How is Hashimoto's Diagnosed? - Dr. Martin Rutherford

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The subject today is how Hashimoto's disease is being diagnosed and that's so basic to what I do every day for a living and yet when I heard this question, a million things went through my mind and here's why. Hashimoto's is a complex syndrome. It's complex for so many reasons. One reason is you can have silent Hashimoto's and not even though you have it, meaning that your immune system has started to attack your thyroid, but you're not really getting any symptoms so nobody's looking for it. Or maybe you're getting some mild symptoms, but you would never put it together so nobody's looking for it. Then you start getting symptoms and maybe they look for it and maybe they don't.

Maybe they go like you got all these symptoms and now we have a joke in the functional medicine field, you go to the doctor for Hashimoto's and they send you to counseling for your depression, anxiety, and they send you to the GI guy for your gut problems and they send you to the endocrinologist for your hormone problems and there's like nine spikes on this little diagram that we use when it's Hashimoto's, when the problem is Hashimoto's. So that creates a layer of difficulty for the patient to get diagnosed properly.

Once you get to that active stage, eventually today, more and more often, the doctors are figuring out that maybe a thyroid's involved. The next difficulty is a lot of them still don't run the antibodies for two reasons, one, some still don't get the Hashimoto's is the cause of at least 90% of thyroid problems and the second one is the medical profession is starting to figure out, "No, don't start throwing things at me or anything like this." This is just, I see this every day, the medical profession is still figuring out they don't know what to do with Hashimoto's, because they don't treat it as what it is. It's primarily an autoimmune problem first.

The next problem is the difficulty of diagnosing an autoimmune problem, because in the medical world, they're going to wait until you have positive antibodies come up and there's positive signs of tissue destruction somewhere, by that time, you've probably had the problem for 10 or 15 or 20 years, you've been exhibiting symptoms of it, but unlike the old days, when I learned how to diagnose, symptoms aren't enough. And I can conjecture as to why that is, but I'm not going to get into that. So, now you're in phase two and you have all these symptoms, you go, they either test you and find out your thyroid stimulating hormone markers are off. So classically, they're going to do a TSH, T3 and a free... And well, they don't even do free T3 most of the time and a T3, T4 and T3.

That's not going to tell you very much. It might tell you if you have hypothyroidism, which is the first signs of Hashimoto. So then they give you the medication, you feel better, you feel worse, you feel better just for a little period of time.

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Martin P. Rutherford, DC
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