Hashimoto’s and Fibromyalgia

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 fibromyalgia. Again, this is a topic that I’m very familiar with because I started out in functional medicine as one of the earlier functional medicine practitioners back when everybody was coming in at that time, it was chronic fatigue, it was fibromyalgia. Those are the big things people were coming in for. And fibromyalgia means pain in your muscle fibers. I do have another like hour long presentation on this online. That is really, I think it’s our most watched videos. Believe it or not, I think it’s got over a million views. And so, anyway. So, early on I was involved when we didn’t know what fibromyalgia was completely. I practiced functional neurology too. And so, we thought okay, it’s brain, there’s a brain component to that. We knew there was a fight, flight component to that.

And that made sense because even though fibromyalgia means pain in the muscle fibers, we were kind of thinking it’s not the muscle fibers, this is nerve pain, this is small fiber pain. And we discovered that and come to find out that you could have something called non-length dependent small fiber neuropathy, which will cause pain and tenderness and all over the place. And so, we saw that as one component. As we started to realize that the thyroid component to fibromyalgia, which was causing the fatigue or part of what was causing the fatigue, as we started realized that that was involved, we started realizing that actually caused some of the small fibro neuropathy that I was just talking about and about a million other things. And so, the autoimmune thyroid disease started to become really a core of what we started looking for because we started realize that once we got the inflammation down from the fibromyalgia patient, a lot of things would get better.

Well, the things that we had to do to get the inflammation down to for the Hashimoto’s, for example if you have blood sugars going up and down, you’re not diabetic and you’re not hypoglycemic where you’re passing out all the time, but you’re somewhere in the middle, like prediabetes or what’s called functional reactive hypoglycemia where you’re either fall asleep and you wake up when you eat or you eat and you fall asleep, this is bad butcher. You have to fix that to fix the Hashimoto’s for the Hashimoto’s to take a step towards getting better. Okay. But that in and of itself also is causing a lot of the muscle pain and a lot of the depression and a lot of the anxiety.

So, as we unwrap this onion, we started to see that we had to first when a person came in with fibromyalgia, we had to first go to what was causing the autoimmune attack against the person who has fibromyalgia. And I’d say 75% of them had Hashimoto’s and then you would work with that and all of a sudden you would see huge differences frequently within 4, 5, 6, 8 weeks, something like that. So, there’s a big connection there. 75% of the time with the Hashimoto’s and the fibromyalgia, why is it not a hundred percent of the time? Because it’s not. Because you could have gut problems, have bad bacteria getting out of there and the bacteria can hop onto your little white blood cells and where do your white blood cells go? Everywhere. So, they can go into your muscles. They can cause [inaudible 00:03:52] to your nerves. They can go to a lot of different places and can cause that pain that some doctors are still pressing on going.

Oh yeah, you got pain, you have fibromyalgia. The bottom line is fibromyalgia is a garbage pale type of a term. It means pain in your muscle fibers. It’s a term they should retire but we use the term because it communicates. I still have patients come in here and the doctors go, well you have all this pain and everything and all your tests are normal, so it’s fibromyalgia because they don’t know what it is. All right. I mean fibromyalgia, most of the patients have chronic stress, a lot of them have PTSD type of stuff from emotional traumas. Most of them have gut problems. Most of them have bad bacteria in their gut. So, most have a leaky gut, most of them have food sensitivities, a lot of them have chemical sensitivities. 75% of them do have Hashimoto’s in my practice and I’ve seen studies that reflect that, that say 70% people have that or are diagnosed with fibromyalgia, have Hashimoto’s. So, that’s the CliffsNotes on is Hashimoto’s and fibromyalgia connected. Yes, and that’s it.