What I Tell My Patients Who Want To Support Their Thyroid

As many as one in eight women in the U.S. will develop some kind of thyroid disease in their lifetime.

Even more shocking, this stat doesn't capture the millions of people who suffer from symptoms of low-grade and transient thyroid imbalances and never get diagnosed with disease.

This often happens because conventional doctors typically only test TSH, or thyroid stimulating hormone, the hormone from the brain that is elevated when the thyroid is low. But for many people the active thyroid hormones, T4 and T3, can be low for reasons such as pituitary, or central, hypothyroidism, or because they are unable to convert T4 to T3.

If you think you might have a thyroid issue, your first step should be to work with a functional medicine doctor or doctor who will test you for blood markers for TSH, free T3, free T4, reverse T3, and antibodies to two proteins called thyroglobulin and TPO.

The population of bacteria in our bodies, primarily living in the digestive tract, is known today as the microbiome. These bacteria are important for maintaining the intestinal barrier, and modulating the immune system. When the microbiome is out of balance, intestinal permeability is more likely and that can kick off a cycle of immune activation and inflammation that can suppress the thyroid.

Most of us don’t like to admit we are chronically stressed, but our on-the-go lifestyles mean we're often more stressed than we realize. Chronic stress lowers the conversion of free T4 to free T3 — meaning you have less active thyroid hormone to work with. Severe chronic stress at the level of the brain can depress the thyroid centrally. And for some people, stress is so chronic that they develop high reverse T3, a hormone that acts like a brake on the thyroid.