Note: The following is the output of 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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So today we’re gonna answer the questions from those of you who asked about Hashimoto’s and eye issues, and that’s um, it’s not terribly common, but it’s not terribly uncommon.
It’s kinda like in between. It’s not something, eye issues are not something that are listed as a symptom of Hashimoto’s. However, Hashimoto’s, I think, has a much farther reach than I think the research has ultimately been willing to put out there because they haven’t been able to make definite connections.
And so you’re gonna hear about Hashimoto’s and eye connections eventually, but I see it moderately. I do see it. And we’ll see blurred vision, and we’ll see double vision. We’ll see dry eyes.
Those are the main things that we’ll see in conjunction with Hashimoto’s. The connections, I surmise from treating all of these cases and evaluating how things kind of are connected, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis has a commonality, it’s called a molecular mimicry, with something called the cerebellum.
Cerebellum is in the back of the head down here. Cerebellum is balance. Cerebellum’s not working right, you can get a stiff neck. Cerebellum’s not working right, it can affect your ear. You can get balance, dizziness, vertigo.
Cerebellum also helps you to fixate on things. So if you have your eyes fixated on that thumb while you’re doing this motion, that’s you’re cerebellum doing the fixation. If your cerebellum’s not fixating properly, because the cerebellum controls your eye muscles, if it’s not fixating properly, you’re gonna have a situation where your eyes are gonna go like that, and you’re gonna get blurred vision.
That actually, now that I’m thinking about it, that’s a pretty common complaint. Blurred vision is a very common complaint. Double vision not so much, and I never know when I’m doing a Hashimoto’s patient, if somebody says double vision, if it’s connected directly the Hashimoto’s or not.
And then we’ve had situations where once we got the immune response under control and everything calmed down, their double vision improved or went away. So I don’t know the exact mechanism for that, if that’s kind of like a secondary, you fix the Hashimoto’s, it decreases inflammation, and than that stabilizes some neuro inflammation in the brain, but I have seen that.
The dryness of the eyes is usually more that Hashimoto’s is related to a lot of other different autoimmune conditions, and one of them is Sjogren’s. And Sjogren’s you’ll get dry mouth.
You can get dry eyes, and I see that. I’ve seen that connection on multiple different occasions where the person has both of those, the Hashimoto’s and has the Sjogren’s, or doesn’t know that they have the Sjogren’s, and then we run the antibodies to find out if they have it and find out that they have the Sjogren’s.
And then that’s generally gonna be the cause of the dry eyes. So I think in general, the eyes are affected by a lot of things. I mean, I could think of a ton of pathways in which chemical imbalances that occur from Hashimoto’s inflammatory responses could interfere with certain nutrients that would cause your eyes to be poor.
And I have seen people, I’ve had one case where we were treating her for Hashimoto’s, and one of the things that was a problem was she had low blood pressure. And we worked to get her blood pressure up.
And suddenly, she was gonna have an eye surgery because she had a pathology, supposedly, a pathology in the eye, and all of a sudden her eye got better. So was it because we got more oxygen in there? Was it because that helped the Hashimoto’s to stabilize? Because getting more oxygen in there decreased certain oxidative stresses and certain inflammation? Who knows? Hard to say at this point in time.
I guess the best summation I could say is I have seen blurred vision, double vision, dry eyes connected to Hashimoto’s, and these are the explanations that I know for sure at this point in time, or I just know we’ve worked with the patient and their eyes did improve, and yet wasn’t able to really understand the connection with all of the things that we had done as to why their vision did improve.
Usually, and again, and I just said vision, vision usually does not improve. If you got like, you know, 100/200 vision, ha ha, you’re not gonna get 20/20 by getting your Hashimoto’s fixed, but blurred vision, yeah.
Blurred vision frequently, and the dry eyes, and even double vision frequently will improve with the treatment, functional medicine model treatment of Hashimoto’s.
