Hashimoto's Natural Treatment - Synthetic Or Bio-Identical Replacement Hormone?

"Your TSH is normal now, your depression, weight gain, hair loss... [insert low thyroid symptom], can't be coming from your thyroid. We need to give you an antidepressant, you're just depressed."

This is a common conversation that plays out between hypothyroid patients and their healthcare practitioner. It is the defining moment that prompts low thyroid patients to seek alternative treatment methods and begin exploring different forms of thyroid replacement hormone.

So What Type Of Hormone Is Best For Low Thyroid Patients?

This question is highly debated amongst practitioners of all types. Most traditional medical endocrinologists prefer synthetic T4 that goes by various names and brands with the most common being Synthroid簧. Many doctors that live on the alternative side of the spectrum prefer bio-identical hormones such as Armour, Naturethroid, or Thyrolar.

So which one is correct? I know you may really want me to tell you that one of those is THE correct one, but the truth is that different patients do better with any one of those. Things such as sensitivity to fillers and your body's ability to convert your thyroid hormones play a role.

Instead going round and round about the TYPE of thyroid replacement, let's ask a better question:

Why Did The Thyroid Gland Stop Working In The First Place?

If we answer this question then we can start to move closer to an actual plan that is going to help you. The answer for 80% to 90% of low thyroid patients in the United States is that their problem stems from an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto's Autoimmune Thyroid.

What does that mean? It means that the low thyroid is a symptom, not the source of the problem. In Hashimoto's disease the immune system goes chaos and begins attacking and killing your own thyroid gland. This results in loss of cells from the gland, and less overall output of hormone.

That also means that the focus clinically should be on modulating the immune system, and slowing the rate of destruction. The immune attack creates two parallel problems which stops the Hashimoto's patient from really feeling like their old self, even with thyroid hormone replacement.

First is the fact that the immune system is constantly attacking the cells of the gland resulting in less and less thyroid hormone being produced naturally. Secondly the immune protein interaction with thyroid cell receptors will block normal hormone binding interactions and the patient will suffer with all of the same thyroid symptoms, even though the TSH and the rest of the lab panel may read in the "normal range."

The difficult thing for patients is that most doctors don't factor in the immune systems role in their condition, and even if they acknowledge and test for it, they don't alter treatment protocols. On the other end many natural doctors, even those that deal with thyroid patients, use generic "immune support" that in a lot of cases makes the immune imbalance worse. The patient has to find a doctor that looks specifically at the immune system and factors in the other body systems that play a role, if a Hashimoto's patient wants to really feel and function well again.