looking at this already know that, and there's varying degrees of it. And I'm not sure if you're aware that it's pretty much accepted now. The studies are largely, largely, largely pointing to the fact that it's an autoimmune problem, which we have supposed for quite some time because we treat autoimmune cases a lot. And although I haven't traded anywhere near as much vitiligo as other things, I've treated enough of it. And the question is, is vitiligo related to Hashimoto's? So, the answer is yes and no. And what that means is Hashimoto's doesn't cause for to say, vitiligo. You can have vitiligo and not have Hashimoto's. But because of my practice being the way that it is, virtually every vitiligo patient that's ever come in here has had Hashimoto's and other autoimmune conditions.
This is probably a good moment to illuminate that very few people actually get one autoimmune problem. I know myself, I have three active autoimmune problems for sure, potentially four, and I have one antibody against my pancreas that I don't think is a problem. And that may sound confusing to you, but there's a test that you can do to find out if you are diagnosed with, say, lupus, or you're diagnosed with vitiligo, you can do this test and see if you have antibodies to other tissues that if you keep triggering your vitiligo, you keep triggering your Hashimoto's, eventually you're going to express other autoimmune problems if you already have the antibodies. So, the one test I use is Cyrex 5, and it's, and it's Cyrex 5 C-Y-R-E-X 5, and they test all those antibodies.
What's the value of that? The value is that, is to find out if you have those and you keep exacerbating your vitiligo, which we'll get back to in a second. And then all of a sudden you start getting all the symptoms, all these are weird symptoms, and you know that you have antibodies against your thyroid, and you go, "Oh, my God, those are Hashimoto's symptoms, and I got Hashimoto's antibodies." Now you know you've developed Hashimoto.
And here's the other thing about Hashimoto's. So, as long as I've done this, I've seen a growing number of autoimmune conditions that are related to autoimmune thyroid disease Hashimoto's. So, I've seen a ton of people who have Hashimoto's and rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto's and pancreatitis, Hashimoto's... I'm sorry, Hashimoto's and diabetes type one, Hashimoto's and celia, Hashimoto's and Crohn's disease Hashimoto's and ulcerative colitis, Hashimoto's and autoimmune gastritis. [inaudible 00:03:15] saying Hashimoto's probably has something to do with polycystic ovarian syndrome, which isn't even necessarily an autoimmune disease, but I mentioned that because of the mechanism.
And the mechanism is this, your thyroid has receptor sites in every single cell of your body. And so, I think Hashimoto's has become so prevalent because the thyroid is so sensitive and it relates to everything else, and then it keeps getting beat up and beat up more than anything. You get stressed, beat up. Your blood sugar goes up, it gets beat up, your blood sugar goes down it gets beat up. You have a food sensitivity, it gets beat up. You have some smoke... I point outside because we had smoke here for... I'm in Reno, we had smoke here for only a week or two this year as opposed to three months like last year. And all of those toxins, boom, boom, boom. And if your thyroid keeps getting attacked and it's uber super sensitive more than anything else, it's going to raise your immune responses more and more and more and more and more and more and more.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Still Having Symptoms Even Though Diet is Clean - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
"I'm eating as well as a human being can possibly eat, but I'm still having my Hashimoto's symptoms." And I actually see this a lot. I see it a lot now, because in the day when we first started doing this, and all we knew was ... we told everybody, get off of gluten, casein, soy, corn, and eggs. That's what we did. And those were allergies, they weren't sensitivities. At that time, we weren't even testing for sensitivities. We were just putting people on diets. And eight months later, we'd have them reintroducing foods and it was crazy. And we're much farther along on that.
But now, you're watching me. You're watching a lot of my other colleagues, probably, online. And you're getting a lot of data. People are coming in here much more informed, in a manner. Maybe not as informed relative to the fullness of the topic, the full context of Hashimoto's. But people are coming in here knowing that diet's important. A lot of people. Not everybody, but most people. So people have tried diets. And then you have that person that comes in here and goes, "How much better can I eat?" A lot of vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians. "I'm eating great, and I still feel terrible."
So the first answer to that is, if we ... most patients who come in here who have autoimmune thyroid disease have a thyroid problem. Which is probably the second most common cause for digestive issues. It slows down your digestive system, and then you start not digesting your food properly. Stomach's slowing down, pancreas is slowing down, gallbladder's slowing down. And this is the way you start to develop food sensitivities. The number one cause for that is stress. So a lot of these folks are stressed even though they're ... and they're particularly stressed because they're eating great and they're not feeling good.
And some people are actually coming in and saying, "I feel good. I'm eating this diet. I'm eating as good as anybody. But if I get off of this diet, just one food, all my symptoms come back." So that's a person who already has developed a bunch of food sensitivities and they're managing it by just not eating those foods. But the problem with that is whatever caused all those food sensitivities in the first place ... in other words, your broken down digestive system and whatever caused that. Whether it's because you had stress or because you have a thyroid problem or because you have CBR, whatever it is. There's a number of things that can cause you digestive system to breakdown. You have an ulcer in your stomach, that breaks down the rest of the system. So usually that person's going to have something like that.
And what happens is they keep eliminating the foods and eliminating foods, and they feel better. A lot of them feel better, a lot of them don't. And the reason for both is they still have the broken down digestive system that caused this in the first place. And so they're eliminating foods and they're eating new foods. They're putting the new foods into the old digestive system that's calmed down because you've eliminated ... you're not eating a lot of foods that stir it up all the time. But it's still not a correct functioning digestive system. So now you put a new food in there and you go, oh, that food's not okay. That food's not okay either. So you put that new food in there and then it goes through the digestive process, it doesn't get digested properly. And then it goes through the whole process of becoming a food sensitivity and now you can't eat that.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Can a Concussion Cause Hashimoto's? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
So today's topic is can a concussion cause Hashimoto's? So the answer to that is it can trigger Hashimoto's. So Hashimoto's is an autoimmune disease. People who are looking at this probably already know what Hashimoto's is. It's an immune attack against your thyroid. And you can have silent autoimmune disease. You can have silent Hashimoto's for your whole life and never get it.
What has to happen is you have to have some sort of a trigger that triggers your immune system, which is usually already compromised from other things, to flare up and attack the tissue in your body that says you can attack my thyroid, because it's genetically programmed that way. And so when the trigger happens, your immune system flares up, and then that flares up the antibodies to your thyroid and then that tells your immune system to attack the thyroid. And that's how you get autoimmune thyroid disease.
There are multiple triggers. One of the triggers is trauma. So if you get a concussion, or I mean, if you get a broken leg, or if you get in a car accident, you get a whiplash, and then you have a whiplash for weeks or months, or you have a concussion, basically what happens is you immediately get inflammation. Immediately, you get inflammation. In fact, if you get a concussion, it's even worse because if you gain a concussion, listen to this, within five minutes, the inside lining of your gut starts to break down. So those of you who are familiar with leaky gut and you get a concussion within five minutes, leaky gut starts to occur.
Why is that important? Because back to the concussion, the concussion causes inflammatory responses, that raises up the immune responses. And then you can trigger Hashimoto's. So it's a cause. The genetics being triggered by something would be the root cause of it and the concussion would be one of those something.
Another thing that can trigger it is the concussion causes a leaky gut within minutes. Look it up. It's like stunning. Like within minutes. Now you got a leaky gut, now you got toxins leaking out of your gut, you got bad bacteria leaking out of your gut, you got undigested food particles leaking out of your gut. They go a lot of different places. But that is a huge trigger and perpetuator of autoimmune disease.
In fact, it's a new theory that the breakdown of the gut creating overwhelming chemicals and infections and food sensitivities overwhelming your liver and decreasing certain nutrients in that liver that stop us from getting too overzealous immune attacks may be why we're getting so much autoimmunity. And what's the main cause of that? The main cause of that is usually stress or one of these triggers that I'm talking about. So the concussion works in that particular area as well.
So concussion's a trigger basically. Absolutely I have had several concussions myself, and it can not only trigger Hashimoto's, but if you don't know how to take care of your concussion, it can actually also perpetuate the problem until you get the concussion under control for those people who have post-concussion syndrome, which is actually a small percentage of people who get concussions. But that's kind of concussion and Hashimoto's.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Exercise Intolerance - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's exercise intolerance or exercising too much. So this is a topic that I have to address quite frequently. One of the main reasons is to my right, and if I point this way about that far, there's about 30 miles is Lake Tahoe, which is one of the biggest beautiful, most beautiful places on earth, and lots of crazy people are up there. Those crazy people are people who run triathlons and run and run, what do you call them? Just decathlons and every athalon that there is. And there's people out there that swim across the lake, which is insane because it's so cold. And I'm tongue in cheek because this is just beyond my comprehension that people could do that. But I get a lot of them, I get a lot of people that are up in there, and they have problems and they're over-training.
I also have people at the other end of the spectrum. I have people at the other end of the spectrum that come in here and if I go through the triggers for autoimmune thyroid disease, and when I get to over-training, they roll their eyes at me like, "Dude, I can't even walk across my living room. You have no problem with me over-training." So just to cover the spectrum there, over-training is a trigger for autoimmune disease, not just Hashimoto's, by the way. If you have any other autoimmune disease, if you have psoriasis, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, if you have celiac, if you have ulcerative colitis, this applies to you too. Over-training is bad.
Exercise is good. So when you exercise, you do a lot of good things. Honestly, between exercise and sleep and diet, you can do so much with a person. And most of my patients can't sleep. Most of my patients can diet and unbelievably some of my patients over exercise. So what happens when you over exercise? So when you're sick, when you have fibromyalgia or when you have chronic fatigue, and as most of my oxygenated patients have some form of that, you're putting a huge demand on your system through the mechanism of primarily inflammation. For all of you out there who goes, "It's all inflammation." It is all inflammation, but what's causing it? Okay, that's the ticket and how do you attack it and what's the order and all that type of stuff. But in the end, inflammation is the bad guy and inflammation covers your whole physiology.
And then depending on what parts of your physiology aren't working well or are available to be more attacked, then you start getting symptoms of that. But it definitely affects the mitochondria in your cells. Inflammation affects the mitochondria in your cells. What are mitochondria? They are the little organelles that are little energy factories in your cells. For those of you who are chemical nerds or biochemical nerds, this is the citric acid cycle, or those of you are not, they're little energy cells. They take your glucose, they take your thyroid hormones, they take your CoQ-10, they take all of these things and they make energy. So when you have them under an inflammatory response, you're generally usually fatigued. But for sure when you get up and start doing things, you're putting a demand on them, whether you're sick or not, you're putting a demand on your cells to create energy.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Are My Supplements Working? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Are My Supplements Working? And this is one that, when presented to me, I was actually excited about doing because this is a challenge. I work in a field in which we use diet, lifestyle and a variety of different supplementations from herbs and botanicals to nutraceuticals, to vitamins, to minerals, and so on and so forth, combined with diets. So I work with this every day. It's a very nuanced area and, "Are my supplements working," is something that I hear a lot. People will come in for their first consultation and sometimes... I had a lady there that came in with three bags of supplements. I think it was 31 supplements that she was taking multiple times a day. Multiple was at least two, was at least two times a day. Most of my patients come to me with bad digestive systems to begin with. So throwing 60 some supplements a day or more into a bad digestive system probably reduces the effectiveness of supplementation just for the record, and that's part of it.
Okay, so supplements, let's go A to B on this. First of all, when I'm treating patients, right now, at a point in the evolution of functional medicine and the evolution of my career, it's changed dramatically. It used to be people came in and if I started giving them some supplements, they were like, "Hey, I'm on four to five drugs. What are supplements going to do?" People were more medically oriented. Now people are coming in with laundry lists of supplements and sometimes they're the right supplement, sometimes they're not at the right dosage. But the point is, obviously they're not working for them or they wouldn't be here talking to me about their chronic fatigue, and their fibromyalgia, and their leaky gut syndrome, and their irritable bowel syndrome, and their chronic anxiety, and all that type of stuff.
Why are they not working? All right. So one big reason why they're not working is, and this is always a challenge for me when the patient comes because I use supplements. We have a pharmacy, if you will, of supplements in our front office that we've been fine-tuning and developing for probably a decade and a half at least. And different companies have different strengths in the field. One company has a strength that they're really the guys in glutathione. Other people might really be the company in berberine, other people... and on and on. Okay, so you get the point there. But that company doesn't just do glutathione and this company doesn't just do berberine. They then start to do all of the things that the other companies do, and then they have to tweak it to make their product special. So they'll put a couple of different ingredients in there, which a person may be sensitive to, they may not be sensitive to.
And these are the quality companies I'm talking about. These are the people I know and respect. And these are the companies that you can count on that what they put is in there. And what they say is in there is in there. And the amount that they say is in there is in there. And so we have a whole pharmacy of these. But I have the pharmacy of certain supplements from this company that are the best because those are the best for that company, and then the same thing for the other. So it's hard for the consumer to know that because you haven't been using trial and error on these supplements on very sick people for a long period of time on thousands of cases. So that's one of the reasons that your supplementation may not be doing the job that you think it should be doing.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's with No Thyroid? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Can I get Hashimoto's if I wasn't born with a thyroid? So the answer to that is I don't know exactly for sure the answer to that because I've never met anybody who's been born without a thyroid. Certainly have never treated anybody who's been born without a thyroid.
But let's follow this through because I've also way more frequently gotten the question of if I have my thyroid taken out, can I still have Hashimoto's? The answer to that question is yes. The reason the answer to that question is yes, and this leads to the answer to the question of the day. Can I get Hashimoto's if I don't have a thyroid? The answer to the question of I've had my thyroid taken out, can I get it, the answer is yes.
The reason for that is because you still have thyroid tissue in there when you have it taken out. It's interesting. Years ago, right before I really started getting into all of this, I was invited to be a member of a hospital outreach program where they had several of us. They chose several of us or allowed several of us to go in and watch surgeries. I remember watching a thyroid surgery and I used to do a lot in human anatomy and biochemistry and I used to dissect out a lot of dead bodies. That's a whole nother story. Years and years and years and years and years ago.
But that allowed me to look at that and say after the doctor did his thing, I said, "It doesn't look like, you got all the thyroid out." He goes, "No, no, you can never get all the thyroid out because it's connected here and there. You might change their voice." At the time it wasn't a big deal to me, I just was curious. But later on when I started getting people that came in who didn't have their thyroid, but they had the antibodies and if they ate gluten, they would get all the exacerbations and the heart palpitations and this type of stuff. I started conjecturing back to that thinking these people still have thyroid tissue in there.
Then eventually, and it wasn't until just recently I actually had that confirmed by a doctor who said, "No. No, this is rare that we don't leave at least 10% of the thyroid in there." So the whole thing for the person who gets their thyroid taken out is they still have thyroid tissue. If you still have thyroid tissue, the immune system still... Your genetics still tells your immune system you can attack it. Now the answer to if you never had a thyroid, I would assume that the answer would be, what are my chances of getting Hashimoto's? I would assume that the answer would be zero and none because in my world, understanding physiology the way I think I understand it, you have no thyroid tissue to attack.
So let's say you had rheumatoid arthritis and you rarely get one thyroid... You rarely get one autoimmune problem. So let's say you got rheumatoid arthritis and you keep getting the rheumatoid arthritis and then whatever treatment you're doing isn't working. Then all of a sudden one day start to get a rash on your neck and you get it checked out and the doctor goes, "You know what? You have eczema now or psoriasis." Okay, let's say on your elbows so psoriasis. You go, "Oh crap. Now how can I get that?" Well, you can get it because you have the genetics that tells you you can attack that skin tissue because you keep flaring up the rheumatoid arthritis. If it's not under control, it's going to express the next one, the next genetic propensity that you have.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Medication for Hashimoto's - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
There's no medication specifically for Hashimoto's. There are medications in and around Hashimoto's, so I'll go with that. The number one medication that is used, mostly by alternative functional medicine practitioners, is low dose naltrexone. Low dose naltrexone goes in, dampens the inflammation, creates an effect in your system that increases your endorphins, makes you feel better. That can dampen immune responses by just calming that whole system down. It's a favorite for alternative medical doctors. I tried it. For those of you who don't know, I have Hashimoto's. I tried it years ago. I think it made me feel better, but it gave me horrible nightmares and horrible dreams. And I hear that a lot. I've heard that a lot from people who take it. That's number one. That's not for Hashimoto's. In fact, it's a drug that was developed for a whole different thing.
They just happen to see what happened. It's really more like a dampening, increasing endorphins. None of these drugs are made for Hashimoto's. Hashimoto's is a thyroid problem. The drug for Hashimoto's is take a thyroid medication, especially in the mental world, basically their whole solution. We'll come back to that in a second. If there were a drug for Hashimoto's, it would be the one that's already there for autoimmune problems. If you're watching this and you have rheumatoid arthritis, or you have lupus or you have Sjogren's or you have irritable bowel syndrome, not irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis or something like that, that's autoimmune. What do they give you? They give you a steroid. Because why? Because it decreases and ultimately dampens and maybe even crushes the immune system. It comes with its whole set of side effects, which I don't have to go into.
A lot of you're going, "Ah, I don't want to take a steroid for the rest of my life." And you'd be right. I don't know that it would ever reach the level of taking an immunoglobulin therapy, which is another therapy for autoimmunity. But, the point is Hashimoto's is an autoimmune problem. It's not primarily a thyroid problem. Somebody can go, "It's a thyroid problem." Is lupus a primarily a skin problem? Is rheumatoid arthritis primarily a joint tissue problem? No, they're primarily autoimmune problems. That's why they give you steroids to dampen the immune inflammation.
It's the same thing with the thyroid. I've had patients that have come in and said, "One more thing I wanted to ask you." As I was doing their history, it's like, "I had this thing happen to me and they gave me steroids for 10 days and I felt enormously better. All had my anxiety went, my heart palpitations went." And I said, "Yeah, because for 10 days your immune system was put out of commission. It couldn't flare up and attack you."
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and COVID - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and COVID. So, we're going to take this from the perspective of what I'm observing, not from "I'm the expert of the universe", or I don't have any axes to grind here, so we're not going to get into anything that I think is going to get me kicked off of the air or whatever it is that we're on here.
So, COVID, so a lot of people are asking me, okay, a lot of people I call and they call me and they say, "Doc, so I have this and I have an irritable bowel syndrome. I'm getting chronic pain, I'm getting joint pain." All the things that I treat, "all the things I got them. I'm seem like I have this or that, migraine headaches and my lungs are a problem." And then, I'll go through my normal consultation. And what I started to have happen, not that... Two years ago, "Oh, and before we're done, I have one more, I just have one more question. I just got COVID, could that have anything to do with it?" So, I think the answer is yes. I don't think that's controversial at this time. I'm reading about long COVID all over the place. And so, I think that my perspective is going to be more of maybe a forecast of what I think you're going to hear.
So, what I'm seeing is this. I'm seeing... I've seen tons of people who got COVID and have developed chronic pain, chronic fatigue, chronic gut problems, chronic anxiety. And in the beginning, the thought process that I was going through was, "Wow, these people sound just like my regular patients who come in with autoimmune problems and chronic anxiety and depression and chronic gut problems and irritable bowel syndrome."
And I thought it's kind of interesting. And then, I started seeing the articles on the health sites, and I have an app where I can access a bunch of health sites that I can go through every day from different newspapers and different journals, and I do so. And I started this look at the histories and they're going, "Oh my God, this long COVID, it's going to be... Or is there such a thing." And that whole thing, that was a couple years ago. Again, I thought, "Man, that looks just like my patients. This sounds like just like my patients." Well, a couple years later now, people are actually saying this long COVID is here. It is long COVID, it's real, it's here to stay. And they're... it's interesting, typical of the medical industry or the medical research industry, they're taking every single symptom and they're trying to find one thing that is causing that symptom.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Glyphosates and Hashimoto's - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Okay, so I've just been informed that somehow we have not covered glyphosates in Hashimoto's. I'm not sure that's a hundred percent correct because it is on my list of the... Well, when I gave the list it was 39 different triggers of Hashimoto's. Now it's 42, but it is on that list.
So most of you know, glyphosates as all the bad chemicals that are on our vegetables and our fruits that are being sprayed on there. Most of you would probably know it as Monsanto, and you would know it as other companies that make these chemicals. You would know it as Roundup. But all these chemicals, they're glyphosates and they're bad. They're toxic, they're poisonous. There have been numerous, numerous studies that they are negative factors for human existence, for human physiology.
But it is listed as a specific trigger for autoimmune thyroid disease. When I say that, if you look at our presentation on the triggers for Hashimoto's, you'll find that, at that point in time, there's 39 of them. Every one of those triggers is on that list because they have been thoroughly researched either in credible labs around the world and even more so through what's called meta-analysis of research.
So what that means is they studied the people who studied these topics of how chemicals affect human physiology or how they affect tissue specifically. The group that studied whether glyphosates affect Hashimoto's did mostly meta-analysis. And here's what that means. It means that they looked at every single study that was ever done on glyphosates and then every single study that was ever done on glyphosates and thyroid tissue. That means that there was positive studies. That means that there were neutral studies. That means that there were studies that said no, there was no thing. When they looked at the meta-analysis, they were reviewing millions of people essentially by the time they looked at all these research projects. This research project was 30 people, and this was 700 and this was on 4,000 and so on and so forth.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Why Does Hashimoto's Cause Fatigue? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Why does Hashimoto's cause fatigue? Because, it's your thyroid, that's why. So, your thyroid is... It's funny, I was involved with a group years ago that was in the early stages of trying to figure out fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. My mentor is... If you've watched many of my videos, is Dr. Datis Kharrazian. He's the guy who figured out that most of these chronic fatigue patients probably had a thyroid problem, but he was the one who took it the extra some said. "I think it's autoimmune thyroid disease." He was met with much skepticism, and I was one of them. But in retrospect, it's like, "Duh, it's your thyroid. It controls your energy." It's like, "If your thyroid goes hypothyroid, and it's not doing its job, you're going to be fatigued." And, it seems so obvious once the brain started to process that.
The basics of it is pretty simple. Your cells have these organs in them, little organelles inside of the cells, and they're called mitochondria. I'm sure a lot of you have heard of them. Some of you have probably even take mitochondrial support and CoQ10 and all this type of stuff. But that's where the energy is made, in those little energy factories in your cell. It's pretty basic. They need proper oxygen. They need proper blood sugar. They need a lack of inflammation, a lack of oxidative stress. In other words, oxidative stress kind of grinds down your cells, and it kind of rusts them out. Inflammation disturbs all function in a cell. It needs all of those things.
And, it needs proper T3. T3 is the end product of the thyroid hormone factory in your thyroid which makes this thyroid hormone called T4. And then, that's broken down into T3, and that's the active form. And when that hooks in to that cell and then it goes in your cell and it gets into those little mitochondria, and this is where for those of you chemistry geeks, this is where the Krebs acid cycle, citric acid cycle is also part of this, where people are taking CoQ10 and all that other stuff. You're going to get energy. You're going to get energy. Hyperthyroid lifts all boats too much and hypothyroid depresses it.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Are Hashimoto's and IBS Related? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Are IBS and Hashimoto's related? The answer is yes. Irritable bowel syndrome, that is when you have intermittent constipation and diarrhea. You can have where it is more IBS-C, which is IBS, more leaning towards constipation, or IBS-D, which is meaning it's more leaning towards diarrhea, but usually some combination of both. Look, and the way that happens is, it will seem obvious when I say this, but the way that happens is, is your gut breaks down. And what that means is, is that, somewhere along the line, you start losing your ability to digest your food properly. And then, that creates a bad scenario in your small intestines, because you're not digesting your proteins, or you're not digesting your fats, or you're not digesting your starches. So, you start getting all this undigested food in your intestines, which isn't real happy about that.
And then, just a bunch of things can start happening. The food can sit there. It can ferment. If you don't have enough hydrochloric acid in your stomach, because you're not digesting your proteins, so you can't have enough hydrochloric acid, you're not sterilizing your food properly. So, you may be getting H. pylori, or you may be getting infections in there, and so on and so forth.
What does it have to do a Hashimoto's? And that mechanism is much more even complex and involved in that, but that's the basic start of how you end up getting irritable bowel syndrome. The number one cause of that is chronic stress. And the reason that chronic stress causes that it's because... This goes back to survival mode and this goes back to fight flight responses. When you go into full bore fight flight, somebody's just about to come after you and is getting ready to do a number on you, and you have to decide whether you're going to fight or you're going to flee, your brain literally shuts down your intestines and your urinary bladder. Because, you don't need to be peeing or pooping while you're, or eating, while you're trying to get away from the bear, okay?
All your resources need to be going elsewhere. They need to be going to your muscles. They need to be going your brain. You need to think better. You need to be stronger. You need to be quicker. You need to have more oxygen going to your lungs. And all of that happens while your gut's being shut down.
On a lower level than that, if you are just stressed, it doesn't shut down your gut, but it semi-paralyzes it. It slows down the ability of it to move through. It causes your stomach to not make that hydrochloric acid that you need to sterilize your food, to digest your proteins. It's slows your gallbladder down. Number one cause for gallbladder's coming out, stress. Pancreas will slow down, which can screw up your blood sugar. And all these things from stress and more. Most of you are probably aware of how devastating stress is.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
3 Things To Focus On If You Have Hashimoto's - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
So we're going to go today with the three main things you need to focus on if you have Hashimoto's. Why three? Okay because there's like 40 triggers, and we have these triggers in some of our presentations.
But sometimes people will just say, "Hey, listen, I can't do this. I can't do the whole thing that you're trying to tell me to do so what would you tell me if it could only be two or three things that I needed to do?"
So if I had to go with two or three things, I would say, gluten is it. It's number one. And some of you're thinking, "Well, I got off of gluten and it didn't do anything." Well that's because you got too many other things wrong that you're not able to really sense what's going on.
But trust me, gluten has molecular mimicry with your thyroid, which means it's not about being an allergy. It's not about being a sensitivity. You can do all the tests. That's fine. But once you know you have Hashimoto's, you also have a sensitivity to gluten because gluten in a chemical process called molecular mimicry, which is one of the three different ways that autoimmunity spreads, gluten has metabolites on it that look exactly, exactly like metabolites on your thyroid and other tissues, too. But we're just talking about thyroid right now.
So gluten is out and I mean, it's out. Doesn't mean it's out six days a week and I can eat it on Saturday night. It doesn't mean I can eat it when I want to every now and then because it can contaminate you and cause thyroid enzymes to flare up for three days, three weeks or three months, literally. And it just depends on which category you're in, but that's number one.
Number two would probably be the triggers, okay, but there's 40 triggers. But in the end, the triggers translate into... it's about... for all you inflammation guys out there, it's all about inflammation. Okay?
My massage therapist when I go in once a month and get a nice massage from this lady who is super [inaudible 00:02:26]. She's an ayurvedic practitioner. She says, "It's all inflammation. It's all inflammation." So she's all about loading people up with turmeric and veritrol and CBD oils, which is fine, but it's kind of like a bandaid as opposed to going after the triggers.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Can Hashimoto's Cause Anxiety? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
"Can Hashimoto's cause anxiety?" Oh, yeah. Hashimoto's and anxiety are like this.
It's my position, I practice functional neurology. I've been in functional medicine practically from the beginning of functional medicine. That, anxiety is not a mental disorder. Now everybody's talking about the HPA axis and the over-firing of the amygdala. That's great. We've been talking about it for 30 years or whatever it is in the functional neurology world. Basically, anxiety is a fear response. It's actually a survival response.
Without crossing philosophical or spiritual or religious lines or something, there was a point in time where we know that cavemen, for example, were out there in the wild and this was their brain stem, reptile brain, original brain, brainstem response was they saw something that was a bear, they had to run from it. This is the response that developed in the fear center of your brain. It's called the fight-flight syndrome. You're very familiar with it, I'm sure. You're either going to fight or you're going to flee. It's a survival mechanism. It's not designed to be engaged 24 hours a day. It's designed to only be engaged occasionally. But anxiety, there's a lot of things that bring our threshold down, especially in this society, down to where that threshold is so low for us to set it off. A lot of it's physiological, some of it's lifestyle. It's just a lot hitting our brains very consistently or hitting our physiology very consistently that brings it down.
That's the setup. When I refer to physiology that can affect your brain and cause anxiety, Hashimoto's is right up there. Blood sugar's a big one, probably bigger. But, if somebody tells me they have anxiety, my brain's like, "Check your thyroid." "Oh no, no, I don't have a thyroid problem." Like, "Check your frigging thyroid, will you?" Because, I rarely... Now, I have a unique patient population granted, but I rarely have someone who come in here who doesn't have anxiety. I treat chronic pain. I treat chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, chronic gut problems. That's what I treat.
At least 70 to 75% of those patients have autoimmune thyroid disease. And, they all have anxiety. So, I'm not saying it's the only thing that causes it, but here's what happens. Thyroid has what's called receptor sites in every single cell in your body, everyone, trillions of cells. It's the only thing... Well, it's not the only one, but it's the most sensitive one that has all these receptor sites in every single cell in your body.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Does Hashimoto's Cause Insomnia? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Does Hashimoto's cause insomnia? Oh, yeah. We have a questionnaire that we have people fill out to 289 questions, one of the sections is on hyperthyroid symptoms. So, it has anxiety and inward tremors, and it has heart palpitations for no reason at all, and a number of things, and night sweats. And one of the questions is, do you have insomnia? This is in the Hashimoto's thyroid section. So, it definitely causes insomnia, and it's kind of indirect and it's kind of not. So, because Hashimoto's, your thyroid has so many effects on so many parts of your physiology, that it can alter your gut function, which can cause imbalances and bacteria, which can cause alternations in your blood sugar. And then you can't go to sleep and you wake up, you can't go back to sleep and you're going like, "Oh, my God, I don't know what's going on," and it's stress, but it's actually all of those things that was caused by the thyroid in itself.
And then there's so many of those mechanisms I can go through, just general inflammation. When the thyroid is attacked and it starts putting out a lot of thyroid hormone, that's an inflammatory response. The thyroid hormone itself will make you very jittery. When you get an attack on your thyroid and the thyroid hormone, particularly the thyroid hormone T3. T3, hooks into your cells, that's all the cells of your body, that would be your heart, your liver, your intestines, your brain, and it hooks into these cells of your physiology and the neurons. It just cranks everything up. And in the brain, it causes inflammation, it causes a lack of oxygen. This will disturb your physiology for sleep significantly, puts a tremendous strain on your adrenal glands, Hashimoto's does.
And your adrenal glands, most of you know them as stress glands. They help to control blood sugar, they're secondary sex glands, they do a lot of stuff. And one of the things they do is they directly work with something called your hippocampus and your brain. Your hippocampus is where your short term memory is. And your short term memory turns into long term memory when you sleep. So, this mechanism also has a lot to do with your circadian rhythm, when you go from day shift to suddenly going to a night shift, and it takes you months, and months, and months to synchronizing to that particular schedule and you don't feel good and you feel crappy. That's your poor circadian rhythm, which is heavily affected by Hashimoto's.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Is it Lyme Disease or Hashimoto's? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Is it Lyme disease or Hashimoto's? I'm going to do this, even though a lot of you are going to be saying bad things about me afterwards.
There's a culture out there, and that's how I prefer to refer to it, and I call it a Lyme culture. The Lyme culture is built around the infection of a human being by Lyme disease, which indeed occurs. When we were trying to figure out chronic fatigue and we're trying to figure out chronic pain and fibromyalgia, there was two factions. In one faction was the alternative medical world. The other faction was the alternative non-medical world.
The alternative medical world likes to... It's designed to attack the symptoms. It's designed to attack the bug. It's designed to kill the bug. It's designed to find the one thing that they think might be causing something. Lyme disease fell into that category. Heavy metals falls into that category. There's a number of things that fall into that category. That in, what I call the dark ages of when we were trying to figure this out, people would get treated for a Lyme, they'd feel much better. People would get the heavy metals taken out. They would feel much better. But I had a lot of patients who came in from that, felt much worse or it didn't help them at all. Or they were on their third trial of antibiotics for six months, which there's no justification for that anywhere. But that was the Lyme issue.
There was a whole language of killing the Lyme. Then there's the dark field microscopy and certainly the Lyme hides as does Epstein-Barr virus as does other viruses. Viruses hide. That's what they do. I remember being dragged in and, "Look. Here's the virus and you can see how it hides." I'm like, that's common physiology for a virus.
I was never against it. Now I'm in Reno, Nevada. Chris, I don't know if you're still here. I'm going to talk about you, but I'm not going to say your last name, but he was here. He was an alternative medical doctor, alternative dentist. I went to him. My wife went to him and we had knock down drag out fights over Lyme because he was the President of the National Lyme Association. In his world, everything was Lyme. Everything that we were looking for, the answer for it was Lyme.
So here's what I've seen and I know many of my colleagues will agree with this because this is what we do. There are 42 triggers for autoimmune thyroid disease, Hashimoto's. One of them is listed as Lyme. I have a little chart here on all of the 42 and the one that is listed is the Borrelia burgdorferi down here. These are all of the triggers for autoimmune thyroid disease. It's listed here as one of them.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's Is Not a Thyroid Problem! - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's is not primarily a thyroid problem. Hashimoto's technically is not a thyroid problem, at least not first. It is a problem of your thyroid secondarily. The initial problem is autoimmunity. This is why when you go to your medical doctors they have nothing for you to offer other than a thyroid medication. If that doctor doesn't understand thyroid medication applications it's not uncommon for people to come in here saying, "I took the thyroid medicine and it made me so much worse. Well and then I changed to the natural one and it made me worse." Some people take the medication and it made them feel better for a couple of weeks or even a month or two and then they crashed because they're treating the thyroid.
So the technical name for your condition if you have Hashimoto's is autoimmune Hashimoto's hypothyroiditis. The autoimmune is the key. It's an autoimmune problem. Your immune system has at some point been given the okay by your DNA to attack you and it could attack your skin. It could attack your salivary glands. It can attack your intestines. It can attack your bones. It can attack everything. But if you have autoimmune thyroid disease, it has decided to attack your thyroid.
If you came in here and you had autoimmune thyroid disease, lupus, celiac, autoimmune gastritis, it would still be the same approach to that case. It would be get the immune system under control first because it's an autoimmune problem. The interesting thing to me is it's 2022 and Hashimoto's has been being discussed now for approximately 20 to 22 years. Even though it was discovered in the early 1900s, it has only been an entity that has been brought to the table in the last 20 years. That's 20 years. That's a long time and still the medical profession... Look, I'm not an anti-medical profession basher per se, but in this one particular area, this is stunning to me.
The medical profession has not made the jump to the fact that all these other diseases, MS, Sjogren's, lupus, autoimmune gastritis, celiac, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, all these are autoimmune diseases. If you have Crohn's disease they don't treat you for a gut problem. They treat you for autoimmune Crohn's disease. If you have Sjogren's or lupus, they'll give immunoglobulins or they'll give you steroids because they're treating it not as a skin disease, but they're treating it as an autoimmune disease.
It's been 20 some years and the medical community has not made the jump to this is an autoimmune disease. Maybe that's good because you're going to go in there and if they treat it as autoimmune disease, first thing they're going to do is give you steroids or immunoglobulin therapy or something like that. You're going to feel better. You're going to feel better. I have people take prednisone for something else and if they have an active Hashimoto's they go, "Could this be helping my Hashimoto's?" It's like yes, because your Hashimoto's is an autoimmune disease not.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Are Hashimoto's and Other Autoimmune Diseases Genetic? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Are Hashimoto's and other autoimmunes genetic? The answer appears to be yes. It's funny. We just got this and I was just reading about this earlier this week just coincidentally. In a time that the data that I was reading was published there are still a little gray area, I think, going on here, but in the end, it's pretty much become accepted that you have to have the genetics to get it.
I give you an example for me. Okay. So I have Hashimoto's. For those of you may not know I have Hashimoto's, I have celiac autoimmune gastritis and two other positive antibodies. Interestingly enough, Hashimoto's thyroid disease, my mother had her thyroid taken out. Her sister had her thyroid taken out. My aunt had a goiter and their brother had MS, had multiple sclerosis.
So I got triggered when I was under a lot of stress and then I got pneumonia. Boom, everything blew up. That seems to be the mechanism. I think it's going that way. I think it's going to end up that way. That yes, it's genetic. Another anecdote that is maybe a little bit better than going into the science of it. When we were first starting to treat chronic fatigue, immunodeficiency disease/fibromyalgia, figuring out that gluten was a problem, and figuring out that maybe thyroid was involved and those types of things. Once we started to realize that thyroid was involved, particularly the possibility that most of it was Hashimoto's, at that point in time, this was 15 years ago or more. 15 years, I think. So when we started to realize that, one of the ways we started to establish whether the person probably had Hashimoto's and that was the way we wanted to attack the case was by looking at their family history. If we saw a family history like the one I just talked about on me...
It doesn't have to be even the same autoimmune disease, there's multiple... In other words, I didn't have to get Hashimoto's or MS, because it was in my family. There's an understanding that once you've developed autoimmune antibodies to tissues as you keep not knowing you have it, and you keep exposing yourself to triggers that you'll start getting immune antibodies to other triggers, to other aspects of your DNA that are weaker or that in your lineage somewhere is there.
So your DNA, what they say in the classes that I've attended is the DNA is the gun and then the environmental, or the lifestyle, or the dietary, or the pathogenic triggers pull the trigger. Pull the trigger. So the DNA is the gun and the trigger's environment, food, pull the trigger. Then that's what creates the autoimmune response.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
How Often to Test for Hashimoto's? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
How often should you test for Hashimoto's? So, that's really an excellent question. So it assumes, I think that the patient already has Hashimoto's, all right. And so if you don't have Hashimoto's and you keep going to your doctor and they keep telling you that you don't have it, but you have all the symptoms, you should try to get tested every three months, because the antibodies go up and down literally daily. And so from that perspective, you should let no more than six months go by.
For me, I actually will have a patient who comes in here and everything's normal, but they got all the lab tests and their thyroids tender, and they've had nodules, but all their lab tests come up normal. I might test them every six weeks until it comes up, if they're really insistent upon getting a lab number that you can hang onto.
If you have Hashimoto's, okay, it's an immune problem that attacks... So, there's your thyroid. It's an immune problem, there's your immune system, that's attacking your thyroid. Okay. And until you pull all the triggers, until you find all the things in your physiology, whether it's small intestinal bacteria, or leaky gut, or one of the pathogens, Epstein-Barr Virus, lyme disease. Or whether it's that you drink too much, or whether it's blood sugar spikes going up and down or stress or diet, whatever it is. And there's 40 some of them, okay? Whatever it is, as long as these are there, your thyroid keeps getting attacked. All right?
So, especially if you're not... I mean, I'm going to promote here, the functional model. If you're not using some sort of functional model that is stripping these things down, and you're going to your doctor and just using the medication, the medication T4 and T3 are the thyroid hormones that are in these pills. Okay? They are antioxidants and they are steroids as well as being thyroid hormones. So, they can calm down inflammation to a degree and stop this a little bit. But if you're not pulling the triggers, it might be going like this. And you take the medication, it might be going like this. You might feel better for two, three weeks, six weeks, even three months. But eventually, you're going to start getting symptom [inaudible 00:02:31]. Why? Because there's still damage taking place to this tissue. Even though it's slowed down, there's still damage taking place.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
How is Hashimoto's Diagnosed? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
The subject today is how Hashimoto's disease is being diagnosed and that's so basic to what I do every day for a living and yet when I heard this question, a million things went through my mind and here's why. Hashimoto's is a complex syndrome. It's complex for so many reasons. One reason is you can have silent Hashimoto's and not even though you have it, meaning that your immune system has started to attack your thyroid, but you're not really getting any symptoms so nobody's looking for it. Or maybe you're getting some mild symptoms, but you would never put it together so nobody's looking for it. Then you start getting symptoms and maybe they look for it and maybe they don't.
Maybe they go like you got all these symptoms and now we have a joke in the functional medicine field, you go to the doctor for Hashimoto's and they send you to counseling for your depression, anxiety, and they send you to the GI guy for your gut problems and they send you to the endocrinologist for your hormone problems and there's like nine spikes on this little diagram that we use when it's Hashimoto's, when the problem is Hashimoto's. So that creates a layer of difficulty for the patient to get diagnosed properly.
Once you get to that active stage, eventually today, more and more often, the doctors are figuring out that maybe a thyroid's involved. The next difficulty is a lot of them still don't run the antibodies for two reasons, one, some still don't get the Hashimoto's is the cause of at least 90% of thyroid problems and the second one is the medical profession is starting to figure out, "No, don't start throwing things at me or anything like this." This is just, I see this every day, the medical profession is still figuring out they don't know what to do with Hashimoto's, because they don't treat it as what it is. It's primarily an autoimmune problem first.
The next problem is the difficulty of diagnosing an autoimmune problem, because in the medical world, they're going to wait until you have positive antibodies come up and there's positive signs of tissue destruction somewhere, by that time, you've probably had the problem for 10 or 15 or 20 years, you've been exhibiting symptoms of it, but unlike the old days, when I learned how to diagnose, symptoms aren't enough. And I can conjecture as to why that is, but I'm not going to get into that. So, now you're in phase two and you have all these symptoms, you go, they either test you and find out your thyroid stimulating hormone markers are off. So classically, they're going to do a TSH, T3 and a free... And well, they don't even do free T3 most of the time and a T3, T4 and T3.
That's not going to tell you very much. It might tell you if you have hypothyroidism, which is the first signs of Hashimoto. So then they give you the medication, you feel better, you feel worse, you feel better just for a little period of time.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Lifestyle Changes - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and lifestyle changes. I like this. I like this topic because it's so underappreciated, it's astonishing. And I think it's because Hashimoto's is still kind of misunderstood.
I've been fortunate enough. I think I've been training with doctors from the get-go, from the time I got involved with this, who were the doctors who brought Hashimoto's out of the woodwork and dusted it off. Dr. Hashimoto said most thyroid problems were autoimmune back in the 19th, 11 or 12th, of the last century. And then everybody made fun of him and it kind of went away, and then my mentor brought it back, and then his mentor and him worked together to work out the autoimmune prospect of it, and as a result, we look at it as a disease. And when you're looking out for diseases, you're usually looking for pathogens.
You've probably heard of, it's Epstein-Barr virus, a cytomegalovirus. It's HHV-6 virus, it's Lyme disease, and all of those can be triggers. The alternative medical doctors, or the alternative medical doctors that call themselves functional doctors or integrated doctors, they're still looking for the big time disease. They're still looking for all of those things I just told you and more. It's heavy metals, and all of those things can play a part in this.
But really, the solutions are not exotic. It's food. It's toxins. Toxins are big. I think you can understand there's a lot of toxins flying around, but lifestyle's huge. Lifestyle is huge, and lifestyle changes are things that when you're doing them, they alter physiology in such a way that they flare up in inflammation, and life is kind of inflammatory. And then they ultimately create an immune response against your thyroid.
Right off the top of my head, the number one lifestyle trigger for autoimmunity is, and specifically for Hashimoto's is, stress, because stress hormones cause your adrenal glance to put out a lot of hormones that create inflammatory responses. They put out adrenaline and noradrenaline and they put out aldosterone, which raises your blood pressure. And they put out cortisol, which screws up your blood sugar if too much is put out, and then that creates inflammation and all that type of stuff, and that flares it up. So, stress is like the number one trigger, I think, and it's also the number one lifestyle perpetuator. And it's one of those things that a lot of people usually have to deal with once we get them in control by herbs and botanicals, breathing techniques, taking a walk, praying, whatever it is. But stress is a big deal.
And a lot of the other ones are very obvious. I mean, if you're a smoker, you're sucking up a ton of toxins into your system, and I'm not admonishing you, okay? Smoking is something that many of us might have done at some point in our life and then got smart and quit, and it's not easy to quit. But I'm just saying, every time you smoke a cigarette, you decrease oxygen to your brain, but you take in so many toxins. Oh, my God. And those toxins are, in and of themself, what triggers the Hashimoto's.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Memory Issues - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and memory problems. It is a rare Hashimoto's patient that comes in here that doesn't write down memory as part of their clinical picture, and Hashimoto's can play a huge part in memory problems. The part of your brain that controls memory is called your hippocampus. This hippocampus controls memory, and it controls sleep. It controls your short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory turns into long-term memory when you sleep. Just the context, the background, there. Hashimoto's hits memory in a lot of different ways. Alzheimer's is the result of the beginning of your hippocampus being destroyed, short-term memory, then not being turned into long-term memory. We do know what it is. We do know there are many, many things that contribute to that.
They're calling Alzheimer's diabetes type-3, because somebody finally figured out that diabetes annihilates the hippocampus, and that starts off the whole chain of events, but it's one of many, many things. Many, many of those things are directly or indirectly related to autoimmune thyroid disease. Let's go directly. When you have autoimmune thyroid disease, and your thyroid gets triggered, for many, but not all of you, a triggered Hashimoto's is going to cause intermittent heart palpitations for no reason at all, inner trembling, maybe anxiety, or panic attacks. It's going to cause insomnia, night sweats.
Those are the signs that your thyroid are getting attacked, and not all of you have that, but most of you have that. When you're getting that, just know that when that's happening, your thyroid is doing a lot of bad things in your body. Two of the bad things they're doing is it's flooding your brain with inflammatory... They're called cytokines. The Hashimoto's inflammatory molecules have a specific affinity for your hippocampus. They go to your frontal lobe, but they have a specific affinity for your hippocampus, your short-term, long-term memory area of the brain.
The second thing that they do is... All neurons in the brain need a lack of inflammation. So, it does three things. It's a lack of inflammation that creates healthy brain function, and Hashimoto's creates inflammation in your brain. Then, it also decreases oxygen to your brain, so all the neurons in your brain, no matter where they are, whether in a hippocampus, or whether in amygdala, or the frontal lobe, or whether in the cerebellum, or wherever they are, they all need oxygen. Hashimoto's decreases oxygen to the brain.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
So we're going to talk about Hashimoto's and PCOS today. Apparently there's a lot of people who are interested in that topic. And I would say with good reason. I don't think there's a week that goes by that I don't do a consult with a female patient who has polycystic ovarian syndrome and Hashimoto's and PCOS are fairly closely connected. And I don't remember what the percentages are. It might be something like 30% of females who have Hashimoto's get PCOS. Might be 40%. It's up there. And of course, polycystic ovarian syndrome, of course, maybe you know this already, is responsible for up to 50% of infertility in this country. So the connections are kind of clear, but they're not always that easy to explain, because when you have Hashimoto's, you have these vicious cycles going on with virtually every organ system and biochemical process in your body because the thyroid affects every single thing that there is.
And the real cause of autoimmune thyroid disease, I'm sorry. The real cause of polycystic ovarian syndrome is prediabetes. And I'm shocked at this point in time how few people coming in here really know that. So prediabetes, the infamous prediabetes of which nobody gets very excited over and you go to the doctor and go, ah, your pre diabetic. Maybe somebody will give you Metformin. Maybe somebody will tell you, change your diet, but most of them just go, eh, just watch your diet and exercise a little bit. And then we'll wait until you get to diabetes type two, and then we'll give you the real drugs. Okay. In the meantime, that mechanism creates chemistry that causes your ovaries, there's enzymes in the ovaries and these lyase enzymes stop working properly.
And the next thing you know, you may not be making enough estrogen, but you start making too much testosterone, thus the hair on your face. And the fact that you want to get angry and choke your husband and all those types of things. So I have more thorough presentations on polycystic ovarian syndrome online, but that's really the basis of it. Now, what can cause that? There's so many things that can cause that. Stress can cause that, but thyroid can cause that because thyroid affects so many different functions that can set you off and create insulin resistance. So that's really where it's at. Okay. Like for example, relative to autoimmune thyroid disease.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
There Is No Silver Bullet When Treating Hashimoto's - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
So today, we're going to do There is No Silver Bullet for Hashimoto's and oh, how that I wish there was. Okay, so I don't know, today, there's a lot of marketing going on. There is the internet, which you're watching right now, right? And it's kind of a wild, wild west out there. There's nobody that really goes in... And I'm okay with this. I don't want to start getting into a little controversy today of censorship and all that type of stuff. The reality is there's nobody out there centering people in this area going, "Oh, no, that doesn't work or this works or that miracle diet's going to work," and so on and so forth. And so I'm getting a lot more people coming to me with, "Have you heard of this diet, is that diet... How come you haven't put out a book? Oh, I read this book and this book says that." I had one yesterday. He came out with the intuitive mystic guy who said, "Okay, it's all Epstein-Barr virus," which it's not all Epstein-Barr virus.
And so I get so much of this. I'm getting so much more of it and more of it, more of it, more of it. So the reality is there's no magic bullet. Look, Hashimoto's is complex. I should have gone over there and pulled out, out of what I call my own control manual, the 10 pages that I go through to assess every single Hashimoto's case to make sure that I haven't missed any aspect of what could possibly be blowing them up. If I get... There's 40 different triggers to Hashimoto's, 40, there's 40. And actually, I think there's going to be 41 or 42 by the end of this year just based on what I'm seeing relative to the COVID thing and some other things.
And no one has, nobody has all those. Nobody has all those triggers. Who has eight? And who has 14? And who also has eight, but they're a different eight than this person has over here? And so there's just a certain complexity to the condition that is unfortunate, but it's there. So what happens is you go online and you start looking and you start finding all of these, I won't name names, so and so's leaky gut program or so and so's small intestinal bacterial program for Hashimoto's or so and so's Hashimoto's program. And I'm thinking of specific doctors as I say this.
And then I look at them and I go there is maybe 10%, maybe 15% of people who put out 1500 bucks or whatever it is for the supplements and the diet for that, that program's going to put you on. And maybe there's 15% of people who are going to do that that are going to do well because maybe they are in the early stages of Hashimoto's or maybe that particular diet, I'm even stretching it here, maybe that particular diet might be specific for that person. And just by doing the low level of vitamins, they might get better and get their... Better meaning putting their autoimmunity into remission, their Hashimoto's into remission.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Brain Fog - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
So I've just been told that we haven't done a presentation yet on Hashimoto's and brain fog. I don't know how that's possible because it's literally one of the top three symptoms. It's fatigue and I put on weight and I have brain fog is Hashimoto's. There's 20 symptoms that are really, really prominent, but literally that's in the top three.
So yeah. Hashimoto's causes brain fog. How does it do that? So many ways. It's so many ways, but we'll start with Hashimoto's. We'll start with the thyroid itself. When the thyroid is getting attacked and it's creating an inflammatory response and it's making too much T4, and ultimately making too much T3, which is the two thyroid hormones and the T3 is active. There have been studies that have shown it creates inflammatory responses in your brain during these attacks and it decreases blood supply to your brain. Your brain needs proper oxygen. So decreasing blood supply is not a good thing to happen to your brain. The brain needs a lack of inflammation. So every time you get that, you get an inflammatory response to your brain and it needs other things, too. It needs blood sugar, it needs proper essential fatty acids. It needs proper stimulation.
So these are then things that your brain cells require. You're hitting two of the major areas with Hashimoto's and then brain fog is basically... Nobody can explain it, but they're just like I just can't think and sometimes I can't get my words out, and I get tired and so on and so forth. So that's one way in which Hashimoto's does it. Another characteristic of Hashimoto's is constipation. Can be constipation and diarrhea. Okay. More often it's constipation than not. Okay. Because after it's been beat up in attacks, then your thyroid starts to fall into hypothyroid just from it's getting beat up. So it's having a harder time making thyroid hormone in between these attacks. So that slows down your entire digestive system.
So what's in the digestive system that would cause you to have brain fog? You'll usually get leaky gut. You can have things like if you get bloating and distension, that can create things called lipopolysaccharides. Those go up to your brain, create inflammatory responses. There's cytokines, which are inflammatory proteins. There's food sensitivities. Once you get those, there's metabolites from those that go up there. And there's, I forget how much it is. I want to say 90%, I think that's correct. 90% of your serotonin. If you haven't heard of serotonin, that's what... Everybody says "Oh, I got a dopamine hit, I'm really happy." Well, serotonin is what really makes you happy. Serotonin is what makes you like to be with your friends. It makes you happy. Serotonin is like when you get sad, because it's overcast, you usually have low serotonin. Seasonal, effective disorder. Serotonin is like mood, mood, mood, mood, mood, mood, mood. Serotonin is like good mood.
Well, 90% of it's made in your intestines. So if the thyroid is slowing down and causing your intestines to become abnormal, then it's going to be destroying a lot of that serotonin.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and the Carnivore Diet - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Okay, so today we're going to talk about the carnivore diet, specifically, and Hashimoto's. So, the carnivore diet. So, background. Okay, I'll tell you what I share with my patients. When we're treating them, it's diet, it's lifestyle changes. There's herbs, there are botanicals. There's a lot of triggers that can be pulled. There just can be so many things that are being flaring up your immune responses and there's 40 something triggers and all that type of stuff. But diet's huge. In the beginning, diet's very, very, very important to calm down inflammation, to dampen things.
But most of my patients come in here, they have a variety of different things and one diet doesn't fit. Sarah Ballantyne wrote the Autoimmune Paleo Diet and that was a great thing at the time because it acknowledged that there was autoimmunity and that there were certain foods that flared up autoimmunity. There's the anti-inflammatory diet, except the problem was a lot of people had food sensitivities. And at that time there was no good way to test them. The problem was some people had small intestine bacterial overgrowth and you would get on that diet and all of a sudden your stomach would start bloating and you'd go, "What?"
So here, at Power Health Chiropractic in Reno, we use 15 different diets. But we never use one diet, never, because one diet is never appropriate for the people who are walking in here who's got small intestine bacterial overgrowth, food sensitivities and gastritis, or ulcers. Or who's got [inaudible 00:01:46] and who's got ulcers and who's got blood sugar, diabetes type II. And a lot of times what happens is functional practitioners will have a diet to help them and they'll make that their baseline diet for everything and then they wonder why things haven't worked. So that's just the background about what I'm going to say.
And frankly, I was just doing a seminar on vascular diseases not long ago and interestingly enough, the presenter went over... And it was the first time I ever heard this. It was our idea here. I work with another doctor here on the nutritional aspects of it. About five years ago, he said, "Look, one diet's not working, okay?" We have to figure out what diets to put together and we did so, and we started with putting these together based on our workups. Excuse me. And lo and behold, this gentleman, who I consider my mentor, came out and he started talking about how one diet didn't work, and you have to do [inaudible 00:02:54]. It's the first time I'd ever heard it. First time I've ever heard it in a seminar setting.
So one diet doesn't work. So we'll start off with that, with the carnivore diet. And a lot of people say, "Well, it made me feel so much better." And it can make you feel better. There are people who can't do the carnivore diet because they don't have enough hydrochloric acid in their stomach. They can't do it because some people that the diet is actually inflammatory to them and you're trying to dampen inflammation.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Food Sensitivities and Hashimoto's - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Food sensitivities and Hashimoto's. Food sensitivities are... I think they're becoming much, much, much more appreciated. I have patients coming in, going, "I want my food sensitivities done. I want my food sensitivities done." So, years of a lot of us talking about food sensitivities is paying off because it's very, very, very important to an autoimmune thyroid case. In fact, I can't remember the last time I had... I don't think I've ever had anybody come in here who didn't have any food sensitivities, and I rarely have somebody comes in here who has less than 20 food sensitivities, believe it or not. So, food sensitivities are really, really important.
Here's the thing about Hashimoto's. It is a very complex condition. Clinical entity, it is just... I have pages. I have five pages that I review on literally every Hashimoto's patient that comes in and make sure that I've evaluated every single aspect of their case that could be flaring immune responses up against their thyroid, and one of them, of course, is the gut, and within the framework of the gut is food sensitivities, even though the gut is not where food sensitivities are actually made.
The bottom line is, people come in, and there's 42 different triggers for autoimmune thyroid disease. If you've heard me say 39 in the past, that's because there's three more that have come to light since then. Okay? And so, food sensitivities are a big one. Food sensitivities are a big one. They're a big one for Hashimoto's. They're a big one for setting off thyroids. They're a big one for those of you who are suffering from chronic fatigue. They're just huge, and they're way up there on the list of those 42, because there's an order in which you have to attack these autoimmune cases. I get doing all the testing, and doing the GI test, and doing the adrenal stress test, and I get you can do the pathology, test the pathogens, and you can do the chemical tests and all that type of stuff. All those things can be valuable, and I can get into the testing, and when you need to take it and when you don't need to take it on a later video.
But for now, then there's the food sensitivity testing, and for years, you've heard me say the food sensitivity testing out there is unreliable, and that's being generous, and then there's urine testing, and then there's hair testing and there's all this type of stuff, and food sensitivity testing, I'll just leave it at this, this is not the whole subject, but it should be antibody testing. You should be testing. You should be testing IGG, and you should be testing IGA, particularly, without getting into all that, but the IGA is really, really, really, really a big one to test because any food that comes up as an IGA is really screwing you up because it's affecting the inside of your intestines where 75% of your immune system are, and if you have Hashimoto's, you don't want anything irritating the 75% of your immune system, and food is something you're putting in there all day, two, three, four, six, for some of you, all the time. For some of you, lots of food. Okay? So, the potential there for exacerbation to your retire is huge.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
What Is The Optimal TSH Level? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
what is the optimal TSH level? I don't think anybody knows. I really don't, but here's the back story on that. When I got into this, so there's a medical lab range and it's better known as a pathological lab range. So most of the medical ranges that you see on your lab test in Labcorp or wherever you go are medical, pathological ranges. Meaning by the time those ranges really become positive on your test, and positive means it's not a good thing, there's a lot of damage that's already taken done. Now we're at the end point and it's showing up on that range. Now it's let's take his medicine or something like that.
But when we first started out in chronic conditions, and chronic pain, and chronic gut problems and realized that Hashimoto's was an issue and autoimmunity was an issue, and that the ranges, everybody was told that their lab tests were normal for everything, not just thyroids but everything. Then there were biochemists who started to shrink the ranges down. So back then the optimal range in the functional world. So the functional world was we wanted to know about dysfunction. The patient would come in, they'd have all of the symptoms of a disease, of a condition, whether it was insulin resistance or whether it was SIBO or whether it was Hashimoto's or whatever it was, but yet all their lab tests were normal.
So we wanted to know what was going on with the organs that caused those symptoms because dysfunction precedes going into pathology. Eventually you're going to get into the pathological ones. So the biochemist that we followed made... The pathological range for Hashimoto's was 0.45, 0.45 to 4.5 and that's the range for thyroid stimulating hormone. I just said Hashimoto's, but I meant to say thyroid stimulating hormone. So that's still the range for them.
Now in the functional world, we've used ranges that started from 1.8 to three, which is a very narrow range for your TSH. This was 20 years ago. As time has gone on, that range has changed from by observing different research projects, by just observing hundreds, thousands of physicians observing that range went to one to three. So currently I am using the range one to three. 1.8 seemed a little tight and I thought that when we were using it and then it was suggested we use one to three and I feel like I'm getting a better grip on what's going on with that thyroid patient using that range.
As I say, the real backstory on this is that ranges have changed forever. I could go into cholesterol. When I was in school, high cholesterol was 275 and it keeps coming down and coming down. There are some people who are irrationally now saying it should be under 100, in my opinion. Some people will tell you it's 150 and other people will still stick to it should be under 200 and so on and so forth. So it depends on the doctor that you go to. But these ranges keep changing and changing. Ranges will change from lab to lab. You'll go into one lab and the range will be one thing and you go into another lab because they use the average of the patients who come into that lab. So the ranges, they have always been ballpark figures.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Blood Sugar - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and blood sugar today, because I think this is a really important subject. And I think the main reason it's so important is because somebody just turned it off going, "I don't have a blood sugar problem. I don't have diabetes. And my doctor said, even though I got a little prediabetes, it's okay." It's not okay.
And at the other end of the spectrum, there's a lot of people who have hypoglycemia, but they've been told by their doctors that they don't. Hypoglycemia is low blood sugar. Prediabetes is pre high blood sugar. And when you have low blood sugar, it's a big problem. It is completely blown off in the medical community. I mean, I'm not bagging the medical community, but more and more and every day, as our patient population grows to be more chronic conditions, it's just an outdated model of care for that particular type of person. [inaudible 00:01:07].
And a lot of people who have reactive hypoglycemia, which means that their blood sugar goes low, but it doesn't go low enough for them to be passing out and having to take a candy bar and all that type of stuff. They're being told they're okay, and they're not. So blood sugar and Hashimoto's. So Hashimoto's is an autoimmune thyroid disease. And I'm gathering somebody who is looking at this probably knows something about Hashimoto's or you wouldn't have clicked on this. So I'm not going to go really into Hashimoto's other than it's a thyroid problem. Okay?
So there's a lot of reasons that a person can... And I'm going to talk about how they go together. Hashimoto's you get an immune attack on your thyroid. And then as a clinical practitioner, you are a clinical practitioner. You're a functional medicine practitioner. Your nutritionist, your dietician, whoever everybody's going to today, your naturopath, your homeopath, they should be first evaluating your entire picture of all of the 40 or 41 or 42 triggers before they even start treatment. Because there's an order in which you attack, and blood sugar way up there on the things you have to attack first. And so blood sugar is one of those 42.
Say, "My God, well it's only one of 42. What a big deal." But certainly these ones like gluten are way more important than the other ones. And blood sugar is up there. Blood sugar is in the top four of the triggers that have to be addressed. Otherwise you're not going to get a lot of [inaudible 00:02:47] done.
So blood sugar, why is this an issue? You already have an autoimmune thyroid disease, which means you want to reduce the attacks on your thyroid by your immune system. Okay. So let's go into what I was talking about. Here's blood sugar. Blood sugar, a lot of people have diabetes type two.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and SIBO (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth) - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I assume most of you know that, or probably wouldn't be clicking on Hashimoto's and SIBO.
It's one of those very important things to know about. But again, it really needs to be put in context and because, what occurs with these types of conditions and it's been ever since people came out with the four R program remove, replace, now it's called the leaky gut program. The leaky gut program was enough maybe back in the seventies and eighties, but it's really not enough, now SIBO is much more involved than leaky gut, but SIBO can be one of the big causes of leaky gut. My point is going to be, we have a SIBO program, we have oral tolerance programs online, we have so many different programs now. I now have patients coming in here who have done them all and they're still sitting here.
Coming in here to try to find out what's going on, a lot of it is about the order in which you attack something and, SIBO is kind of up there with Hashimoto's. Hashimoto's is, for those of you who are tuning in here, who may not know what Hashimoto's is, it's an immune attack against your thyroid and without getting into it too heavily, the battle when you go to a functional medicine practitioner is the immune system. First, in most cases, it's the main system first. Whereas 70% of the system it's in the linings, particularly of your intestines barrier linings and your intestine, some of it's on the inside of your lungs. But the biggest part is in the intestines, which is why the leaky gut stuff came about because early on, people started realizing that when their guts got better, their Hashimoto's symptoms started to clear up.
This went along with the gluten issue. We thought we were really hot years ago. We would go like, "Hey, get off of gluten first of all, Oh my God, it feels so much better, we were bad, we know." Now it's a lot more than just gluten and that the person who gets off of gluten and feels wonderful is maybe 10% of the people walk in here, 5% and that there was more to that. SIBO is kind of like the new Holy grail in a lot of ways. There are a lot of programs on online for it and they're good. They're good programs, except SIBO is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. SIBO can be caused by thyroid problem. SIBO can be caused stress, stress responses, paralyze your stomach and your intestines because when you're in fight flight, the stress response stops you from having to move your bowels or urinate because you're in fight flight.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Birth Control Pills - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and birth control pills. It could be Hashimoto's sex hormone binding globulin and birth control pills, and you'll see why in a second here. Okay. So birth control pills. I am a big non-fan of birth control pills. I get it. I get it, but birth control pills change a lot of things.
There are a variety of types, but there's estrogen, there's estrogen and progesterone. I don't know if anybody's even doing Premarin anymore. I haven't seen that in quite a while, but anyway, so it's the estrogen component that's a big deal. When you're taking exogenous estrogen, whether it's in a birth control pill or not, whether it's a cream, because you're in menopause and somebody gives you... Somebody says, "Okay, you're having all these symptoms, you're in menopause. So I'm going to give you estrogen." It's the brain dead.Let's not look at anything and give you estrogen type of thing.
There's a lot of things going on there. Whether it's synthetic, whether it's natural, these types of things. How they're read is very difficult, synthetic doesn't really register in your brain. So you really can't tell what the person's estrogen is all about. So there's just a lot of problems when you're trying to deal with somebody who is on birth control or estrogen. Now having said that, I treat a lot of people on birth control and what happens is the birth control pill...
Estrogen builds. In other words, you get estrogen into your system or you make estrogen, even for the people who aren't on birth control pills and are highly estrogenic, you have too much estrogen. Part of the reason is because it's not getting cleared out of your system properly. You need to make the hormone. It needs to go into your cell. It needs to be used. What isn't used needs to then go into the system and be cleared by your liver, gallbladder and your intestines. That's a big deal because especially if you're taking exogenous estrogen like birth control, you're never going to get it dosed properly for that person. There's always going to be building, there's always going to be stored estrogen and stored estrogen is not good. Most women now, if you take too much estrogen, it can cause breast cancer and a variety of other different things.
So now thyroid. So thyroid, the way a thyroid works is... The way hormones work is they're made, they go into your bloodstream and they have to hop on a protein. It's called a globulin and it has to hop on a protein and attaches that pro... Then that protein takes it to where it needs to go. So the thyroid protein takes it to all the cells in the body, the estrogen takes it to all the cells in the body.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Fibromyalgia - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and fibromyalgia. Again, this is a topic that I'm very familiar with because I started out in functional medicine as one of the earlier functional medicine practitioners back when everybody was coming in at that time, it was chronic fatigue, it was fibromyalgia. Those are the big things people were coming in for. And fibromyalgia means pain in your muscle fibers. I do have another like hour long presentation on this online. That is really, I think it's our most watched videos. Believe it or not, I think it's got over a million views. And so, anyway. So, early on I was involved when we didn't know what fibromyalgia was completely. I practiced functional neurology too. And so, we thought okay, it's brain, there's a brain component to that. We knew there was a fight, flight component to that.
And that made sense because even though fibromyalgia means pain in the muscle fibers, we were kind of thinking it's not the muscle fibers, this is nerve pain, this is small fiber pain. And we discovered that and come to find out that you could have something called non-length dependent small fiber neuropathy, which will cause pain and tenderness and all over the place. And so, we saw that as one component. As we started to realize that the thyroid component to fibromyalgia, which was causing the fatigue or part of what was causing the fatigue, as we started realized that that was involved, we started realizing that actually caused some of the small fibro neuropathy that I was just talking about and about a million other things. And so, the autoimmune thyroid disease started to become really a core of what we started looking for because we started realize that once we got the inflammation down from the fibromyalgia patient, a lot of things would get better.
Well, the things that we had to do to get the inflammation down to for the Hashimoto's, for example if you have blood sugars going up and down, you're not diabetic and you're not hypoglycemic where you're passing out all the time, but you're somewhere in the middle, like prediabetes or what's called functional reactive hypoglycemia where you're either fall asleep and you wake up when you eat or you eat and you fall asleep, this is bad butcher. You have to fix that to fix the Hashimoto's for the Hashimoto's to take a step towards getting better. Okay. But that in and of itself also is causing a lot of the muscle pain and a lot of the depression and a lot of the anxiety.
So, as we unwrap this onion, we started to see that we had to first when a person came in with fibromyalgia, we had to first go to what was causing the autoimmune attack against the person who has fibromyalgia. And I'd say 75% of them had Hashimoto's and then you would work with that and all of a sudden you would see huge differences frequently within 4, 5, 6, 8 weeks, something like that. So, there's a big connection there. 75% of the time with the Hashimoto's and the fibromyalgia, why is it not a hundred percent of the time?
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Macular Degeneration - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and macular degeneration. So I can't say that I've studied this a lot, but you'll see why. You'll understand why here in a second. So I've treated Hashimoto's for a long time. I literally treated a couple of thousand cases or more and so you start to see patterns. People come in and they have Hashimoto's and they have every symptom known to man sometimes if they're a real serious case. They might even have fibromyalgia. They'll be overweight. Their hair will be falling out. They could have dizziness, vertigo, balance because Hashimoto's has cross sensitivity with something called your cerebellum, which could call us all of that stuff. They can have autoimmune gastritis. I'm thinking. You can have a million things. Once that thyroid goes, it has receptor sites in every single cell that they're in the body.
A lot of people come with migraines. Honestly, at this point, when a person comes in with Hashimoto's and migraines, I don't even pay attention much to their migraines. Because if you start getting the proper areas of body to function that are causing your Hashimoto's, most of the time the migraine's going to go away.
The eyes are in that category for me which is why I've never really gotten into investigating it a whole lot. I have seen scores and scores of people come in here who have Hashimoto's and eye problems. I just had one literally yesterday, who we had talked about the gluten being the number one trigger for Hashimoto's because when we had done the consult, she was telling me how every time she ate wheat she bloated. Every time she had a pizza, she bloated. Every time she had a piece of bread, she bloated and we didn't know she had Hashimoto's yet, but she had all the symptoms. I was proposing to her that, that may be part of the mystery disease she came in. She came up with kind of chronic fatigue and an eye problem.
She actually came in for an eye problem. Most of my patients come in with all of these other symptoms, a diagnosis of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, neuropathy, something like that and they list eye problems too. Bottom line on her was she started... Between the time we did the consult and the time I was able to gather all the data and do an evaluation for her, she had stopped gluten. Her eye problem went away. Her eye problem completely just... Mind you now, she'd been to an ophthalmologist. She'd been to two ophthalmologists, an optician and two ophthalmologists, and nobody could tell her what was wrong with her eye.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Going Gluten Free Did Not Help My Hashimoto's - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and gluten-free didn't help.
So I have probably heard this hundreds of times, and the problem is that gluten is the number-one trigger for autoimmune thyroid disease. In fact, it's not an allergen. It's not a sensitivity. You can have a sensitivity or an allergen to it and have Hashimoto's, but it's something called molecular mimicry, where there's metabolites on the gluten protein that unfortunately look exactly like metabolites in your thyroid tissue. So once you've developed Hashimoto's and your immune system starts to attack your thyroid, you eat gluten, it's going to flare up in an inflammatory response and create an attack on your thyroid every time you eat it. So it's got to go.
And gluten's in everything. Gluten's in all the good stuff. I'm half Italian, so gluten's in the pasta. Gluten's in the pizza. I used to like to have a beer now and then, or more than now and then, and it was in the beer. It's in a lot of the alcohol. I mean, it's everywhere. It's in the sauces. Gluten, it's everywhere. It's in all the good stuff. It's in all the stuff we love.
So on a semi-regular basis, I get a person go, "Well, I already tried off gluten, and it didn't do anything for me." Meaning, "I'm not going to give up all the good stuff if I got off of it." Now, here's the problem with that. The problem is Hashimoto's. So gluten's one of, now, I think it's 41 triggers that we know of, that are potentially also affecting your thyroid. Nobody's got all 41 triggers, but a lot of people have 12, 13, 14 of them. So that's one trigger. So let's say you don't even know what the other 13 triggers are, and most of them don't, and some of them are, mind-blowingly, things that you do every day or that you may ingest every day or things of that nature.
So when we first started this and we had people, this being treating Hashimoto's and taking people off the gluten, I was very early on in the groups that were taking people off of gluten for Hashimoto's. And you would get a miracle case, and you'd go like, "Yeah, we're bad. We know. These guys, these medical doctors, they don't know anything. We're so cool, because we took them off of gluten and they felt better." And then you'd get a couple of those, and life was good. And then you got the guy. You took him off of gluten, or gal and lady, and nothing happened. Or they felt worse or the gluten made them feel worse, because gluten is not just a trigger for autoimmune thyroid disease, but it is a big fat trashy carb.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's Treatment After Thyroidectomy - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's treatment after thyroidectomy. Like anything else with the human body, nothing is as straightforward as you'd like it to be. So the theory is, and again, it depends on why you had your thyroid taken out. Did you have your thyroid taken out because you have Graves' disease? Did you have your thyroid taken out because you have Hashimoto's? Did you have it completely taken out or partially taken out? I'm assuming this question refers to completely taken out. And did you have it out because you had cancer? Okay.
So basically let's go to Hashimoto's and Graves', and Graves' is a very small part of the population, so I'm going to talk mostly about Hashimoto's. So when you have your thyroid out, and I've watched some thyroid surgeries years ago and asked some questions, and it seems like a lot of times they just take out maybe part of the thyroid in cancer. But in Hashimoto's and in Graves', they're usually going to take the whole thing out.
And so the theory is because of where the medical model is at this point in time in 2022, okay, they're still not addressing Hashimoto's as an autoimmune problem. They're still addressing it as a thyroid problem, which leads to the theory of I'm going to take it out and I'm going to be able to control your thyroid hormone levels by giving you the right thyroid medication. And that alone is a crapshoot, figuring out what is the right thyroid medication for that particular person. That's a whole other subject that I have a presentation on online.
And so it gets a little complex because of their model. All right? So two things. One thing is they don't always get all the thyroid tissue out, and it's attached to certain structures where it can alter things if you mess up. And the other thing is they're treating it as though it's a thyroid problem and not an autoimmune problem. So if you're still not aware that there's 40 triggers or more now, and I know I've got one online that says 39, but there's more since then. So if you're not aware of that and you're not removing those triggers, those triggers are still there. Very seldom does a Hashimoto's patient have one autoimmune problem. They usually have Hashimoto's and autoimmune gastritis or Hashimoto's and arthritis or they have Hashimoto's and cerebellar antibodies and on and on and on and on and on.
So in several different ways, the immune response is still a problem. And if you have thyroid tissue that is still remaining, you will have thyroid tissue that is still getting attacked. And have I had these patients come in? Oh, my God, probably a couple hundred over the period of time I've been doing this. And so, I mean, it's something I've seen a lot. And they respond well to treatment, because when you have an autoimmune problem
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Low Dose Naltrexone - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Low dose naltrexone, LDN, and Hashimoto's. So I don't use low dose naltrexone for Hashimoto's and one of the main reasons is I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a chiropractor by... That's what I graduated from as my... That's my diplomat or whatever. My doctorate is in chiropractic. I do functional medicine. I do functional neurology. So that's the path that I have chosen and LDN is a medical procedure.
Now having said that, I have a lot of people who come in here on LDN. I have a lot of people who want to know about it. So I've done a lot of background research on it and here's been my observation on it. From a non-medical doctor, basically it's a medication that the alternative doctors mostly use. It's one of their, I don't know if it's fair to say holy grails, but it's one of their first tools for autoimmune thyroid disease. So basically when you get autoimmune thyroid disease, you have a lot of inflammation hitting your thyroid and that inflammation is coming from could be 40 different places or more.
So that inflammation creates an inflammatory response and you get shaky and jittery when the thyroid hormone starts going up. The medical model doesn't really treat Hashimoto's very well. I don't think anyway, because they'll usually look at your numbers, give you a thyroid hormone, it'll work. It won't work. Maybe it'll make you worse because there's binders in there that are part of the triggers and so on and so forth. So they don't really treat autoimmunity the way functional medicine practitioners do. So they treat autoimmunity by giving you steroids or immunoglobulin if it's really a serious, serious autoimmune problem.
So in between all of that is low dose naltrexone. So low dose naltrexone, what it does is it goes in and increases the endorphins in your body. The endorphins are those feel good endorphins that make you feel good. They also alter chemistry that will to certain degrees dampen the inflammatory responses and they're not anti-inflammatories, but through chemistry, I did use to teach biochemistry at one point in time. Through chemistry, they have kind of a chain reaction effect where they'll help to calm down the thyroid to a certain degree.
I have a lot of patients who come in and it's really helped them. So it doesn't really take care of the problem. I'm not trying to be demeaning by saying it is kind of a bandaid. Then there are a lot of people, and I don't know who's asking this question, but there are a lot of people that can't take it because it will cause a lot of people to have bad dreams and nightmares and things of that nature. So it's a tool. It's a tool. If you're not up on what all the triggers are for Hashimoto's, if you're not changing your diet, if you're not at least off of gluten, which is the number one trigger for Hashimoto's. If you're not doing all those things, if you have bad gut, if you're just not doing any of that and you're looking for something that's just going to make you feel a little bit better, it's worth a try.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Chronic Fatigue - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and chronic fatigue. So years and years and years ago, I was part of a group that was one of the earliest groups in functional medicine and chronic fatigue was the issue. It was chronic fatigue, immunodeficiency disease, and fibromyalgia.
Chronic fatigue can be caused by a lot of things. Okay. Back then we were looking to see what caused chronic fatigue and the obvious main suspect if you will, was thyroid, because thyroid really, really is controlling your energy levels, and your mitochondria and your cells need a few things to work well. They need proper oxygen. They need lack of inflammation. They need proper blood sugar and they need proper T3, the thyroid hormone T3.
So if you're not getting an... So as we started to explore that, it became apparent that a lot of the thyroid problems that people did have, who had chronic fatigue, actually were autoimmune thyroid disease, Hashimoto's and then we started to see a big player in chronic fatigue, but it is not the only player. So Hashimoto's will cause chronic fatigue for the reason I just said. It's called Hashimoto's hypothyroid disease. The vast majority of people who have Hashimoto's have hypothyroid. There's a small group that are the thin overactive Hashimoto's patients, but 95% are hypothyroid. Overweight, losing hair, constipation, dry skin, everything slows down, including the ability to make thyroid hormone.
So you might not make enough thyroid hormone, or you might make enough thyroid hormone and it can't get into the cells. As I just said, you need proper T3, so that's the active thyroid hormone that is made out of your thyroid. A little bit out of your thyroid. There's another hormone called T4 that's made in your thyroid and that turns into T3 in your liver, in your intestines and at the cell sites themselves. Then that has to get in for your cells' mitochondria, the little energy industrial factory energies in your cells that make energy. It doesn't get in there, you got chronic fatigue.
That's the relationship of Hashimoto's to chronic fatigue. Again, I just want to make the point. Chronic fatigue can be so many different things. It can be chemical. It can be because of food sensitivities. It can be because of chemical sensitivities. It could be because of blood sugar going up and down. It can because of diabetes, it could be because of insomnia, sedentary lifestyle and more. Autoimmunity in general can cause it. So there's a lot of things that can... Usually, it's more than one thing, which is why I'm saying this. Usually it's Hashimoto's bad gut problem, blood sugar going up and down, chemical sensitivities. If you're like, I am so fatigued, I am done, I can't get up. I'm going to have to quit my job. It's not just Hashimoto's. It's going to be four or five or six of those things put together that need to be unwound, the onion on that needs to be peeled and Hashimoto's is a part of that. So that's Hashimoto's and chronic fatigue.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Follow TSH Not TPO - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Follow TSH not TPO. This came up a couple of times in the past couple of weeks when I had patients that I reevaluated their thyroid hormones and they were a little upset because I didn't rerun their thyroid antibodies. So I'm assuming if you're looking at this, you have some idea what TSH and TPO is, but we'll talk about it right now. So it's not that you never look for thyroid antibodies. Obviously you have to look for them. I'll assume that there's maybe one person out there who, for some reason, tripped on this and doesn't know what TSH and TPO is. So TPO is the thyroid peroxidase enzyme that is most, about 97% of the time, that's what comes up positive when a person has autoimmune thyroid disease, or you might know it as Hashimoto's. And a thyroid stimulating hormone is a hormone that everybody checks for your thyroid, all the endocrinologists check for the thyroid.
It's the holy grail. That's all they check. And if they just check that and they don't do the antibodies, they're not going to know that you have Hashimoto's, which 90% of hypothyroid patients or more, actually have Hashimoto's. So if they don't look for it, they don't know you have it, they're just going with your TSH. And so TSH, when they just go after that and you have Hashimoto's, a lot of you don't do well. And so, TSH has gotten a bad name. I was probably part of that at one point in time, as was the group of doctors that I was involved with because at the time we didn't know any better. And we were tracking thyroid peroxidase enzyme, TPO, to see if the patient was getting better. So, that was wrong. So here's how it goes.
The thyroid peroxidase enzyme, and there's another one called an antithyroglobulin enzyme. They're antithyroglobulin tissue test. So these tests tell you whether you have an antibody that flares up that tells your immune system to attack your thyroid. So these are the tests that need to be run to figure out, do you have Hashimoto's hypothyroidism? Once you figure that out, what someone figured out was that you really didn't need to run those antibodies anymore, but because we have been trained throughout our life that if you have a high blood sugar marker, and you do a blood sugar diet, you want to see the marker go down. So we intuitively think that's the same with the autoimmune thyroid disease markers, but it's not, because they're very erratic. They can go up and down for no reason at all. You can test them one day, they'll be down. You can test them the next day, they'll be high.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Can Childbirth Cause Hashimoto's? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Can child birth cause Hashimoto’s? So the short answer is yes. The longer answer is, here’s how that happens. Okay. So the answer is yes. I would… In my patient population over the years I’ve been in this… In my mind as I look at all the people who come in and I listen to all of the triggers that are described in the patient history as they’re giving it to me… I mean pregnancy might be number one, but if it’s not number one it’s definitely number two, behind stress responses.
So it’s huge. It is just like… A female patient walks in, she sits down, and then I say, “Okay, give me your story. When did this start?”. “Well, it started after my…”
They might not even know they have Hashimoto’s, when they came in to me, they might just suspect it. And they go, “It started after my third child, after the birth of my third child. It started after the birth of my first child.” I’m like, “That’s enough. You got Hashimoto’s.”
But seriously, what happens… There’s a lot of things that happen there, okay. The first thing that has to happen is that person has to have, that mother, has to have the genetics to develop Hashimoto’s. You have to have…so somebody, somewhere in your lineage has to have had some sort of thyroid problem.
Today we know, and I keep quoting the Mayo Clinic, okay, but today we know that… Well, one of my mentors says, “Look, it’s all Hashimoto’s, if you have a thyroid problem.” Mayo Clinic, let’s just go with the Mayo Clinic because everybody, you know… They have credibility with a lot more people than maybe my mentor does. They say 85-95% of hypothyroidism is Hashimoto’s.
Usually you’re going to have somebody that has thyroid back in your family and then you have your child. Now if you’re compromised during that period of time… If you haven’t been eating well, and if you’re stressed, and if you’re working too much, and if you’re fighting with your husband, and all that type of stuff; this all makes it more likely that you’re going to be compromised enough, so that when you start making antibodies… And this is a massive oversimplification of what happens, okay. All right. You’re compromised, you’re carrying a baby, you’re giving all [inaudible 00:02:41], you’re giving all of your nutrients and so on and so forth, to the child. So, your immune system is challenged, especially when you start making antibodies, to give to the child.
if you have the ability to make anti… You’re making excess antibodies to give to the child… Again, for those of you who are in the field of immunology and all this type of stuff, I know this is a gross simplification, okay. When you start making a lot of antibodies and if you have the gene that says I can get it and you’re compromised and mom’s compromised, and she is, especially in the third trimester when she’s going to have a baby
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Best Medication For Hashimoto's? - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
So the topic today is the best medications for Hashimoto's. And I'm assuming that the question is relevant to hormone replacement therapy and for thyroid. And this is a great question and I could go on for a long time on this but I won't. But here's the deal, okay. I'm considered an alternative healthcare practitioner and I am functional medicine, functional neurology. And yet even in my world, the research is going more and more towards the earlier you can get the person on hormone replacement therapy, the better. There's a couple of problems there. The person's got Hashimoto's and they got all kinds of triggers hitting them. Their TSH is going to be all over the place. They can have inflammation. It's hard to get the proper numbers to even put that person on hormone replacement therapy.
I had a lady in here yesterday and she was like, "Yeah, and I go to the doctor and then he gives me the thyroid hormone and then I get shaky and jittery and all that type of stuff. And then he takes this away and then I'm done." Because that doctor really can't, she hasn't even started care yet and she's got some of the 20 or 30 or 40 triggers that are there. Until you get those triggers under control it's hard. Really, it's hard to dose thyroid hormone. Now, the question is, what's the best one? The answer is you don't know until you figure out what's the best one for that patient. I'll give you a couple of real quick examples. I think you just need to get this idea and this is a challenge for me because if a patient comes in, they have Hashimoto's they're not on thyroid hormone we'll probably say.
It might take 3 or 6 or nine or 12 months to figure out which is the right one for them. Their doctor might have a hard time figuring that out and they might hit it the first time and everything's off. I usually won't have that patient consider getting thyroid hormone replacement therapy until we pull all the triggers until we whatever, if it's their gut or if it's stress hormones or whatever thing we have to fix to get the thyroid under control. I'll usually wait but here's the deal. You go to a doctor and is it natural or is it synthetic or is it compounded or is it not compounded? And all of those things can be relevant to what's right for that particular person.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com
Hashimoto's and Low Libido - Dr. Martin Rutherford
For more information on this topic or to schedule a consultation please visit us at http://WhatIsHashimotos.com
Hashimoto's and low libido, and I'm largely talking to women on this because it's a lot different between women and men. Frankly, 97% of my practice is women and so I'm very much more familiar with that and I try to stick to things that I know. So basically, it's a complex relationship and it's not. So let's talk about libido and what causes libido in women. It's estrogen. So estrogen's what makes you want to have babies, it's what makes you want to have sex, it's what helps to procreate the human race. So it really comes down to all about estrogen and what's affecting estrogen. So this kind of hooks into Hashimoto's and pregnancy, this kind of hooks into Hashimoto's and abnormal periods and menstrual cramps, and just the whole thing.
And today, even endocrinologists up until maybe two years ago when I would see panels coming in from other doctors that were endocrinologists, they were never on a thyroid panel when we're trying to figure out a woman's female hormones. But today, they are. Today they are, they're running panels and they're not necessarily looking for Hashimoto's, but they're definitely are getting if the thyroids screwed up, then it's going to slow everything down and it's going to slow down a function of the process of making a proper estrogen, estradiol, estriol, progesterone balance.
So, this is kind of how it goes. Someone comes in here and they go, I'm not menopausal. I have all of these female hormone imbalances. Or I'm looking to get pregnant, I have no libido. Because they all kind of go together, it isn't like it's no libido and it's I have menstrual issues. It's all estrogen at that point. So the question is, is how do we, without drugs, I'll be the first one tell you, I'm not a big hormone replacement therapy guy or like, okay, you have this symptom, so take estrogen and you're about to find out why.
So basically, here's the things that have to be working in a person properly for them to produce proper estrogen production and proper estrogen clearance. And what that means is you produce estrogen, the estrogen gets made, it goes into the cells. In the cells, the estrogen is used for certain chemical processes. And then there's waste products and those waste products have to get into the toilet. If they don't get into the toilet, you start accumulating too much estrogen in your liver, in your fat cells, and some parts of your intestines, and now you start becoming estrogenic. The problem with that is it starts telling your brain you have too much estrogen and now you're ovaries start not making enough estrogen because your brain's going, kicking back and oh, well we already got enough estrogen sitting around. So I'm going to tell the pituitary gland to tell the ovaries to kick back and not make enough estrogen.
Martin P. Rutherford, DC
1175 Harvard Way
Reno, NV 89502
775 329-4402
http://powerhealthreno.com