Can Hashimoto's Cause Anxiety? - Dr. Martin Rutherford

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"Can Hashimoto's cause anxiety?" Oh, yeah. Hashimoto's and anxiety are like this.

It's my position, I practice functional neurology. I've been in functional medicine practically from the beginning of functional medicine. That, anxiety is not a mental disorder. Now everybody's talking about the HPA axis and the over-firing of the amygdala. That's great. We've been talking about it for 30 years or whatever it is in the functional neurology world. Basically, anxiety is a fear response. It's actually a survival response.

Without crossing philosophical or spiritual or religious lines or something, there was a point in time where we know that cavemen, for example, were out there in the wild and this was their brain stem, reptile brain, original brain, brainstem response was they saw something that was a bear, they had to run from it. This is the response that developed in the fear center of your brain. It's called the fight-flight syndrome. You're very familiar with it, I'm sure. You're either going to fight or you're going to flee. It's a survival mechanism. It's not designed to be engaged 24 hours a day. It's designed to only be engaged occasionally. But anxiety, there's a lot of things that bring our threshold down, especially in this society, down to where that threshold is so low for us to set it off. A lot of it's physiological, some of it's lifestyle. It's just a lot hitting our brains very consistently or hitting our physiology very consistently that brings it down.

That's the setup. When I refer to physiology that can affect your brain and cause anxiety, Hashimoto's is right up there. Blood sugar's a big one, probably bigger. But, if somebody tells me they have anxiety, my brain's like, "Check your thyroid." "Oh no, no, I don't have a thyroid problem." Like, "Check your frigging thyroid, will you?" Because, I rarely... Now, I have a unique patient population granted, but I rarely have someone who come in here who doesn't have anxiety. I treat chronic pain. I treat chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, chronic gut problems. That's what I treat.

At least 70 to 75% of those patients have autoimmune thyroid disease. And, they all have anxiety. So, I'm not saying it's the only thing that causes it, but here's what happens. Thyroid has what's called receptor sites in every single cell in your body, everyone, trillions of cells. It's the only thing... Well, it's not the only one, but it's the most sensitive one that has all these receptor sites in every single cell in your body.

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Martin P. Rutherford, DC
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