Note: The text below is a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
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Hashimoto’s and birth control pills. It could be Hashimoto’s sex hormone binding globulin and birth control pills, and you’ll see why in a second here. Okay. So birth control pills. I am a big non-fan of birth control pills. I get it. I get it, but birth control pills change a lot of things.
There are a variety of types, but there’s estrogen, there’s estrogen and progesterone. I don’t know if anybody’s even doing Premarin anymore. I haven’t seen that in quite a while, but anyway, so it’s the estrogen component that’s a big deal. When you’re taking exogenous estrogen, whether it’s in a birth control pill or not, whether it’s a cream, because you’re in menopause and somebody gives you… Somebody says, “Okay, you’re having all these symptoms, you’re in menopause. So I’m going to give you estrogen.” It’s the brain dead.Let’s not look at anything and give you estrogen type of thing.
There’s a lot of things going on there. Whether it’s synthetic, whether it’s natural, these types of things. How they’re read is very difficult, synthetic doesn’t really register in your brain. So you really can’t tell what the person’s estrogen is all about. So there’s just a lot of problems when you’re trying to deal with somebody who is on birth control or estrogen. Now having said that, I treat a lot of people on birth control and what happens is the birth control pill…
Estrogen builds. In other words, you get estrogen into your system or you make estrogen, even for the people who aren’t on birth control pills and are highly estrogenic, you have too much estrogen. Part of the reason is because it’s not getting cleared out of your system properly. You need to make the hormone. It needs to go into your cell. It needs to be used. What isn’t used needs to then go into the system and be cleared by your liver, gallbladder and your intestines. That’s a big deal because especially if you’re taking exogenous estrogen like birth control, you’re never going to get it dosed properly for that person. There’s always going to be building, there’s always going to be stored estrogen and stored estrogen is not good. Most women now, if you take too much estrogen, it can cause breast cancer and a variety of other different things.
So now thyroid. So thyroid, the way a thyroid works is… The way hormones work is they’re made, they go into your bloodstream and they have to hop on a protein. It’s called a globulin and it has to hop on a protein and attaches that pro… Then that protein takes it to where it needs to go. So the thyroid protein takes it to all the cells in the body, the estrogen takes it to all the cells in the body.
Well, here’s the problem. They kind of share the same protein. It’s called a thyroid hormone binding globulin but when that thyroid hormone goes to the… It’s on that globulin and then it goes to the cell to drop it off, there’s only so many places, there’s only so many seats on this taxi cab. There’s only so many places where the thyroid can have a seat, jump on there and then actually be taken to where it needs to be.
Here’s the problem. Estrogen also competes for those same receptor sites on that globulin and in the cells. So when you have too much estrogen in there, you’re going to get low what’s called T3 uptake. You’re going to get on here. Maybe the estrogen’s going to get in here and maybe the thyroid’s not going to be able to get their hormones on there. Then they get to the cell and then that’s where that hormone becomes T3, and it’s going to be blocked out by the molecule of estrogen. So you can go to the doctor and you can have low thyroid function. They’ll look at you and they’ll say your teeth… You have hypothyroid. I don’t know what’s going on. Your thyroid hormone is good but when we get to the cell, it’s not. For the person who’s highly estrogenic, or for the person who is taking hormone replacement therapy, birth control pills, then that’s the factor.
It’s stunning but a lot of people, a lot of endocrinologists, don’t know that at this point in time. I’m seeing more and more and more endocrinologists now running female hormone panels and thyroid together and this is one of the main reasons why. There’s other reasons, thyroid has a lot to do with progesterone metabolism. So your thyroid and your female hormones, and thus your birth control pills are very interactive and they both affect each other. There’s a lot more chemistry to that than what I’m just going into, but I think you get the idea. They compete. These guys compete for the same receptor sites on the cell. They can knock things off and cause the thyroid hormone to not get where it needs to be. Thus, technically you’re now hypothyroid until you clear out all of that excess estrogen, and that’s another whole topic.
