The Cure For Hashimoto’s?

There’s a lot of negativity on the web and I do my best not to participate….but if I see one more tweet, blog, popup or web banner offering the cure for Hashimoto’s I’m going to scream.

You can’t cure Hashimoto’s, but you can most certainly learn to manage it much better, optimize your thyroid, modulate your immune system and feel way, way BETTER than you do now….and lose fat.

Offering up a cure is great marketing as any woman living with this condition would love to be done with it! These claims enrage me as they prey on women who are feeling vulnerable and fed up as they try to manage this very frustrating condition.

Frustration doesn’t hardy cover it does it? With Hashimoto’s you feel tired, puffy, fat, achy and have a host of vague, not life-threatening, but seriously life-hindering symptoms like brain fog.

This cloudy, cobweb littered brain makes it hard to finish a sentence, to remember why you walked in to that room (what do I need in here again??) and has made you miss an appointment or two – most of my patients have forgotten to pick up their kids…on more than one occasion. You don’t feel like yourself, you just want to feel at home in your body again. If you’ve missed an appointment or a pick up, you also feel like a bad mom.

And you wonder for all your efforts why in the hell you can’t drop a pound or two???

And you’re doing your best, you’re on the internet looking for solutions because your doc doesn’t have much beyond Synthroid – which is fine, but not enough is it?

So you scour the internet and find some good, but also a whole lot of bad info. So when you come across a practitioner’s site promising to cure your “incurable thyroid condition” – well, of course you read that pitch! You’re human…and you feel like crap.

Autoimmune hypothyroidism aka Hashimoto’s

I wish I had better news, but here’s the deal: you can’t cure autoimmunity or autoimmune hypothyroidism (aka Hashimoto’s).

You can lower your antibodies, improve your thyroid labs, you can feel better and you absolutely can lose weight. But lower antibodies or a normalizing of your thyroid numbers does not mean your Hahsimoto’s is cured.

(NOTE: lowered antibodies means very little actually. The antibodies bounce all over the place. Because the immune system is not static, it is constantly reacting to things, thus the attack on the thyroid is not static either.  Antibodies rise and fall and this has little bearing on how you feel or how “sick” you are. Someone with antibodies of 100 is not necessarily better off than someone with levels at 1000.So when a treatment is viewed as a success because antibodies are lower, hum….not necessarily true.)

Autoimmunity (Hashimoto’s, Celiac, Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and many others) has a genetic predisposition, meaning you came into this life with a loaded gun. This genetic inheritance doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily develop autoimmune disease, but it means you have the potential to.

From here, there are a host of triggers that can fire this loaded gun and trip your system, giving you autoimmunity. Triggers include gluten and GMOs, leaky gut and food sensitivities, chronic infections (i.e. EBV, herpes viruses, long standing gut infections, etc.), vitamin D deficiency, heavy metals and excess estrogen and estrogen swings (puberty, pregnancy, peri-menopause, estrogen medications such as the pill).

Even at this, it won’t turn on in everyone that has a genetic predisposition. However, many of you endure multiple triggers in your lifetime, increasing the odds.

Autoimmunity is at an all-time high right now. 1 in 8 women have Hashimoto’s in the US alone because our environment is rife with triggers.

Once it’s tripped, it’s on and we can’t go back un-trip the switch or “cure” it.

Does this mean you’re doomed? Not at all! There’s a ton you can do to keep that immune fire down to a smolder from a roaring flame and this not only protects your thyroid from further attack if you have Hashimoto’s, but it also helps you prevent or delay other autoimmune disease and delay the need for thyroid medication or keep your dose lower.

This in includes normalizing vitamin D, treating any overt or pre-anemias, dealing with chronic infections, healing the gut, balancing blood sugar and a few more. In short, there’s a lot you can do to calm the immune attack on poor little thyroid gland. So there’s more than a bit of hope, but to me the danger in offering up a “cure” is that if someone thinks their autoimmunity is cured, gone, fineto then why not enjoy life again?

Get back on gluten, forget to take your supplements and maybe hop on the birth control pill, cuz “I don’t have it anymore, yahhhh!”

In my practice I’m not offering a cure. I’m offering hope. I’m teaching women how this condition works and the many areas of control and power they actually have. I help them understand this is a lifelong issue not because I want to squash their spirits, but because I want to protect them from a future of more and worse autoimmunity.

And the women I work with are losing fat, having better energy, way fewer bad days, thinking more clearly and feel in control of their bodies again. They’re coming home. They’re done fighting with themselves and feeling like their body is betraying them. And together, we’re fighting the good fight…and we’re winning by the way, even without a “cure”.

If you have Hashimoto’s and are tired of going it alone, well Molly Galbraith and I have something very special for you. To learn more click here and take this journey with us.

If you have Hashimoto’s don’t give up, learning to manage the many aspects of your immune system that are out of whack is possible and will give you back immense control over this frustrating condition. And knowing how to manage your immune system will help you slow damage to your thyroid and protect other tissues, thus other autoimmune issues.

Don’t give up! Want to understand this condition better? Stay tuned, more blogs on Hashimoto’s coming in the next week or two.

SaveSave