Understanding Hypothyroid Conditions, Part 3
One of the ways that naturopathic medicine can have a success with hypothyroid cases is because naturopathic physicians look at all the potential reasons why hormones may not be working in the body.
Once we identify the underlying cause of the problem and make correction the body does what it can do best heal itself. Last time we talked about Hashimoto’s thyroiditis which is one form of hypothyroidism but there are others including euthyroidism which is a form of underactive thyroid hormone. The difficulty with euthyroidism is a thyroid disease where the blood test values come back normal however the patient is still experience symptoms.
Let’s look at some other factors that might be affecting your ability to have normal thyroid hormone function in your body. You get your blood tests back and you either have normal TSH values or high TSH values you could have hypothyroid problems. What is happening in the body is the TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) hormone is traveling to the thyroid gland and stimulating the thyroid to release the thyroid hormone. The thyroid hormone is released from the thyroid gland in an active form (T3) triiodothyronine and an inactive form (T4) thyroxine.
The thyroid gland releases 7% of the active thyroid hormone T3 which can then travels directly to the tissue to act to regulate metabolism or other thyroid functions for the tissue. The thyroid gland releases 94% of the inactive hormone form of the thyroid gland, T4. T4 has no ability to act on any of the body tissues. It has to travel to the liver to get converted to active form. An enzyme in the liver, 5’ deiodinase, converts 40% of T4 to active T3 and the rest is converted to an inactive form of T3. This inactive T3 then travels to the gastrointestinal tract and is acted on by intestinal sulfatase to become active.
I share the pathway with you to let you know that if you have problems with your liver, intestine, or the enzymes in the liver or intestine then it increases the probability that your thyroid function is being affected by these other organs.
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