Thyroid Treatment

When it comes to hypothyroidism, there are a lot of thyroid treatment options to consider. But most of the available options do hypothyroidism sufferers an injustice by relying entirely on taking a pill to solve their thyroid problems. But the way that your thyroid works is far more complex than that. So this pill popping approach is really an inadequate attempt to solve a much bigger and deeper problem.

We’ve become far too accustomed to popping pills to solve all of our health problems when there is always an underlying cause that really needs to be addressed. And hopefully it makes perfect sense that you didn’t become hypothyroid or suffer from any other health issue because you somehow became deficient in pills. It just doesn’t work that way.

There are many thyroid treatment options available today but they all have their flaws. And one major flaw that I see is that all of them are one-size-fits-all approaches to a very complex problem. If you really want to correct the underlying problem(s) then you have to take an in depth look at what is truly going on with your body.

Individualized Thyroid Treatment vs. One Size Fits All Approach

For decades now, the conventional medical community has been promoting T4 only thyroid medications as the best thyroid treatment option, but with sickening results. Not only has T4 alone been ineffective but it has actually been responsible for making many people even more hypothyroid and worsening their hypothyroidism symptoms.

And it has taken more than 60 years but conventional medicine is now starting to realize that most people who suffer from hypothyroidism do in fact benefit more from a combination of T4 and T3 hormones. But most doctors are still practicing the same old ineffective methods because old habits die hard.

Many people have found that they do far better on thyroid extracts such as Armour Thyroid which have been used for more than 100 years. Armour is a combination of both T4 and T3 in ratios that more closely resemble how thyroid hormone is produced and secreted by your thyroid gland.

One word of caution regarding Armour Thyroid is that although it had been the natural thyroid medication of choice for decades, it has more recently been sold and reformulated which has raised many questions to its effectiveness as a thyroid treatment today.

But the biggest problem is that both of these are one-size-fits-all approaches to dealing with hypothyroidism. It’s essentially saying that your body has a problem producing and/or delivering thyroid hormone to your cells so we’re just going to give you more hormones in a pill instead of trying to figure out why your body can’t get the job done itself.

A far more effective thyroid treatment approach is to look at each patient individually and determine why is it that they can’t manage their own thyroid function to begin with.

This would involve looking at everything that influences your thyroid including…

Diet
Gut Function
Liver Function
Hormones
Stress

You would be amazed at the effects that a good hypothyroidism diet can have on improving thyroid function. And more often than not, it’s a poor diet that is a major contributor to your hypothyroidism to begin with.

By looking at and identifying the problems in all of these areas, you can actually tailor an individualized hypothyroidism treatment program specifically to a person that will have a far more drastic effect on not only their thyroid but also their health.

Below are some of the more common but largely unknown hormonal factors that play a major role in suppressing your thyroid and affecting most thyroid treatment options.

Underlying Hormonal Factors that Affect Thyroid Treatment

Estrogen Dominance

Far more women than men suffer from hypothyroidism and it’s primarily because women naturally have higher levels of estrogen hormones in their body. But the truth is that almost anyone who is hypothyroid is going to have an imbalance of estrogen. And this is because estrogen and hypothyroidism go hand in hand.

Estrogen in general is well known to suppress your thyroid gland from secreting thyroid hormones. And when your liver doesn’t get the thyroid hormone that it needs, it can’t properly detoxify estrogen. So this causes estrogen to build up in your body which further suppresses your thyroid gland.

This continuous process puts you in a hypothyroidism hole which can be very difficult to get out of which is why addressing excessive estrogen needs to be a very important step in any comprehensive thyroid treatment plan.

Blood Sugar Imbalances

Your liver needs sugar for a number of very important processes. And when it comes to your thyroid, your liver requires sugar in order to convert inactive thyroid hormone T4 into the active T3 hormone.

And when you become hypoglycemic which is common with hypothyroidism then your liver can’t store the sugar it needs to do this. But I only know of a few select practitioners who even touch on the importance of certain sugars with thyroid treatment.

In the end, your body increases its own stress hormones in order to break down your muscle tissue to convert it into sugar for your body to use.

Stress Hormones

Blood sugar problems are only one mechanism for elevating stress hormones and really need to be accounted for with any truly effective thyroid treatment. But any form of stress whether it be, dietary, mental, emotional, physical, etc will elevate your stress hormones.

And when your body is under stress, it tries to conserve energy by suppressing your thyroid and lowering your metabolism.

Your stress hormones play the role of blocking your liver from converting T4 into T3 as well as blocking your cells use of T3. When the stress is chronic, this can cause T4 to build up in your body which also further suppresses your thyroid gland and worsens your symptoms of hypothyroidism.

Very few, if any, doctors or practitioners really focus on these different sources of stress in their patients’ lives and how these sources of stress are often some of the main hypothyroidism causes.

But also keep in mind that these are just a few of the common hormonal influences that affect your thyroid. There are many others that all have a cumulative effect of suppressing your thyroid and making many thyroid treatment options far less effective. And oftentimes this can hold you back from making real progress and getting real results with your hypothyroid symptoms.