Hashimoto’s can cause many different other conditions to manifest low libido being one of them.
Today Dr. Rutherford will delve into this topic further.
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So the topic today is Hashimoto’s and low libido, and I’m largely talking to women on this because it’s a lot different between women and men. Frankly, 97% of my practice is women and so I’m very much more familiar with that and I try to stick to things that I know. So basically, it’s a complex relationship and it’s not. So let’s talk about libido and what causes libido in women. It’s estrogen. So estrogen’s what makes you want to have babies, it’s what makes you want to have sex, it’s what helps to procreate the human race. So it really comes down to all about estrogen and what’s affecting estrogen. So this kind of hooks into Hashimoto’s and pregnancy, this kind of hooks into Hashimoto’s and abnormal periods and menstrual cramps, and just the whole thing.
And today, even endocrinologists up until maybe two years ago when I would see panels coming in from other doctors that were endocrinologists, they were never on a thyroid panel when we’re trying to figure out a woman’s female hormones. But today, they are. Today they are, they’re running panels and they’re not necessarily looking for Hashimoto’s, but they’re definitely are getting if the thyroids screwed up, then it’s going to slow everything down and it’s going to slow down a function of the process of making a proper estrogen, estradiol, estriol, progesterone balance.
So, this is kind of how it goes. Someone comes in here and they go, I’m not menopausal. I have all of these female hormone imbalances. Or I’m looking to get pregnant, I have no libido. Because they all kind of go together, it isn’t like it’s no libido and it’s I have menstrual issues. It’s all estrogen at that point. So the question is, is how do we, without drugs, I’ll be the first one tell you, I’m not a big hormone replacement therapy guy or like, okay, you have this symptom, so take estrogen and you’re about to find out why.
So basically, here’s the things that have to be working in a person properly for them to produce proper estrogen production and proper estrogen clearance. And what that means is you produce estrogen, the estrogen gets made, it goes into the cells. In the cells, the estrogen is used for certain chemical processes. And then there’s waste products and those waste products have to get into the toilet. If they don’t get into the toilet, you start accumulating too much estrogen in your liver, in your fat cells, and some parts of your intestines, and now you start becoming estrogenic. The problem with that is it starts telling your brain you have too much estrogen and now you’re ovaries start not making enough estrogen because your brain’s going, kicking back and oh, well we already got enough estrogen sitting around. So I’m going to tell the pituitary gland to tell the ovaries to kick back and not make enough estrogen.
You then go to the doctor. You get checked and they tell you, you don’t have enough estrogen and they give you more. But you don’t need more because you got a bunch sitting around. So that was important to know because what you do in an alternative world, in the real world, the natural world is you get- First thing you do is you get rid of all the excess estrogen because it’s going to be there. Most estrogen problems are too much estrogen, too much estrogen. And if you throw on top of it that you’re taking estrogen hormone therapy, then you can never dose it right, so they’re always going to give it too much.
So thyroid, I haven’t forgotten. So thyroid Hashimoto’s slows everything down for starters. So two of the biggest things that screw up your libido is stress. No surprise, right? But we’re going to tell you why. Stress and hypothyroid, and most Hashimoto’s is Hashimoto’s hypothyroiditis, hypothyroid, which slows everything down. When everything slows down, all the mechanisms that are managing your estrogen balance slow down too. So when someone comes in here, and my staff members told me I can use them as examples, so when somebody comes in here and they have female problems, one of them just hadn’t had a period for years and the other one wasn’t looking to get pregnant. She was just looking to get healthy, but she had a lot of female hormone issues.
Here’s how we go about it. First thing you got to do is you got to make sure the liver’s cleansing properly and getting all the excess estrogen out. You got to make sure that the gallbladder’s working. If you don’t have a gallbladder, you got to make sure that the cystic duct that is remaining, that’s trying to be your gallbladder isn’t sludged up. You got to make sure the person’s got a good gut. You have to make sure the person has a good gut, a gut that’s moving. The person can’t be constipated. If the person’s constipated or has irritable bowel syndrome, they’re not dumping their excess estrogen out into the toilet. You got to make sure that you have proper adrenal function. Your adrenals have a lot to do, their secondary sex glands. And you have to make sure- and that’s where the stress comes in. Stress drains the adrenals. It paralyzes a lot of this other stuff along with the hypothyroid that’s slowing everything down, slowing your gut down, slowing your liver down, slowing your gallbladder down. So this is the high Hashimoto’s connection, the hypothyroid connection.
Your blood sugar has to be normal, not high, not low, not going up and down. Otherwise, it’s very, very difficult for your cells to process your estrogen once you make it. And you have to have proper essential fatty acids and those proper essential fatty acids actually will help the estrogen to get into the receptor sites in your cell and give you that estrogenic response. That’s what we do when a person comes into us, and I go back to my staff member. I have one staff member who, she just wanted to be healthy. She’d been eating crap forever. She saw the other patients. She saw what we were doing. She just wanted to go through the program. We started. So we did the work up on her and we started addressing the specific criteria of her case within the framework of what I just said. And she hadn’t had a period for, I want to say it was three or four years and literally, within four weeks, she got her period back. Everything started to normalize, her skin started to clear up, her libido came back.
So the other staff member that I have here, she was just not feeling good. She had acne, she was overweight, she couldn’t lose weight, she had hair problems. Hair was falling out, just the whole thing and libido. And so, we put her through the program and she got pregnant and it wasn’t particularly what she wanted to do, but she got pregnant and she was doing the program and so on and so forth. And then after a year or so, she decided that this was a hard program. I don’t know if the sign up here, if you can see the sign up there, I imagine that you can. We didn’t say it was going to be easy. We said it was going to be worth it.
And so she decided to go through the program again because she wasn’t feeling too good. Got pregnant again and she’s not doing the program anymore because now she’s got three kids and we can’t afford to lose her right now anyway. So if she wants to go through the program again, I’m going to say no. We’re going to choke you first. But that’s how it works. That is how it works. So when I say I’m against hormone replacement therapy, I’m not entirely against it, but the reality is that you do all of that and everything’s starting to work right and your libido’s still low, and maybe you’re still having heavier or mild periods and all that type of stuff. At that point, there are herbs and botanicals that can be very successful once you run a lab and find out what’s left at the lab, a female hormone panel.
And I’m not sure that most people even know what to run for female hormone panels anymore, other than estrogen and testosterone, and there’s a lot more to run. You run that, now you see what’s going on. Maybe they’re not processing their testosterone and you knock it down. Maybe they have too much testosterone. Maybe you need some herbs and botanicals to get the brain talking to the ovaries again. And then usually that’s going to work. So that is libido. I don’t really talk to people about their libidos all that much. It’s on my intake form, so I’m very aware of it on every single person it comes in. But it’s at the of the barrel, you have to take care of all those other things first.
And let’s go all the way back to how Hashimoto’s affects us. All of this stuff, the liver, the gallbladder, the intestines, the stomach, the pancreas, the adrenal glands, all of this is affected by thyroid function because when thyroid function goes down, everything slows down. You don’t digest your food well, your pancreas doesn’t handle your blood sugar well, your liver doesn’t detox the estrogen properly, and a zillion other things. So that’s the connection. That’s it, thyroid disease. And it’s like the massive trickle down effect to where one part of your system stops, this stops, this stops. The next thing you know, you’re not processing your estrogen. It’s not going in the toilet. It’s building up in your system and when that starts happening, that tells your brain to shut off making estrogen. At that point, your libido’s gone.
