Your Mysterious, Misunderstood Thyroid Gland; how to take charge of your health and recover from fatigue

Whereas your adrenal glad is your body’s fight-or-flight stress response organ and helps provide your energy needs above your daily average (see previous blog here), the thyroid gland regulates your day to day, baseline energy expenditure, your basic metabolism.

• Metabolism – daily energy levels

• Body temperature

• Heart rate

• Digestion

• Mental clarity

• Feeling cold when others don’t

• Dry skin or hair thinning

• Constipation or slow digestion

• Weight gain that is unresponsive to exercise or healthy eating

• Infertility

One of the most misunderstood, however, is your body temperature. All your cells and organs expect a normal body temperature of 98.6 F. Your body temperature is a direct reflection of your overall metabolic rate. If your temperature is consistently lower than the normal of 98.6 F, it means your thyroid hormones are not being properly absorbed and utilized. There are actually 2 reasons for this: either your thyroid gland isn’t producing enough thyroid hormone, or, the hormones being produced aren’t able to be absorbed, a condition known as Thyroid Hormone Resistance. When this occurs, virtually none of your organs will be operating optimally.

Standard Thyroid Conditions

Conventional medicine looks at two primary categories of thyroid conditions. Hypo, or low acting thyroid, or Hyper, overactive thyroid. Hyper active thyroid is virtually always associated with an autoimmune condition. I explain a great deal more about the basics of formal thyroid conditions on my video here: https://www.brighteon.com/d0085f94-ca0a-4b3a-8563-c3db603b32b3 .

Many cases of supposed hypothyroidism are in fact cases of thyroid hormone resistance; poor absorption combined with low body temperatures. Standard thyroid testing on the typical conventional “annual physical” blood tests only examine to parameters, TSH – thyroid stimulating hormone, and T4, the most abundant of the hormones produced by the thyroid.

Proper thyroid evaluation, however, requires 8 parameters – TSH free and total T4, free and total T3, reverse T3, and the thyroid autoimmune parameters, anti thyro-peroxidase and anti thyro-globulin antibodies. Compounding the conventional method of testing is the fact that while T4 is the most abundant, it is also the inactive form of thyroid hormone, requiring conversion to T3 to actually work. By not testing T3, the most important of the hormones are missed.

Thyroid Treatments

I’m not going to dwell too much on conventional treatment, which essentially involves giving artificial forms of T4. This is seldom effective long term, one reason for which is that T4 to T3 conversion step I mentioned earlier. Stress and various nutrient deficiencies can inhibit that conversion, a defense mechanism for our bodies when under long term stress.

Natural treatments start by loading up your body with all the nutrients needed for making, converting and absorbing thyroid hormones. This includes vitamins B2, B3, Selenium, Magnesium and Iodine. Various natural herbal medicines support the thyroid function. In some cases these will be augmented by homeopathic medicines as well.

What to Expect

Conventional doctors will tell you that once you are on thyroid medicines, you will need to be on artificial hormones for life. This is simply because conventional doctors aren’t trained in how to rebuild your thyroid gland, only to permanently replace it with pharmaceutical drugs

If you have been on thyroid medication for years, and you still have your original thyroid gland – it wasn’t surgically removed or destroyed by toxic radioactive treatments – then restoring you to normal health without prescription medications should be possible. I see about a 75% success rate at doing this, a process that takes 12-18 months on average, though sometimes faster. The process involves building up your own thyroid with nutrients and herbs as we’ve discussed, and then very slowly weaning you off your prescription thyroid medications, which must be done very gradually.

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At Dr. Cage Wellness Clinic, this deeper level of insight allows us to move beyond surface-level answers and build a personalized plan that supports your metabolism, energy, and overall balance. Over his 25+ year clinical career, Dr. Cage has worked with more thyroid patients than any other single malady.

contact Dr. Cage Wellness Clinic at 406-361-8073 or visit www.drcagewellness.org.