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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Low dose naltrexone, LDN, and Hashimoto’s. So I don’t use low dose naltrexone for Hashimoto’s and one of the main reasons is I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a chiropractor by… That’s what I graduated from as my… That’s my diplomat or whatever. My doctorate is in chiropractic. I do functional medicine. I do functional neurology. So that’s the path that I have chosen and LDN is a medical procedure.
Now having said that, I have a lot of people who come in here on LDN. I have a lot of people who want to know about it. So I’ve done a lot of background research on it and here’s been my observation on it. From a non-medical doctor, basically it’s a medication that the alternative doctors mostly use. It’s one of their, I don’t know if it’s fair to say holy grails, but it’s one of their first tools for autoimmune thyroid disease. So basically when you get autoimmune thyroid disease, you have a lot of inflammation hitting your thyroid and that inflammation is coming from could be 40 different places or more.
So that inflammation creates an inflammatory response and you get shaky and jittery when the thyroid hormone starts going up. The medical model doesn’t really treat Hashimoto’s very well. I don’t think anyway, because they’ll usually look at your numbers, give you a thyroid hormone, it’ll work. It won’t work. Maybe it’ll make you worse because there’s binders in there that are part of the triggers and so on and so forth. So they don’t really treat autoimmunity the way functional medicine practitioners do. So they treat autoimmunity by giving you steroids or immunoglobulin if it’s really a serious, serious autoimmune problem.
So in between all of that is low dose naltrexone. So low dose naltrexone, what it does is it goes in and increases the endorphins in your body. The endorphins are those feel good endorphins that make you feel good. They also alter chemistry that will to certain degrees dampen the inflammatory responses and they’re not anti-inflammatories, but through chemistry, I did use to teach biochemistry at one point in time. Through chemistry, they have kind of a chain reaction effect where they’ll help to calm down the thyroid to a certain degree.
I have a lot of patients who come in and it’s really helped them. So it doesn’t really take care of the problem. I’m not trying to be demeaning by saying it is kind of a bandaid. Then there are a lot of people, and I don’t know who’s asking this question, but there are a lot of people that can’t take it because it will cause a lot of people to have bad dreams and nightmares and things of that nature. So it’s a tool. It’s a tool. If you’re not up on what all the triggers are for Hashimoto’s, if you’re not changing your diet, if you’re not at least off of gluten, which is the number one trigger for Hashimoto’s. If you’re not doing all those things, if you have bad gut, if you’re just not doing any of that and you’re looking for something that’s just going to make you feel a little bit better, it’s worth a try.
I don’t know anybody who has had any severe untoward like, oh my God, I took it and it made me sick. The only negative I hear over and over again is, “I took it. I couldn’t take it because I just couldn’t sleep because my dreams were so bad.” There’s people that take it and it doesn’t do anything for them like every medication. That’s pretty much what I see in clinical practice. I haven’t gone online to see the Wikipedia explanation of low dose naltrexone or anything, but in real practice, that’s been my experience of treating several thousand, probably at this point in time Hashimoto’s patients.
