Many people have been seeing functional medical care instead of the traditional medical care for their health conditions. A common example we see at pure health is when patients have been diagnosed with hypothyroidism. These symptoms can include hair loss, feeling cold, fatigue, weight gain forgetfulness or brain fog. If you haven't been to a traditonal medical doctor for this yet lets, explain what seems to happen as my patients explain it. They tell the doctor they have these symptoms so the doctor runs what's called a TSH and if lucky a T4 marker to see if they show results of hypothyroid function. If TSH is elevated and or T4 is low, you will get a diagnosis of hypothyroidism then given a couple prescription drug options either synthetic or natural thyroid hormone. This is done to supplement the body with the lack of thyroid hormone the body is not producing. Is this sounding familiar yet. Ok let's keep going. Most of the time that's the end of the office visit and you are told to do this well forever. Literally that's the end of the health care search for answers. If this sounds unbelievable, I will agree but that's exactly what happens. To be fair the medical system is not set up to get root cause answers for people and walk them through healing and functioning properly again. Fast forward a few months the patient returns to their doctor and tells them that they were feeling a little better at first, but it has seemed to go back to the start. The doctor runs another post test and sees the thyroid markers are looking better. So, the doctor says well your tests are normal and there is nothing else we can do. But the sad part is there is soooo much more you can do.
Let's take the same person and send them to a Functional Medicine trained doctor. Here is how it will usually go, we would evaluation all of your bodily systems that relate to your symptoms you are experiencing. Then a thyroid test might be performed but you won't just get a partial test run, you will get a complete thyroid panel that included TSH, T4, Free T4. T3, rT3, Free T3, and Thyroid antibodies. The reason why we do a complete functional analysis on lab markers is to find any kinks in the metabolic processing chain. There are many different directions of what is causing the person to experience low markers or high markers. For one example let's take the thyroid antibodies marker. If the patient has their immune system making auto antibodies to their own thyroid hormone, then that means the thyroid hormone that is being made gets tagged by the antibodies thus rendering them inactive(useless). This means your thyroid hormone can never do its job to get into the cells to run metabolic processes. Which means your cells are starving for their thyroid hormone and will send signal to the brain to make more. Which is why the persons TSH is elevated because that is made in the brain to send signal to stimulate more production of thyroid hormone. So, in this case you actually do not have a thyroid problem you have an immune problem and should be addressed as such. There are many more reason for hypothyroidism. If you are wanting to get a more root cause answer to why you are having thyroid issues or any other symptoms, then please call us for a functional medicine appointment at 614-839-1044.
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