Podcast 24 – Hashimoto’s Disease
Transcription
Dr. Chad Edwards: This is Dr. Chad Edwards and you are listening to podcast 24 up against the grain. Are you tired and fatigued? Are you frustrated with doctors because they just don’t seem to listen? Do you want to fix your pain without surgery? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then we are the clinic for you.
We offer Tulsa prolotherapy, PLP or Play Post Plasma therapy and stem cell injections. I.V. nutritional therapies, bio-identical hormone replacement therapy and functional medicine to get you back on track to optimal health. Call our clinic at 9189353636, or visit our website at www.revolutionhealth.org, to schedule your appointment today.
Announcer: Welcome to against the grain podcast, with Dr. Chad Edwards where he challenges the status quo when it comes to medicine. We get into hot topics in the medical field with real stories from real patients to help you on your way to a healthy lifestyle. Get ready because we’re about to go against the grain. Tulsa prolotherapy
Brian Wilson: Hope everybody’s having a great day. I’m Brian Wilson, I am joined by the Dr. Chad Edwards who believes that 80% of the medical recommendations are crap. Technically speaking, he is the author of Revolutionize Your Health with customized supplements. Tulsa prolotherapy
He served in the U.S. Army for 23 years as both an enlisted soldier and as an officer and as a physician. He graduated from medical school at Oklahoma State University, is the founder of revolutionhealth.org and this very podcast Against the Grain podcast. How are you doing today Dr. Chad Edwards? Tulsa prolotherapy
Dr. Chad: I am doing amazing.
Brian: It’s great. We’ve had a good time today.
Dr. Chad: Yes. Absolutely.
Brian: Hey, it’s Easter. Easter is coming. This is actually Good Friday.
Dr. Chad: It is.
Brian: I’m headed to an Easter egg hunt in a little while.
Dr. Chad: I would consider almost every Friday Good Friday, but this is like the Good Friday.
Brian: That’s how you doctors really say. You know how they say, “Doctors and bankers, every day’s a Good Friday.” Every day’s Friday for you guys, right? Tulsa prolotherapy
Dr. Chad: No.
Brian: Is it easy being a doctor?
Dr. Chad: Because sometimes you’re like, “I’m on call this weekend.”
Brian: Really?
Dr. Chad: Argh!
Brian: I feel like the shows like The Doctors shows on T.V. have really messed up the whole profession of being a doctor because it seems like you guys just drive really nice cars, and you go to islands and every now and then you come in, and your hair is perfect and everything’s going right in your life. That’s not the real life of a doctor? Tulsa prolotherapy
Dr. Chad: Well, not when you own your own clinic. [Laughs] I’ll tell you. There are certain specialties that will go nameless that it is ridiculous how much money they make, ridiculous.
Brian: Yes, I know you want to remain nameless but I always heard spine surgeons make an insane amount of money. I assume they do because it’s — Again, what do I know, but if you hit the wrong part of the spine, I think that’s bad. And there’s only a few people that can do that. You’re pretty talented guys right? What’s the highest paid doctor? Let me ask you that. What’s the category of the highest paid doctor? Tulsa prolotherapy
Dr. Chad: You’re talking about by profession — By specialty.
Brian: By specialty.
Dr. Chad: Orthopedics is way up there. Anesthesia is way up there.
Brian: Really?
Dr. Chad: Yes. Neurosurgery is probably way up there. I’m not the expert on this so don’t quote me on this. I’m going by it just from the hip. Tulsa prolotherapy
Brian: What’s interesting about is you is you’re really not a money guy. There’s nothing in your — I’ve known you for a long time and there’s nothing in your DNA — I’ve never heard you talk about medicine and money in the same sentence. Almost it’s like you got into this for a whole another reason.
Dr. Chad: This is a total side note, but I think it’s worth saying. I had a patient that came to me the other day that went to another testosterone clinic in town. They wanted him to sign a three-month contract, for a total of just under $1,000. They hadn’t even checked the lab. They didn’t know — He was complaining about these things.
These are not my words. He was frustrated that in fact he told me he’s like, “They didn’t even check my lab, how do you know that I have low testosterone and you want me to sign a three-month contract for almost a $1,000?” He was very concerned. In our clinic, we charge for the office visit. If you don’t have insurance then you really have to pay cash for labs.
The way we do our labs and they’re marked up a little bit just to cover our time, our resources, the nurses and those kinds of things, so we’re not losing money by paying stuff to be able to do those things, but there’s another lab in Tulsa that’s charging $38 for a complete blood count.
In our clinic, I don’t remember exactly how much it is, it’s well less than $10. It’s like 7 bucks or $7.50 – $8 something like that. They’re charging like 35. They’re almost $30 more for the same lab just one, one lab.
Brian: We are on a tangent, aren’t we?
Dr. Chad: Yes, but the thing is, is this guy — It’s just, they were charging so much money for something that we’re going to charge less than a third of that.
Brian: Something that should be a really a last leader to get to the real problems.
Dr. Chad: Right. We charge what we think is appropriate, and we’ve got bills and the lights on. We charge what we think is appropriate. I’m committed to what we do, and the way we do it, and the prices that we charge. We’re going to do everything we can to not have to raise those prices in the future.
Brian: There’s a reason you have revolution in your name, right? [Laughs]
Dr. Chad: That’s exactly right. We want to revolutionize health care.
Brian: Speaking of another buzzword, you got revolution and you got Hashimoto. It’s a buzzword right?
Dr. Chad: You like that word.
Brian: Hashimoto, that’s our topic today. It’s cool.
Dr. Chad: Yes.
Brian: Today we’re going to talk about karate right? Is that what that means?
Dr. Chad: No.
Brian: Okay, I was– Kung fu.
Dr. Chad: No. It was named after a Japanese guy.
Brian: It’s a disease?
Dr. Chad: It is.
Brian: Interesting. It’s categorically Hashimoto’s a disease.
Dr. Chad: Yes, Hashimoto’s.
Brian: Hashimoto’s disease.
Dr. Chad: Yes.
Brian: Explain what it is. This is our topic today.
Dr. Chad: Yes. Basically, Hashimotos is an autoimmune disease where your body makes antibodies. In the last podcast we were talking about an autoimmune disease, a type one diabetes and what antibodies we look at. Going with that theme, we’re going to go with another autoimmune disease and we’re talking about Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. An autoimmune-
Brian: Did I say it wrong? Hashimoto.
Dr. Chad: No, well when you put in a little different emphasis on it-
Brian: Like a Tulsa twang.
Dr. Chad: You’d have to ask a Japanese person because they’re the ones — You really want to know?
Brian: Yes, yes. I got it.
Dr. Chad: In Oklahoma we would say, “Hashimotos.”
Brian: Yes. [Laughs]
Dr. Chad: Anyway.
Brian: It’s pretty good.
Dr. Chad: Autoimmune destruction of the thyroid gland. Over time it destroys the thyroid gland, could result in not having a thyroid gland because your immune system just attacked and killed it over time. Antibodies associate with that stuff and so often these patients will be tired and fatigued and all these kinds of things.
They’ll come into the clinic and we’ll check their labs, see the antibodies, see their thyroid levels and we can treat that. There’s a number of different things that we can do.
Brian: Is it mainly, and we talked about this before but when it comes to thyroid, is it may be mainly female base that has Hashimotos —
Dr. Chad: Almost. In my experience almost always, almost always. I actually wonder if there is an association between the use of oral contraceptives, or oral birth control pills and autoimmune disease.
Brian: Because there’s such an abundance and there should be no other reason, right?
Dr. Chad: Well you could speculate about a lot of other different reasons but I wonder. We see so many issues with oral contraceptives that I didn’t see when I was in my mainstream medical practice because they weren’t diagnosable. I couldn’t pick it up on my standard labs. I didn’t know how to read my labs but there are still some issues.
Brian: Is there any research to that effect or is that a gut —
Dr. Chad: Not that I’m aware of that’s a gut thing. If you listen to some of the other podcasts in the past, we’ve talked about girls or ladies that have come in with different hormone things implanted. We took those out and they felt amazing, and it kind of resolved their issues. It’s just one of those things. I just wonder is there an association between the use of synthetic hormones, not biological hormones but synthetic hormones and autoimmune disease.
Brian: Seems logical.
Dr. Chad: I don’t know but it’s interesting. Maybe you can design a test and —
Brian: Yes, an analytical test.
Dr. Chad: Yes.
Brian: I’ll get right on that.
Dr. Chad: Then we will be about money, and we’ll go and we’ll be doing this podcast in Grand Cayman.
Brian: Yes we are and getting paid for it because right now that isn’t happening.
[Laughter]
Brian: Which is fun but we like to hang out.
Dr. Chad: Yes we do. It’s good.
Brian: We like to hang out, we like to talk to people. Assume someone is listening. Right?
Dr. Chad: Can we waste more time not talking about the topic?
Brian: Absolutely.
Dr. Chad: Today.
Brian: We can try. It’s a goal. It’s a goal.
[Laughter]
Brian: Let’s actually go back to it though and talk to me about — You’ve already kind of discussed what symptomatically low energy these kind of things. You talked about low thyroid on the last podcast. What makes specifically this particular type of autoimmune disease different? Are there underlying, is it asymptomatic or they’re additional symptoms to this?
Dr. Chad: Well, I would I would argue that it depends on the spectrum where we’re picking this up, where we’re identifying it. We do thyroid screening on many of our patients and your thyroid function may be completely normal. Your TSH thyroid stimulating hormone may look normal or even optimal. T4T3 both important to look at, both of those could be– Maybe they’re not optimal, maybe they are.
Brian: Again, explain what T3T4 are because you’re one of the only two that talk about pervasively treating that.
Dr. Chad: Sure, certainly. We’ve done a whole podcast on thyroid in the past. You can go back and look, listen to that for more information. But basically those are the thyroid hormones are secreted from the thyroid gland they go to the cells and cause there.
Brian: They are the root cause.
Dr. Chad: They are the hormones that actually have the effect on the cells so that you feel like you thyroid is working.
Brian: When we come back I want to talk a little bit more about Hashimoto’s. I want you to talk a little bit more because all I know it is still Kung Fu. So when we come back from break let us talk a little bit more about it okay?
Dr. Chad: Cool.
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Brian: And we’re back with Dr. Chad Edwards and we’re talking about Kung Fu Hashimoto’s.
Dr. Chad: Not Kung Fu-
Brian: Not Kung Fu so no, okay.
Dr. Chad: And thyroid so you’ll get many of our patients will come in, they’ll have some I feel bad I feel fatigued, they have been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s in the past, and some of them think that once a day that she asked, we talked about her thyroid antibodies and she’s already on thyroid replacement.
So she’s on either Synthroid or Nature-Throid I don’t remember for her if we already transitioned over or not but — So we got this autoimmune disease it’s destroying the thyroid gland sometimes quickly sometimes slowly, but you’re on thyroid hormone replacement, so we’re giving you thyroid hormones.
You see these elevated antibody levels and some patients will ask, “What do I do about that, do we need to do anything about that, what I do?” And it gets into and we’ll be talking about this in the future podcasts, I think the next podcast we’ll talk a little bit about it specifically, but definitely much more in the future about how we would address autoimmune disease from a functional medicine perspective.
With these antibodies it’s like do I care about the antibodies or not? And I would argue that there’s two reasons that you should care. The first one is that it is an antibody that it’s the immune system attacking your thyroid gland and destroying it. So if that process happens aggressively enough long enough it will completely destroy your thyroid gland.
Brian: Seems important to know.
Dr. Chad: Did you care that your thyroid gland is completely destroyed?
Brian: It’s a good question what does it do for you right, kind of thing.
Dr. Chad: We can talk about thyroid function much more in another episode of the podcast, but I would argue that you care to try and keep you off of thyroid replacement, or to lower the dose of thyroid replacement that you would need. So that’s one reason that you care about those antibodies.
Because when we don’t want to destroy the thyroid gland it can do a better job of regulating it than we can buy thyroid replacement. The second reason that I care about these antibody levels are because, if you have an autoimmune disease your immune system is a little bit over responsive, there’s probably some gut dysfunction your physiology is not normal.
So it’s not that I care about the antibody itself, it’s like that I care about the underlying reason that that antibody is elevated. So we want to work on that underlying condition hopefully those antibodies decline. In fact the patient I saw today her antibodies initially were in the 1500s which is fairly elevated, and now she’s in the in the 400s, and so we’ve cut them down to a third of what they were before.
She’s actually feeling a little bit better. We had to change her thyroid medicine around to get her feeling optimal, and we will see how she does in the next couple of weeks. But most of these patients will feel very, very well with optimal thyroid management, you can look at our listen to our podcast in the past, it’s one of the early ones where we’re talking about how to manage the thyroid but it’s this autoimmune.
Brian: That is a good podcast by the way, go to revolutionhealth.org to listen to it.
Dr. Chad: Against the grain podcast.org sorry podcast.com or on ITunes.
Brian: We’re the worst.
Dr. Chad: I know.
Brian: We really are. Keep going there.
Dr. Chad: Revolutionhealth.org for clickable related stuff and then the podcast is on their site. Anyway but you can find the link to the podcast on the regular site, so we confuse people more?
Brian: No.
Dr. Chad: Okay good.
Brian: I think we got it.
Dr. Chad: There’s the autoimmune destruction of the thyroid gland and that’s what we want to focus on, and there’s a couple of antibodies that we check, anti-thyroglobulin and anti-thyroid peroxidase, just two anti-TPO, two big words for antibodies that are killing your thyroid gland.
And we want to be able to turn that stuff off or manage that, we don’t want to leave them where your antibodies are just through the roof, we want to be able to manage that. Those are some of the things that we do in revolution, we follow these antibodies, and we want to be able to turn off that autoimmune destruction and there are several things that we can do.
There’s medications that we can use. There are supplements that we can use, sometimes giving a little bit of iodine can turn that off, and that will have to be another podcast where we talk about that —
Brian: Are there any dietary things that people can do that have this disease?
Dr. Chad: Absolutely, and that’s a very nuanced question sometimes things like some of your green leafys and some of the things like broccoli can be what we call goitrogenic, again the topic of another podcast.,
Brian: What is it broccolis are good in short, broccoli is are good thing to eat if you have Hashimoto?
Dr. Chad: Well it can work against you, so again —
Brian: It’s confusing and customized.
Dr. Chad: It does and that’s why I recommend functional medicine clinic that will evaluate this, do you need to worry about what you’re eating those kinds of things. You’re checking those antibodies following them, developing a full comprehensive lifestyle management nutritional program, the big thing.
Brian: Exercising?
Dr. Chad: Well exercise is always important. I don’t know how that relates directly to the thyroid gland, the big thing and we’ll talk more about this, it would be the top specific topic of future podcast, but gut health and gut function is a huge one and there a lot of supplements that we can use as nutritional approaches. Lots of things we can do for that, and we often see those antibody levels decrease, and when we see that we’ll often see the thyroid function improve.
Brian: A lot of chatter around good health these days.
Dr. Chad: It’s a huge component with a lot of implications in obesity, diabetes, all kinds of gut problems, irritable bowel syndrome that is a gut health problem. There’s a lot of things that we can do for that. In fact one of the medicines that’s come out recently is or that they’re advertising recently is Xifaxan. It’s an antibiotic that doesn’t get absorbed into the body, so how is an antibiotic helping irritable bowel? Well probably because it’s killing off bad bacteria allowing you to stabilize or normalize the micro biota in your gut, so, quite interesting stuff.
Brian: I’m always curious, do you even watch TV or do you have any hobbies or just read books all day long? I’m just curious.
Dr. Chad: I have tons of hobbies. I don’t get to do them as much as I would like.
Brian: How do you know all this information outside of scale, a lot of this is unconventional medicine. This is you taking it upon yourself, I was hearing you talk earlier going to something in Dallas where you’re learning more about the skin, you seem like the kind of guy and you always have since college that you’re always learning.
Dr. Chad: Well my approach to understanding and knowledge in those kinds of things is when you can memorize things like through algorithms, and we have alluded to this in past episodes of this podcast.
Brian: You can be scientific or you can be artful.
Dr. Chad: You can surely be artful, you can be scientific but you can memorize things through an algorithm if this then do this. And I remember being motivated by that in the past and I wanted to know all those algorithms, but one of my mentors taught me to break that mold, understand the algorithm and then do it differently. It’s okay to do it differently but you have to know why you’re doing it differently.
Brian: Fundamentally.
Dr. Chad: So the algorithm is for those that don’t really understand why.
Brian: It was interesting when the whole word algorithmic is the true definition of algorithmic is by definition a way to solve a problem. It doesn’t have to be the way to solve a problem. I always think of algorithms with a baseline of computers. The problem with that is computers are dumb machines, they’re very good at looping.
Dr. Chad: Sometimes they’re really dumb.
Brian: They’re really dumb, like I always give the analogy of if you give a computer a peanut butter jar and bread and jelly and you tell the computer, I want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, there is limited information, it will stab the bread bag [laughs] stab the side of the peanut butter, because you have to be so literal with the computer, that it becomes almost inefficient, and you compare that to a human being.
I tell Marsha over there, and I have the roses I sent me to give me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You think we have some customer service over here but we don’t. That’s fine I’m not mad about it, but my point is, is that he puts together a really beautiful peanut butter and jelly sandwich based on deductive reasoning in this kind of awareness and general perception that is much more fluid.
So you really have to be careful I think to, as you said I agree with you to be so algorithmic that you take a natural flow out of something or a specific example and you are so literal that its defeating.
Dr. Chad: And they consider the biodiversity, every single patient is so completely different.
Brian: Exactly.
Dr. Chad: Based on their stress levels, their nutritional level, their genetics. Genetics factors and epigenetic factors make different people so completely individual there is no way —
Brian: Absolutely.
Dr. Chad: — to have one approach to all of their problems. We got to keep that in mind.
Brian: Okay we are way over time Marsha is dying over there. It was a great conversation today.we’ll pick up next time.
Dr. Chad: Sounds awesome thanks Ryan.
Brian: Thanks.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to this week’s podcast wit Dr Chad Edwards. Tune in next week where we’ll be going against the grain.
[00:20:50] [END OF AUDIO]
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