Managing Your Thyroid and Adrenal Glands

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Managing Your Thyroid and Adrenal Glands
YouTube video by Dr. Frank Shallenberger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhGN5dYNuBQ). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

this lecture is presented by Dr Frank shenberger Dr shenberger has been trained in traditional medicine and is licensed as a medical doctor he has also been trained in alternative and homeopathic medicine and is additionally licensed as a homeopathic medical doctor Dr shenberger graduated from the University of Maryland school of medicine in 1973 and has been integrating the best of alternative medicine with the best of traditional medicine since 1980 he has authored several scientific and clinical papers as well as two popular books which can be found at all of the major book Outlets he is also the editor of the real cures newsletter Dr shenberger is the medical director of the Nevada Center for alternative and anti-aging medicine in Carson City Nevada this lecture was recorded on August 7th 2009 hi I'm Frank shenberger I'm a medical doctor I'm licensed both as a uh conventional medical doctor and also as a homeopathic medical doctor and I started my career almost 40 years ago in surgery and in emergency room medicine and then very shortly into my career uh I I learned about natural healing I became intrigued with the idea of natural healing and subsequently received training in that and uh my life uh as a professional has been devoted to working with my patients to helping their bodies heal them of whatever illness or problems they have thing I want you to know is that your body was designed by God to heal itself that's right it wasn't God God didn't make this body and then send it out say you know go get some drugs when you need them uh we are actually endowed with systems in our bodies that diagnose and treat all medical conditions every medical condition from cancer to flu to uh if you break your bone you don't need surgery you don't need a medication you just need to follow what your body does and it'll heal that break so your body was made to heal itself true there are some times when we do need surgical intervention and we do need medications there's no doubt about that but in general I want you to understand this your body was endowed with systems that not only diagnose why you're sick but actually fix the problem so as a homeopathic medical doctor I have over the years tried to use that as much as possible sure I understand that there are times when surgery or drugs are needed but but my really my thrust is to what to find out what I can do to help your body heal itself of whatever disease you have whether it's cancer or it's um chronic fatigue syndrome or or whatever you're facing now today I'm going to talk about two of the most how shall I say two of the most critical and overlooked factors by medical professionals on both sides by conventional medical doctors by alternative medical doctors these two things are just grossly misdiagnosed and overlooked and they're probably the two most critical factors that your body needs to get well and virtually any disease you're dealing with and that has to do with managing your thyroid and your adrenal glands um and so in the course of this lecture I hope you understand that one of the reasons people get sick in the first place and go see a doctor is that their thyroid and their adrenal glands are not working and one of the reasons patients fail to get well even in spite of all the good things they may be doing is because uh the this diagnosis of of failing adrenals and failing thyroid is often missed and and or not adequately treated let me put it to you another way when your system gets stressed your uh your body has capabilities of dealing with that stress in order to deal with the stress it makes hormones it makes adrenal hormones primarily but it also makes thyroid hormones this sort of keeps your bat to Flat everything's working pretty well but as soon as your body isn't able to keep up with the demand so the the the de the stress may be so great that the demand for your adrenaline and your thyroid output is exceeded and your adrenals and your thyroid just can't keep up with it that's when things start to break down so I have sort of a general rule and my general rule is this how do I I know if a patient needs adrenal or a thyroid support I know because they walked in my office if they didn't need adrenal or thyroid support they probably still feel pretty good no matter what stress they were under whether it was a flu or whether was arthritis or whatever they probably still feel good and wouldn't feel the need to see a doctor so this is extremely prevalent problem and one that you'll see is is just uh very very underdiagnosed and undertreated so I want to explain some of these uh misconceptions to you and we're going to go through this today how to know when your adrenal is depleted how to know when your thyroid is depleted and what it first of all we're going to talk about the hormone cortisol cortisol is the most important hormone in your body uh you absolutely need cortisol your cortisol level goes to zero you go to zero it's the most important steroid hormone in your body by far there's nothing that comes close I'm sorry insulin isn't as important uh thyroids not as important nothing is as important to your survival and your wellbeing and your body's ability to deal with stress and the hormone cortisol uh cortisol is also known by the way as hydrocortisone so if you see the word hydrocortisone that's the exact we referring to the exact same hormone as the hormone cortisol cortisol has unfairly received a very bad reputation so bad in fact that doctors are just flat out afraid to supplement their patients when their patients have cortisol deficiency now I don't know why I think it's crazy if you got an estrogen deficiency we give you estrogen you got a DHEA deficiency we give you a DHEA you got a thyroid deficiency we give you thyroid we don't think too much about that but for some reason when you get a cortisol deficiency whoops we can't give you any hydrocortisone can't do that even though it's the most critical hormone in the body uh I think this bi primarily comes from the fact that there's a lot in the literature about cortisol excess there's a disease called Cushings Disease also known as Cushing syndrome where there's cortisol excess and uh this disease is very developing it's very terrible and I and I guess the thing that that that the doctors get confused with is that uh uh you know if you give a patient hydrocortisone uh it that somehow you might give them Cushing's Disease it's it's just I've never seen it happen but I'm thinking that's that's the bias because there is this bias against cortisol so let me just expose the myth of cortisol excess okay all stressful conditions begin with cortisol excess as soon as you get stressed out whether it's from a flu or from a cold your body makes aund a lot of hydrocortisone why because it needs it that's why it makes it you know it's not like your body's stupid and said you know what I don't have anything else better to do today and all Frank is stressed out so let's just make a whole heap Hydrocortisone and then think of something else no it's making that hydrocortisone because that's what keeps me healthy it's what keeps me well whether I'm fighting a virus or whatever I'm fighting okay so all stressful conditions begin with a cortisol excess but with rare Exception by the time the patient is seeking medical condition that cortisol excess has become a cortisol deficiency now let's take a look at why that is let's look at this concept of a dream sufficiency when I talk about the adrenal gland I'm talking about the gland that makes hydrocortisone it also makes other hormones one of which will I think we'll touch on called DHEA but the primary one that we're going to focus on today is the one that is so often depleted and it's called hydrocortisone um Life in the Fast Lanes and all the lanes are Fast Lanes have you noticed that the world is becoming a more stressful Place have you noticed that you have uh more electronic gadgets you have to deal with have you noticed that it's the news is becoming a little bit more stressful have you noticed that it's harder to deal with life these days than it used to be in the old rural communities 100 years ago have you noticed anything like that have you noticed that we're our environment is getting bombarded by thousands and thousands of new chemicals released every day have you noticed that uh you know where our bodies are constantly bombarded by the invisible electromagnetic radiation coming from cell phone towers coming from cell phones coming from wireless phones coming from uh uh 24hour wireless internet services have you noticed these things have you noticed how the air has become contaminated with all kinds of pollutants have you noticed this have you noticed that due to international travel we're all getting exposed to viruses and bacterias that we just don't have any immunity to have you noticed this I think you probably have okay uh we're all under a tremendous amount of stress some of the stress is obvious when we see it and some of it's not so obvious when we don't think of it like maybe a cell phone stress but our bodies are under a tremendous amount of stress they were never meant to be in so Life in the Fast Lanes and in our turn in our world all the lanes are fast it's pretty hard unless you're a monk on a mountain somewhere to be in a situation where your body is not getting continually stressed just look at some of the factors uh there's all this complexi complexity in our lives has very little time to do what we need to do we always seem to be hurried we always seem to be behind the eightball uh there's this whole idea of genetics and your adrenal Reserve what that means is that certain people their their adrenal glands can pump out a ton of hydrocortisone you know people like that you might even be a person like that you know where where stress doesn't bother you you can miss a night's sleep and you're still performing young people are a lot like this they can eat terrible things they can smoke they can carry on they can do all kinds of things that that you know to this 63y old man had just put them in a in the graveyard real quick but they can do that and they get away with it because they have very strong adrenal glands they can pump out enough hydrocortisone but as we get older we can't pump out as much Hydrocortisone and some of us are born with an inability to to make enough hydrocortisone to deal with all this tremendous amount of stress so for those people this lecture is particularly important and I'm going to tell you who you are in a second here um coping bankruptcy it's sort of like you ever get the feeling I if one more thing happens I'm just not going to be able to deal with it these are common things we all experience this uh in some way or another uh children and young people very often have weak adrenal glands that our kids are getting stressed out not just us and then there's this vicious cycle thing we see this stuff all the time uh you got your stimulants like your coffee uh you got your high glycemic carbs like your donut uh you got anxiety and then you get anxiety over being anxious and then you get insomnia because you're anxiety over being anxious and you had too much coffee that day and because you got insomnia to get a good night's sleep you need more coffee to take care of that and oh yes that dut makes you feel pretty well and then you kind of get depressed over this and then you get depressed over being depressed and you know how many people how many of us can't relate to some form of these kinds of things going on uh you might have to rely on medication you might have to rely on meditation or whatever it is you but but this is a stuff that we all face and this is why I want to tell you it is so common if you're a patient and you're trying to get over disease and you're not thinking about your adrenal gland odds of you actually getting well aren't real good let's look at what the adrenal is supposed to do this is a healthy adrenal response so here's the cortisol here's the Kyro cortisone over here and uh here's time over here and here's Baseline so Baseline means you know when everything's going okay and there's no problem that's about the amount of hydrocortisone you make and normally in a human being that's in the order of 20 milligrams a day so uh in the average human being who's not particularly stressed out somewhere around 20 30 milligrams a day is what their adrenal gland is going to make in terms of hydrocortisone but alarm comes a big stress something happens and stresses that system out it could be bad news it could be a virus they got exposed to it could be a physical thing like not getting enough sleep it could be eating a food that was contaminated in one way or another any anything that's stressing your system here's the stress your body makes just Oodles of hydrocortisone instead of making the 20 or 30 milligrams it may make 180 milligrams during this stressful period but that's okay that's what it's supposed to do the hydro extra hydrocortisone keeps your boat afloat keeps you alive helps you resist the virus keeps you strong everything's fine and then as soon as the stress goes away and you get over the illness or get over the problem uh you go back down into a lower level cortisol until it's completely gone over and then you revert back to your Baseline so this is a a very healthy adrenal response an initial High reaction of cortisol to stabilize things uh a higher level in Baseline to keep things going until you finally get well and once you get well you don't need anymore but that's not what happens in modern day life this is modern day life modern day life was the alarm was sort of uh I don't know you got up one morning and you went out or you graduated from high school or medical school or whatever you did and you went out into the real world and you started getting stressed and guess what it never stopped you're continually stressed either stressed by like I'm talking about like environmental things or you know you're getting older you've got children you've got jobs you've got spouse relationships you've got all these issues going on too many irons in the fire you never get over it so you have continuously elevated levels of cortisol okay this is called the General Adaptation Syndrome I call it Modern Life this is where we live folks right in here with excessive amounts of cortisol to deal with all this stress but as long as your body's healthy it can deal with this and this is not necessarily an issue but here's the problem you can't keep this up forever we all have what we call an adrenal Reserve that it basically is a way it's like a bank account we all have so much hydrocortisone per day we can make and uh you know if you exceed that if you withdraw too much money you're going to go run overbalance and that's what we do with our adrenals so over time here's what happens with people as they're making this amount of cortisol they're in their adaptive phase and they feel pretty good and this can go on for years but at some point something happens it could be something simple like a virus or a flu that ordinary they would have gotten over it could be they had a surgery it could be their doctor put them on birth control pills it could be uh that they received bad news it could be that they moved into a new house and they happen to be allergic to the carpets it doesn't make much difference it doesn't have to be a big thing is the point they're already overloaded here a little thing comes along and just pushes them right over the edge and now their adrenal Gand cannot make enough hydrocortisone to keep up anymore and the hydrocortisone levels actually go down as the adrenal becomes exhausted and the levels go down actually at some point they go right down below Baseline and this is where uh Han celier the man that first the scientists that first discovered all this effect of stress on our systems and the effect of cortisol and such he called that the exhaustion phase where now you still have the same amount of stress but you can't make the hydrocortisone to deal with it I call it it's the time to see the doctor phase because as long as you're making enough hydrocortisone keeps your boat afloat you're okay but as soon as this thing happens and you go into this exhaustive phase now you can't make the hydrocortisone now everything falls apart and you go into that thing we just kind of talked about where you're in adrenal fatigue and this is what I'm telling you so many patients are in this state when they see their doctor and and yet the doctors either completely ignore it or they don't give adequate treatment for this because they're scared to give their patients Hy Cortisone and I can just tell you uh I could tell you literally hundreds of stories of patients that have come to see me for chronic long-term problems uh anywhere from lupus to rheumatoid arthritis to other like chronic fatigue syndrome fibromyalgia chronic headaches anything it's unbelievable that have seen a who's who list of conventional uh or alternative doctors the best of the best and have gotten nowhere until I put them on adrenal therapy and then all of a sudden the lights turn on and and but that's what it's like there's no way I don't care have every little part of your healing mechanism is in place but you're hydrocortisone deficient there's no way you're going to get well all the way you might feel better but you are not going to get well until you plug in that hydrocortisone so how do you know if you have this well let's go over these symptoms because you're going to you're going to see most of the people probably listening to this right now have a degree of this that's how common this is okay um well I give lectures to doctors and so I I uh I I ask the doctor how do you know if the patient uh if a person has uh a need for Hydrocortisone they're hydrocortisone deficient they're sitting in front of you okay that's just a factious way of saying this is extremely common well they have weakness and fatigue that's the most common symptom and it's especially in the afternoon so if you feel fairly good in the mornings you have your Starbucks and your kind of Coos and everything's pretty good in the morning but you do the crash and burn number around 2: to 4:00 p.m. you have adrenal fatigue you have hydrocortisone deficiency B that's all I need to know that is a pathon slam dunk diagnosis now even if you don't have that you might have the problem uh you if you're fatigued in the morning and it gets worse in the afternoon you just have a worse problem but that afternoon Crash and Burn number um uh that's pathic of Hydro cortisone deficiency now some patients won't report that cuz you know they they have a Starbucks uh around uh 1 2:00 p.m. and that takes care of they feel great but if you didn't have that coffee that's what I'm talking about how would you feel um if you have decreased coping ability or if you have to if you have to have crutches if you have to have to have alcohol if you have to have that saitip if you have to have things to calm you down or the anti-anxiety medication odds are really good you have adrenal insufficiency and you need some hydrocortisone replacement um hypoglycemia low blood sugar hydrocortisone is the hormone that keeps your blood sugar up so if your blood sugar Falls bang guarantee you you have a hydrocortisone deficiency carbohydrate craving when your blood sugar goes down what are you going to want to eat you're going to want to eat something that makes your blood sugar go up what's a really good thing to do that say candy something with sugar uh something very bread-like some chips uh some cookies all those things that we all crave and we all want especially in the afternoons uh because the blood sugar's down that's a real sure idea that you have a hydrocortisone deficiency if you find that you're drinking more and more coffee you you start it off at one cup a day that's pretty good next thing you know you like the patient I saw yesterday is on six cups a day and didn't think anything of it everything's just fine as long as it's on six cups a day because it keeps stimulating his adrenal to make hydrocortisone but this is not a healthy situation it's much better to give his give yourself hydrocortisone stop the coffeee and let your dream gland heal mood swings headache insomnia allergies big thing so uh uh allergies uh uh and by that I'm including all autoimmune diseases by the way but allergies to dogs cats pollin uh all of those kinds of inhalent allergies are manifested by a deficiency of Hydrocortisone and likewise they can be cured when you replace the deficiency adrenaline panic attacks are huge here's what happens you're when you're under stress your your your adrenal gland has a choice it can make the really nice hormone that feels you good makes you feel good that's called hydrocortisone or it can make the really bad hormone that makes you feel terrible that's called adrenaline but in NE event those are those are two hormones that it can use to keep your boat of flat it prefers to give make hydrocortisone because that's the nice Mello hormone makes you feel good makes you feel satisfied everything's good adrenaline makes you feel terrible but if you can't make hydrocortisone it has to rely on adrenaline so now it's going to pump out adrenaline and when you get adrenaline these are kinds of the symptoms of adrenaline you get tacac cardia or rapid heart rate that's what that means dry mouth perspiration nausea lightheadedness you often feel breathless you feel like you can't breathe you can breathe but you feel like you can't you you're trembling and you have this sort of outof control kind of feeling this is classically diagnosed as a panic attack and it's caused by excessive amount of D adrenaline being secreted by the adrenal gland because it can't make enough hydrocortisone hydrocortisone will cure panic attacks so if you see these kinds of symptoms um you stand in line you you need some hydrocortisone there are other ways that doctors can use to uh kind of determine if you need it in my book though if a patient walks with any one of those symptoms I'm going to give them Hydrocortisone and see if they don't get better if they get better and we're talking in a matter of two or three days if they get better then I know that's made my diagnosis I don't have to go into the rest of this but just so you know uh you can look at your blood pressure when you're you take your blood pressure laying down you go to stand up if you have good adrenal glands the blood pressure actually gets higher when you stand up if your adrenal glands are bad the blood pressure will get lower so that's one way to determine it uh hypotension or orthostatic hypotension hypotension means too lower blood pressure orthostatic hypotension refers to a blood pressure falling when you go from a sitting to a standing in position so uh if you notice that when you're sitting down and and you get up or you're bending over and you go to stand up and you get woozy and kind of lightheaded that's a pretty good sign that you have hydrocortisone deficiency you can look at your blood tests uh if your if your sodium is a little bit in the low range and your potassium is a little bit in the high range that's a sign uh pupilary response when you shine a light into an eye it should constrict and it should hold that constriction if you're having that light shining in that eye uh that is controlled by hydrocortisone so in hydrocortisone deficiency what happens is the pupil goes down but it immediately opens up you can't hold it so that's another way to check it and then finally on the blood count you'll see an elevation of these cells these cells called eosinophils uh we test for these all the time and and we see high eosinophils probably 50% of the time with their uh hydrocortisone deficient patients now you can almost look at somebody in the mall and and determine just by looking at them whether they're likely to be hydrocortisone deficient certain body types are really prone to this I'm one of them uh just so you know I'll go on record I take anywhere from 20 to say 30 milligrams of hydrocortisone every day of my life been doing that for probably a decade now U I'm healthier and heck I got nothing wrong with me by the way all those people out there that think Hydrocortisone and poison and everything it's not um it's you know the it's not a poisonous your body makes it uh so how bad can it be it either either makes enough or it doesn't make enough if it doesn't make enough take some build up the amount anyhow um people who are thin that would be me people who are white fair that would be me I used to have red hair uh blueeyed that would be me uh females in particular but obviously also men uh and Blondes are redheads so if I have somebody walk in my office and a woman who's a blonde or red head and they're thin white and have blueeyed and a fair skin I guarantee you that the likelihood is probably 95% they have hydrocortisone deficiency That's How Strong the genetic markers are for this hyperpigmentation and vidigo these are relatively rare indications so don't lean on those too heavily one of the biggest causes for not having menstrual periods is hydrocortisone deficiency a huge reason for decreased libido in women is hyro cortisone deficiency uh anytime you're having aches and pains and joint aches and muscle aches you always got to think hydrocortisone a hydrocortisone deficiency can cause those autoimmune disease I think all autoimmune diseases from Scleroderma to uh to lupus to rheumatoidarthritis to colitis you name them any one of those autoimmune diseases I think they are are a cortisol deficiency disease I I understand there's more factors involved than just cortisone deficiency but I know one of the big reasons people get autoimmune diseases is because they are deficient on that hormone so in order to get well from those diseases you have to replace your deficient levels and of course a fasting a low fasting blood sugar and even a low fasting cortisol on the blood test can diagnose that as well but here's the thing I I don't want you or doctors to rely on lab tests whether it's a saliva test or a blood test or a urine test I do not want you in any way shape or form to rely on a lab test to diagnose this condition this condition can be diagnosed in about two seconds by talking to a patient and if you suspect the patient has it it's very simple to determine if they really have it just give them some hydrocortisone for about a week or two if they don't get better they don't have the problem but if they do get better then there's your diagnosis uh I uh they do have laboratory evaluations but I'll tell you I really don't use these anymore uh more often than not these laboratory evaluations will not pick up the patient with hydrocortison efficiency why because the general population that they're using to determine what the normal range is they're all hydrocortisone deficient this is a problem that is all over Society why do you think we you know coffee shops are so popular so forget the tests if if you just tell your doctor or if you're a doctor watching this just give your patient some hydrocortisone you're not going to hurt a patient by giving them Hydrocortisone and the kind of doses I tell you about for four to six weeks you're not going to hurt them even if they don't need it so give them a little try it out see if it works that's the best way to diagnose any hormonal deficien treating it um you want to do am dosing the the adrenal gland makes hydrocortisone in in a rhythmic f it makes a lot of it in the morning a little less at noon a lot less around 2 or 3 p.m. and virtually none from 6:00 p.m. on so you want to supplement in that way you kind of give a dose in the morning and another dose around noon time or 2 p.m. sometimes I'll go with three time a day dosing so I'll do morning noon and 3 p.m. in the harder cases normally I'll just do morning and noon and that's enough that's what I take and that that's enough for most people uh I make a powder it's called quick start you can learn about it at my website site uh uh and it's a it's just a marvelous powder we've used it for years and years and years it helps your liver it helps you detoxify and it really strengthens your adrenal as well so I like to use that in conjunction with the Hydrocortisone and we typically start off with somewhere around 5 to 10 milligrams in the morning and again around two now for you doctors out there you know this is a safe dose you know you can't hurt anybody with this in way even if they don't need it you can't hurt it but here's the point this may not be enough if you have an autoimmune disease patient you may need in the order of 80 to even 120 milligrams of hydrocortisone you may need a really large amount of heart cortisone to normalize that patient um but for most patients with the typical allergies you're looking at doses in this range or maybe a little bit higher uh often the patients need thyroid and uh so we are going to talk more about thyroid but not right now but often the patients need thyroid if your patient needs thyroid and they're also adrenal deficient I would suggest that you slow down on the thyroid because if you give thyroid hormone to a patient that's hydrocortisone deficient you probably aggravate them with the thyroid so hold back on the thyroid wait till they're built up with the hydrocortisone then add the thyroid in um definitely take them off their stimulants there goes the coffee uh there goes any other stimulants they're taking whether it's diet pills or medications uh and definitely off the high glaum and carbohydrates all those sugary things that they're using to make them feel better they got to stop doing all that but if they'll do that and so take this particular remedy in here I don't care what their problem is inside 3 to six days their whole medical condition will be completely turned around and then you can start there um you know there's a lot lot of me clinical conditions you also want to think about when you thinking hydrocortisone the fish so anytime I have a patient who's complaining allergies inflammation of any kind uh or any kind of illness tiredness fatigue insomnia any of those kinds of things there're there bad belief systems things that cause them to worry and stress all those kinds of things are the kinds of things that will deplete their adrenal glands so while we're replenishing their body with the hydrocortisone they so dramatically need you also want to start elim minating some of the stresses that caused it in the first place so look for food allergies look for inhalent allergies get rid of inflammation clean out the bowels give them something to help them sleep make sure they have good healthy sleep habits if they have negative belief systems discuss that with them get them to look at the world as a more friendly place um we also need to teach people when we put them on hydrocortisone to how to dose themselves remember your body makes hydrocortisone depending on how much stress you have so if you have more stress you're going to need more so for me for example uh on a regular basis I take 10 milligrams in the morning and 10 milligrams at noon that just does me great but if I uh have to go to Europe or I was going to Singapore there for a while the time zones are dramatically different that's very stressful to my body I you know I I about doubled the amount of hydrocortisone because I needed that much if I think I'm facing a flu or a cold or if I'm just having a a stressful time my life whatever the reason may be I will increase the hydrocortisone to an adequate level um around here we have allergy season with rabbit brush starting around September goes on for about 68 weeks I'm really allergic to Rabbit brush so at that time I'll increase my hydrocortisone dose just enough that take care of that those allergies and then after the rabbit brush is gone bengar can reduce the dose so it's important to uh for everybody to learn uh how to anticipate and prevent efficiency simply by by taking the hydrog cortisone depending on on how you need it now many patients incidentally will be able to stop it entirely uh if you give them a 3 to four month course of hydrocortisone replacement that's enough time and you and you deal with the causes in the first place that's enough time for many patients their own adrenal glands to recover and their own adrenal glands to be making more Hydrocortisone and very often you can withdraw the Hydrocortisone and they no longer need it uh however many of us because of all the enormous stresses that we do have in our lives um such as yours truly uh will probably need it to some degree forever and ever to be at Optimum I'm not saying that if you don't take it you're going to be sick or terrible if I didn't take my hydrocortisone I'd just be sleepy in the afternoon I'd probably be reaching for a coffee uh I wouldn't feel the strength and the V vitality and the aliveness that I feel I wouldn't be sleeping as well I'd be suffering more from allergies but it wouldn't be like sick necessarily so uh so it's it's it's okay if you don't take it and a lot of people worry they've heard this this this myth about gez if I get on Hydrocortisone and then I run out and I stop it it'll kill me won't it no it won't kill you you'll just feel the way you felt before you started taking it that's all remember your body makes hydrocortisone how bad can it be it makes it it needs it if I didn't give you hydrocortisone in a pill form you'd have hydrocortisone floating in your blood veins anyway you make it you need it the question is not whether you should have some in your body you already got it in there the question is do you have enough because if you don't have enough your body is going to become ill and your quality of life is going to go down big time okay that that's a good good little introductory thing on hydrocortisone um I I will tell you that um uh most doctors most pharmacists have no clue about anything I talked to you about uh there are just a handful probably of Physicians that understand this I'm talking about endocrinologist too very few endocrinologists which is the special the specializes in hormones understand about the physiological use of hormone replacement to enhance health and optimize Health uh endocrinologists are trained for disease management they're used to giving hydrocortisone when the patients got a cancer of the adrenal or some terrible dis disase of adrenal they're not used to giving it as just a in replacement doses for patients whose adrenals just aren't making enough so most doctors haven't a clue about this and most pharmacists haven't a clue about this so and if you go on the Internet or if you listen to any of these people that don't know they'll tell you hydrocortisone is terrible it's horrible it's going to waste your bones it's going to give you cancer it's going to give you diabetes God knows what they tell you it's true all those things will happen if you take enormous doses year in year out if you take doses Way Beyond what you need year in year out all those things will happen that's true but we're not doing that we're just giving you what you need if if you're supposed to have that much but you're only making that much we just give you the difference we don't give you that much so all those warnings I tell you what if those warnings were true uh there would be thousands of my P patients out there that are just sick and diseased and horrible instead of feeling great because I've been doing this for decades now I'm going to talk about something that is really tightly aligned to adrenal and that is the thyroid uh you've all keep in mind the there's sort of this Triad in the body that orchestrates healing okay one part of it we've just talked about is the adrenal part the hydrocortisone part uh and I don't know that I mentioned this so I I will mention let me see if I said this um no actually I didn't okay so um I do want to mention this when you're taking hydrocortisone I always give some DHEA with it dihydro and. drone which is the other hormone the adrenal gland makes it DHA balances out it's is a stress hormone too but it attacks the stress in a different way so DHEA balances out hydrocortisone so give them together normally I'll give uh milligram for milligram equal amounts of DHEA and hydrocortisone whenever I'm dosing so I forgot to say that so I want to include that in there uh but so on the one hand you have the this Triad now on the one hand you have adrenal hormones uh primarily Hydrocortisone and DHEA the other part of the Triad is the thyroid hormones T3 and T4 and then the third part of the Triad is the big organ that regulates all of this it's called the liver so that's why we take the quick start powder because it's a liver remedy and that's why we always think of doing those three we always think of taking liver remedies along with Hydrocortisone and DHEA along with T3 and T4 the thyroid hormones and incidentally iodine is used by all those so we throw a little iodine in there so that's kind of the overall big approach to giving your body the primary the main ingredients that it needs to get well so we're going to take a little time here we're going to talk about um hypothyroidism uh hypothyroidism is um another one of these things it's kind of like it's it's it's prevalent almost as much as uh hydrocortisone deficiency is thyroid hormone deficiency is prevalent like that but your doctor will miss it most your conventional doctor will miss this most of the time because all he ever is going to do is check a blood test called the TSH which as you will see I'm going to explain the blood testing part to you and you'll see that the TSH is essentially useless for diagnosing this condition and we're going to talk about how you can diagnose this condition and how you can treat this condition in a second but I think it's critical to understand that as we get older thyroid hormone deficiency is an inevitability in fact as you get older every hormone that you have inevitably will become deficient it's true there's a great great deal of difference I saw like a 72y old man yesterday and his testosterone levels were perfect ly normal they were really good and and relatively recently I saw 42y old man his testosterone levels were in the dumper so there's a great deal of variation here but whatever age you are now 10 or 20 years from now your thyroid levels your ADR your adrenal your hydrocortisone levels your testosterone levels will all be lower than they are now we know this so over time people become deficient in hormones now thyroid hormone is a little bit different than hydrocortisone hydrocortisone becomes deficient due to stress so it can be deficient in an 18-year-old kid if he's got sufficient stress thyroid hormone becomes deficient usually more over time uh however we all know that people can be born with hyro uh thyroid hormone deficiency so if they can be born with thyroid hormone deficiency um then we know as they get older it's become become more and more prevalent uh and so we do see a very broad spectrum and this is the kind of a hormone deficiency along with cortisone deficiency that can occur even in young people so we always think about this even in 20 and 32 year olds uh thyroid hormone deficiency well as if you look through the whole list of thyroid hormone deficiency Sy symptoms it encompasses almost anything that can happen to you that's out of the ordinary but I'm just going to give you the main ones um you feel weak you're not quite as strong you're tired you run down you might be sleepy even during the day your cognitive dysfunction your your brain won't work as well you're not quite as sharp you can't concentrate quite as well you don't remember quite as well it might be hard for you to learn things uh mood is a big one you can start becoming depressed so low thyroid is a major cause of depression particularly in the elderly but also in the young uh slow wound healing if you find that uh your wounds don't quite heal as well uh if you find that you get infections easily uh this is particularly true with colds and flu so a frequent uh you're the kind of person that gets all the colds and flu you're probably thyroid deficient um cold and heat intolerance so that's another one we see if if you can't tolerate the cold you're putting on sweaters and everybody else is looking at you funny or you're taking off all your clothes because you're too hot and everybody's looking at you all kind of funny then uh you might very likely have thyroid hormone deficiency a decreased appetite uh a diminish libido particularly in women but this is one of the major cause for lack of sex driving in women and in men impotence uh in women a major major cause of anovulation or not having periods or irregular periods PMS anything to do with your periods women if your periods are off you get PMS you get bad cramps they're irregular skip periods any of that kind of thing think thyroid you're probably thyroid hormone deficient uh dry eyes a common cause so uh there's so many people have dry eyes today and uh instead of just taking drops for them look into your thyroid because you probably have thyroid hormone deficiency uh constipation a major symptom your bowels need to be moving every day if they're not not moving at least every other day you probably have thyroid hormone deficiency uh uh joint aches orthologist headaches uh I've seen several patients with chronic severe bad migraine headaches put them on some thyroid hormone bang Gone Forever that was their cause a rods phenomenon which is a disorder of the fingers carpal tunnel syndrome responds really well to U low thyroids or to thyroid replacement okay so those are kinds of the some of the symptoms that you can use to recognize if you have this so now the next part is to determine if you have it and we can rely on Laboratory Testing so I'm going to go over here to the chalkboard and I'm going to give you an ex I'm going to show you basically explain to you what I would H what I would tell you probably 9 5% of doctors don't know about thyroid testing including most endocrinologists so this would be a great little lesson for you and once you see this you'll you'll really learn how you can diagnose thyroid and then then we'll talk a little bit about how you can treat it okay so um before you can understand much about how the testing is done and much about how you ought to be treated here's some really critical things to understand I'm going to diagram out for you how this whole thyroid axis works works it's really simple so just follow with me on this you know it all starts with your cell down here okay uh all of your cells every single one of your cells requires energy to work doesn't make any difference if it's a brain cell or a hormone cell or enzyme cell or whatever the heck it does it needs to have energy to work the ability for the cell to make energy is what we call metabolism if you have a fast metabolism you make plenty of energy if you have a slow metabolism you don't make enough energy so the body's ability to regulate the metabolism of the cells is absolutely critical to heal let me give you an idea how critical this is if you don't have any metabolism it's easy to diagnose your condition it's called dead so you need to have adequate metabolism if you have slow metabolism it's easy to diagnose your condition too it's sort of like almost dead you're tired you run down you you you you know you know what I'm talking about so anyhow cell metabolism is what it's all about now up here you got your brain and the here's what the brain is responsible to doing the brain is your sort of your your the conductor of the symphony he's supposed to understand what the hell is going on in the cells so the brain monitors the cell and the Brain notices what the cell's metabolism is if the cell has a good metabolism the brain says fine everything's good but if the brain says you know what the metabolism on the cell is starting to get a little bit low then the brain goes into the following it gland and that message is a hormone called TSH T TSH stands for thyroid stimulating hormone so it's not actually a thyroid hormone uh but what it does is it stimulates the thyroid to make hormones so now the thyroid when it gets exposed to this th TSH now is going to make a hormones so it's going to make a hormone called T3 and it's going to make a hormone called T4 now the difference between T3 and T4 is they're the same hormone except T3 has three iodine molecules atoms on it and T4 has four iodine atoms on it so other than that the the same the thyroid what it does is it makes roughly about 85% T4 and about 15% T3 so it doesn't make much T3 it makes mostly T4 now T3 is the active form of the hormone T3 is what actually goes down to the cell and stimulates the metabolism T3 tells the cells to speed up so when the brain finds out that the metabolism is going low in your cells it signals the thyroid to make these hormones the thyroid makes a little T3 and that little T3 activates the St the cells to increase the metabolism now you might ask well why is it making T4 then what's that all about inactive it means it doesn't do anything it's unable to stimulate the cell but what T4 can do is it can get converted to T3 on an as needed basis so basically T4 serves as kind of a reservoir of hormones that are inactive but they can be activated at any moment depending on whether your body needs it so let me give you an example let's say I'm lifting weights and I'm and I'm lifting weights with my right arm the cells of my right arm need to have a much more rapid metabolism than the cells of my left arm don't they uh so how is the body going to do that it can't do that by the thyroid because that's going to treat the cells in the whole body it has to have a way of just treating the cells with more thyroid in this right arm and this is how they do it all my T4 in the right arm will be converted to T3 and that's one of the ways that it can regulate that so T4 gets converted to T3 on an as needed basis the thyroid in its whe wisdom makes only about 15% T3 that's sort of enough T3 to generally keep you awake and alive and things functioning you know you need T3 even when you're sleeping right you have a certain amount of metabolism when you're sleeping even though it's much lower uh so you make sort of the thyroid makes just enough T3 to kind of think keep things going and then when you have a more need for T3 say if you're fighting an infection or you're or you're uh exercising or you're you know heavily involved in thinking or whatever you're busy doing and you need a higher metabolism on an as-needed basis your body can convert T4 to T3 if in general your body needs more it can also convert it in the liver so I told you before that the liver was a master player in hormone regulation and it is it's in the liver predominantly that T4 gets converted to T3 however and here's something that a lot of people don't understand T4 can rt3 R stands for reverse so what rt3 is it's a molecular form of T3 that's just slightly backwards okay now the problem with rt3 is it's inactive it doesn't do anything it can't stimulate the cells to increase metabolism but since it's molecularly same as T3 it can interact with the receptor sites on the cell so it can go into these receptor sites that should be activated by T3 and it can attach on to them when the rt3 attaches to the receptor sites on the cell that means that real T3 the active form of T3 can't so rt3 has a negative effect on metabolism the more rt3 you have the more uh that you block your real T3 from working and you can't get a metabolic Improvement now here's why this is important so many doctors look at this complex situation here and diagnose whether or not the patient needs thyroid based upon this well you know anybody can look at this and say well that is just that's kind of ridiculous that's looking at a very complex system and only checking one single regulatory aspect of it what if the thyroid is making plenty of T3 and T4 but you can't convert here what if the thyroids making plenty of T3 and T4 but you're making too much R T3 this completely ignores this point so what you need to do from a blood test if you really want to know what's going on with the thyroid you got to get TSH T3 T4 and rt3 if you get all four of those n at least you have some idea of what's going on down here at the cellular level but here's the bummer you don't you don't even know then you don't even know then you could get all of these and they all fall within the normal range and the patient is still hypothyroid so what how do you determine if the patient really needs thyroid you look directly at the metabolism you look directly down here you measure the metabolism directly this is something very few doctors do I've been measuring metabolisms directly for almost 15 years now and I can tell you from doing that that many times almost all the time that the that the cell has hypom metabolism or low metabolism almost all the time the TSH is normal I would say 95% of the time so TSH in my opinion misses the diagnosis 95% of the time the other thing is almost all the rest of the tests are normal say 60 70% of the time so these tests are not a good way to diagnose whether you really need thyroid the way to diagnose this is with getting a basal metabolic rate now you can measure this again most doctors don't do it but there are ways to measure basal metabolic rate we use a a technique called indirect calorimetry if you read any of my books I have two books out uh bursting with energy and the type 2 diabetes breakthrough you read any of those books and you'll learn about bioenergy testing which is how the testing system that scientifically can determine what your metabolism is if you also go to the other section on this website and click on the button that says bioenergy energy testing you learn more about it too and I have like a lot of videos out on this so you can click any of those videos but they will describe how bio energy testing will directly tell you how your metabolism is working now that's important because without that you're probably going to have the diagnosis missed you're probably going to have all the symptoms of low thyroid and you're probably going to go see your doctor and they're probably going to tell you you don't need thyroid when you really do now there's another reason to know this scenario because there's two way to give thyroid once you've determined you need thyroid most doctors the way I was taught in medical school is just give T4 examples of the medication T4 the thyroid hormone T4 would be Synthroid a Leo thyroxin and uh there's another one but I can't think of it right now but uh Synthroid is the most common it's also called Leo thyroxin and uh that is simply T4 so most doctors will give T4 and the reasoning is good the reasoning is you know what why give T3 it's active maybe the patient doesn't need T3 let's just give them T4 and then when they need T3 they can always make it from the T4 well that makes sense doesn't it and that's why doctors give T4 here's the problem very many patients they don't convert well from T4 to T3 they just don't I don't really know why but they don't convert well you can give them T4 all day long they just don't make T3 out of it but it gets worse a lot of these patients not only don't make make T3 out of their T4 they're getting they turn it into rt3 so not only are they deficient in T3 now they're getting too much rt3 and that rt3 is ruining the little T3 they have left and actually these people feel little if no response at all from Synthroid or levothyroxin how are you going to know what you know is if if I see a patient and they're on Synthroid or levo thyroxin I test all four of these things of course I also test their metabolism if their metabolism is low which it almost always is uh and especially if there are T3 is high and their T3 is low relative to T4 I know they're on the wrong medication so we switch them over to something called desicated thyroid examples of desiccated thyroid would be nature throid or west throid uh or Armor Thyroid armor thyroid and woid consists of combinations of T3 and T4 and they tend to solve the problem a lot better than Synthroid uh sometimes that doesn't even work and sometimes we need to have specially made combination thyroids that are custom made for each patient which really accentuate T3 because if we give you T3 you can't make our T3 and that causes the whole system to work really well so it's not just about diagnosing it's also about learning exactly what preparation of thyroid to give but once you get that nailed down you get your adrenal activity nailed down you get your thyroid activity nailed down you are well on your way to becoming healthy and I hope the information from this lecture has helped you in that regard so