How Often to Test for Hashimoto’s?

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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How often should you test for Hashimoto’s? So, that’s really an excellent question. So it assumes, I think that the patient already has Hashimoto’s, all right. And so if you don’t have Hashimoto’s and you keep going to your doctor and they keep telling you that you don’t have it, but you have all the symptoms, you should try to get tested every three months, because the antibodies go up and down literally daily. And so from that perspective, you should let no more than six months go by.
For me, I actually will have a patient who comes in here and everything’s normal, but they got all the lab tests and their thyroids tender, and they’ve had nodules, but all their lab tests come up normal. I might test them every six weeks until it comes up, if they’re really insistent upon getting a lab number that you can hang onto.
If you have Hashimoto’s, okay, it’s an immune problem that attacks… So, there’s your thyroid. It’s an immune problem, there’s your immune system, that’s attacking your thyroid. Okay. And until you pull all the triggers, until you find all the things in your physiology, whether it’s small intestinal bacteria, or leaky gut, or one of the pathogens, Epstein-Barr Virus, lyme disease. Or whether it’s that you drink too much, or whether it’s blood sugar spikes going up and down or stress or diet, whatever it is. And there’s 40 some of them, okay? Whatever it is, as long as these are there, your thyroid keeps getting attacked. All right?
So, especially if you’re not… I mean, I’m going to promote here, the functional model. If you’re not using some sort of functional model that is stripping these things down, and you’re going to your doctor and just using the medication, the medication T4 and T3 are the thyroid hormones that are in these pills. Okay? They are antioxidants and they are steroids as well as being thyroid hormones. So, they can calm down inflammation to a degree and stop this a little bit. But if you’re not pulling the triggers, it might be going like this. And you take the medication, it might be going like this. You might feel better for two, three weeks, six weeks, even three months. But eventually, you’re going to start getting symptom [inaudible 00:02:31]. Why? Because there’s still damage taking place to this tissue. Even though it’s slowed down, there’s still damage taking place.
At that point, what’s important is watching your TSH and mainly your TSH and your T4 and your free T3, but mainly your TSH. And if your TSH, your thyroid-stimulating hormone is going up, it’s because you’re still getting damage to this, even though you’re feeling somewhat better.
If I have a patient that is in that mode when they come to me, I’m going to test them every three months while I’m treating them to see if the… First of all, if you’re going to go to an alternative practitioner who is going to understand how to attack this from a functional perspective of diet and lifestyle and herbs and botanicals and all those types of things, and knows what the triggers are to eliminate and knows how to take care of those triggers, your TSH is going to go like this. So in treatment, I like to do it every six weeks.
Once the person is stable in that condition, then they should do it every three months for the first year, to watch what their TSH is doing while they’re getting better. And it should be getting better, frankly, over that period of time, if you’ve pulled all these triggers and you’re eating the right diet and all that type of stuff.
And then after that, you should probably get it checked every six months, because life is life and life… One of the biggest triggers of autoimmune thyroid disease is stress. And these last six years have been pretty stressful in this country. And a lot of things are going on. A lot of people are stressed and there was COVID and there’re people out of work and there’re arguments on national levels and all that kind of stuff. And it’s stressful, on top of the regular stresses that were there beforehand. So every six months, once you’re stable.
Now, if you are going to a medical doctor, you’re having gone to an alternative practitioner and you’re strictly getting the thyroid hormone every three to six months because this hasn’t stopped. Now, and I’m a good example for when I was doing this treatment in the beginning for myself, for those few of you out there who might not know that I have autoimmune thyroid disease, and that’s part of how I got into this, I was taking 150 micrograms of levothyroxine. For those of you that who don’t have a feel for that, that is a lot of thyroid hormone. Means my thyroid was just tanks. It was hardly working. You’re not going to see many people up above 150. I’ve seen people at 200 and more, but I can count them on one hand.
So now, I take 25 micrograms. Why? Because as I continued to get rid of the triggers and as things continued to get better and as time passed and allowed the pressure to come off of my system and things started working better, mine went from this to very possibly this. Because I’ve been at 25 micrograms now, for three years. So, my TSH is staying normal.
So right now, I get it treated every six months. I use a medical doctor. Unfortunately, we don’t work together. He’s not quite on top of this, to where I’d like him to be, but he’s on it enough to where we cooperate. And he put me out for a year. He doesn’t want to see me for another year. So, we’ll see how that goes. But I would feel more comfortable seeing him in six months, but I’m going to try and let this ride for a year and see what happens, and see if it stays the same. So, I speak to you also from personal experience, because I’ve been going through this since about 2002. And so I’ve had a lot of personal experiences as a patient, as well as a practitioner.
So, those are all the different parameters as to how frequently you should get tested, from my mind, once you’re stable, every six months. Before that, if you’re still in the process of trying to figure things out, if you’re in the active process, for me, it’s going to be every six weeks. If you’re going to be in active process with a medical doctor, I would say every three months. And then once you’re stable, I would say every six months.
We’ll see how this, once a year thing… We’ll see how this works out. And then I might have a presentation on that for you in six months from now. So, those are the timings that I, and many of my colleagues, use.