In the blog post in November, I promised that I would post the nutrition needed by your thyroid to help it work properly and convert that Thyroxine you may be taking into T3, the active hormone, triiodothyronine.

Patients, if they are 'lucky' enough to have a TSH reading of over 4, will be given prescriptions for T4 or Thyroxine, on the often wrong assumption that your body knows what to do with it!

The thyroid gland needs nourishing, every day, just like putting moisturiser on your face to stop it wrinkling, and yet it is a much neglected organ.

These are the supplements your thyroid primarily needs to function at optimal levels: iodine (unless you have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is an autoimmune disease), selenium, B6, B12 as methylcobalamin as it is more easily absorbable, L-Tyrosine, zinc & copper (which balance each other), and folate, not folic acid, either as folinic acid or raw kale or raw spinach.

It is also possible to buy bovine, non-hormone, thyroid glandular supplements which also support the thyroid.

I started taking a supplement called NOW Thyroid Energy in April of this year with no great expectations, as no thyroid supplement had made a noticeable difference for me before.  

I actually started to feel like I COULD be bothered to do things whereas, in spite of getting rid of candida, cleaning out gluten and other intolerances from my diet, getting rid of parasites, and using myself as a guinea pig to try all kinds of supplements to give myself some oomph, I still felt a little 'tired all the time'.

I always have far more faith in a product if I notice a difference myself and started recommending it to my patients, who would come back and ask for more as they felt better on it.  Some, who had been on Thyroxine for over twenty years noticed a difference after only ten days!

I have now added Nutri's Thyroid to my regimen, which is a bovine glandular, and have improved further still.

I have had three thyroid tests over the past ten years, two at my doctor's practive and one paid for privately, and they all came back 'normal'.  I have always had my doubts, but when taking a supplement designed to help my thyroid gland work properly, I start to have more energy, I am even more convinced that my thyroid has been struggling for years.

There is no point in having another TSH test because I am so much better than I was that I have no doubt I would be 'normal' again if they did find a high TSH level, the doctors would only give my Thyroxine, without the T3 triiodothyronine active hormone, and it wouldn't make any difference.

I hope this information might help someone out there manage their thyroid symptoms.

... at 4.30am when you can't get back to sleep. 

Why I should start thinking about the NHS at that time I don't know, but while we are lucky to have it, something has to change and I don't mean the way it is funded.  It needs to change its approach to utilising the billions which are poured into it.

The NHS is excellent in emergencies but falls down on chronic care, by which I mean the every day stuff of being 'tired all the time' and digestive problems.  The resistance of doctors to a different approach is both disappointing, exasperating and very expensive for the NHS as it is just providing Band Aids for the symptoms of health problems and not getting down to the nitty gritty of what is causing these problems.

People come to see me when they have run out of patience with their doctors and their attitudes.  I think the way doctors are trained has to change, they seem to be trained to write prescriptions or pass the patient onto an expert further up the chain, not play detective and work out what is causing the problem.

I have always assumed that doctors went through seven years of training and exhausting hours because they want to help their patients get better.  When those patients fail to improve, I wonder why they don't consider looking for the root cause of the many problems they are presented with.

I was never given vitamin and mineral deficiency tests when I was suffering from chronic fatigue, I was just told that I had young children and it was pretty much inevitable.  The number of prescriptions for antibiotics I was given from being a toddler was never taken into consideration.  Parasites aren't considered unless a person  has been on an exotic holiday but they can exist in our domestic water supply.  Our water is very chlorinated at the moment and I wonder what Northumbria Water are trying to kill off.

Diet, apart from wrongly telling us to cut out saturated fat for the past 40 years or so, and eat 'heart healthy grains', of which there is no such thing, is NEVER taken into account.

I always say to my patients that we would never deliberately put diesel into a petrol car, but we do the equivalent to our bodies every day of our lives, with our doctors' blessing!

Tell people to give up gluten and they wonder what they can eat because the larger part of most people's diets are based around baked wheat products.  You know the sort of thing, bread, pastry, cake, pizza (how I miss pizza), pasta and all those breaded coatings on chicken or fish.

Suggesting meat & fish, of which there are many varieties, both expensive and cheap, vegetables and fruit often elicits groans.

Why are dieticians, in the face of abundant information in books and on the internet, still saying that people shouldn't remove a whole food group (grains) from their diet because they won't get enough B vitamins? 

The original allergy elimination technique that I used demanded that patients should avoid the offending substance for the following 23 hours.  When we got to B vitamins, the only foods available which DIDN'T contain B vitamins were tapioca made with water (yuk) and something American called either Miracle Whip or Cool Whip, I can't remember!  Nearly all fresh foods and some processed foods contain some B vitamins and there are a lot of supplements on the market to make up the shortfall.

So these are just two things which doctors can do, to help with 'tired all the time' patients and IBS patients, is to suggest they take probiotics after antibiotics and remove gluten and lactose (I explain this elsewhere on my website) from the diet.  

Not too difficult to suggest and try, and would reduce the number of patients seeking help with these conditions, which in turn reduce the numbers seeking help every week.

Yes, it is here again like a bad penny.  Why there should be more viruses about when the weather gets colder I don't know but that is the way it seems to work.

Maybe it is being cooped up in offices, classrooms, buses and trains but the bugs just keep flying around at this time of year.

A few years ago, in this very month of November, I started a part time job in Newcastle city centre, which necessitated journeys on the Metro system alongside the sneezing, coughing & snuffling folks in the area.

A few weeks later I went down with a stinking cold and actually had to go home from work, I was that ill. Shortly after that I read about a supplement called Beta Glucan - 1,3/1,6-D, which I promptly started taking.  

I can honestly say I never had another bad cold in the year or so I travelled on the Metro or after that.  I still take it every winter and now stop sniffles before they get started by doubling my dose temporarily.

I tell a lot of people about Beta Glucan because it works at building your immune system, so it can fight off the bugs we come into contact with every day!

Wishing you a healthy winter! 

Listening to QVC's beauty channel, in the way that men have sports on in the background, I have noticed a general acceptance that the outer 'tail' of a woman's eyebrows will disappear over time and there are many products for drawing them back in!

This could be as a result of overplucking in their youth but it also a little known symptom of under active thyroid as well as general hair loss.  Symptoms of hypothyroid are many and varied and I have borrowed this list from a very helpful website called www.stopthethyroidmadness.com

"Also, some patients have some symptoms; other patients may have others. Some are more common for a majority; others are not.

• Less stamina than others
• Less energy than others
• Long recovery period after any activity
• Inability to hold children for very long
• Arms feeling like dead weights after activity
• Chronic Low Grade Depression
• Suicidal Thoughts
• Often feeling cold
• Cold hands and feet
• High or rising cholesterol
• Heart disease
• Palpitations
• Fibrillations
• Plaque buildup
• Bizarre and Debilitating reaction to exercise
• Hard stools
• Constipation
• Candida
• No eyebrows or thinning outer eyebrows
• Dry Hair
• Hair Loss
• White hairs growing in
• No hair growth, breaks faster than it grows
• Dry cracking skin
• Nodding off easily
• Requires naps in the afternoon
• Sleep Apnea (which can also be associated with low cortisol)
• Air Hunger (feeling like you can’t get enough air)
• Inability to concentrate or read long periods of time
• Forgetfulness
• Foggy thinking
• Inability to lose weight
• Always gaining weight
• Weight loss (a small minority experience this)
• Inability to function in a relationship with anyone
• NO sex drive
• Failure to ovulate and/or constant bleeding (see Rainbow’s story)
• Moody periods
• PMS
• Inability to get pregnant; miscarriages
• Excruciating pain during period
• Nausea
• Swelling/edema/puffiness
• Aching bones/muscles
• Osteoporosis
• Bumps on legs
• Acne on face and in hair
• Breakout on chest and arms
• Hives
• Exhaustion in every dimension–physical, mental, spiritual, emotional
• Inability to work full-time
• Inability to stand on feet for long periods
• Complete lack of motivation
• Slowing to a snail’s pace when walking up slight grade
• Extremely crabby, irritable, intolerant of others
• Handwriting nearly illegible
• Internal itching of ears
• Broken/peeling fingernails
• Dry skin or snake skin
• Major anxiety/worry
• Ringing in ears
• Lactose Intolerance
• Inability to eat in the mornings
• Joint pain
• Carpal tunnel symptoms
• No Appetite
• Fluid retention to the point of Congestive Heart Failure
• Swollen legs that prevented walking
• Blood Pressure problems
• Varicose Veins
• Dizziness from fluid on the inner ear
• Low body temperature
• Raised temperature
• Tightness in throat; sore throat
• Swollen lymph glands
• Allergies (which can also be a result of low cortisol–common with hypothyroid patients)
• Headaches and Migraines
• Sore feet (plantar fascitis); painful soles of feet
• Tailbone pain
• now how do I put this one politely….a cold bum, butt, derriere, fanny, gluteus maximus, haunches, hindquarters, posterior, rear, and/or cheeks. Yup, really exists.
• colitis
• irritable bowel syndrome
• painful bladder
• Extreme hunger, especially at nighttime
• Dysphagia (nerve damage causing inability to swallow fluid, food, saliva; can also be caused by a goiter or anxiety)"

Losing the 'tail' of our eyebrows can be just the tip of the iceberg but the more people who recognise this symptom the better.

Getting diagnosed is the next hurdle as doctors in both the UK and the US are trained to test and treat by the TSH test (Thyroid stimulating hormone).  

If you fall within their very wide band of 'normal', between 0.4 and 4, you will get no treatment at all.  If you test as beyond the magical number 4 they will give you Thyroxine or T4, which sounds fine, you have a prescription which will make you better or will it?

Thyroxine or T4 is a storage hormone not an active one.  There is a supposition within the medical community that the body will automatically convert T4 to the active form T3 or triiodothyronine, but bodies don't always do what we want them to do, so many patients continue to suffer.

There are various vitamins and minerals which can help the body convert the T4 to T3 and I will cover this in my next blog.

There is currently an advert on LBC radio wisely advising the nation to cut its sugar intake.  It is easy, says the helpful voiceover, just swap sweets for fruits and swap sweet fizzy drinks for 'sugar free' drinks, blithely missing the point that 'sugar free' drinks aren't remotely healthy.
But good health doesn't seem to be understood by those sharing this dangerous  advice.  
Good health comes from eating foods with a natural and recognisable origin, generally if it comes from a factory don't eat it.
Sugar free drinks and foods are usually sweetened by aspartame, a highly dangerous sweetener which has been inflicted on the populations of the world without a care for the damage to health it can cause.
I am attaching a YouTube video which explains it all so well, enjoy ...

While watching an episode of Friday Night Lights I learned about a foodstuff I had never heard of before.  Probably because I am not and never will be a vegetarian! 

Who knew there was something called Seitan which apparently is 'wheat meat' but has never been near an animal.  This wheat meat seems to be pure gluten.

Knowing the digestive problems gluten can cause in small quantities, it seems highly irresponsible to me producing a food which consists purely of something which can make some people double up in pain.

So if you are one of we unlucky gluten sensitive souls, please decline Seitan if you are ever offered it!  It sounds truly the work of Satan!