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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So today, we’re going to do There is No Silver Bullet for Hashimoto’s and oh, how that I wish there was. Okay, so I don’t know, today, there’s a lot of marketing going on. There is the internet, which you’re watching right now, right? And it’s kind of a wild, wild west out there. There’s nobody that really goes in… And I’m okay with this. I don’t want to start getting into a little controversy today of censorship and all that type of stuff. The reality is there’s nobody out there centering people in this area going, “Oh, no, that doesn’t work or this works or that miracle diet’s going to work,” and so on and so forth. And so I’m getting a lot more people coming to me with, “Have you heard of this diet, is that diet… How come you haven’t put out a book? Oh, I read this book and this book says that.” I had one yesterday. He came out with the intuitive mystic guy who said, “Okay, it’s all Epstein-Barr virus,” which it’s not all Epstein-Barr virus.
And so I get so much of this. I’m getting so much more of it and more of it, more of it, more of it. So the reality is there’s no magic bullet. Look, Hashimoto’s is complex. I should have gone over there and pulled out, out of what I call my own control manual, the 10 pages that I go through to assess every single Hashimoto’s case to make sure that I haven’t missed any aspect of what could possibly be blowing them up. If I get… There’s 40 different triggers to Hashimoto’s, 40, there’s 40. And actually, I think there’s going to be 41 or 42 by the end of this year just based on what I’m seeing relative to the COVID thing and some other things.
And no one has, nobody has all those. Nobody has all those triggers. Who has eight? And who has 14? And who also has eight, but they’re a different eight than this person has over here? And so there’s just a certain complexity to the condition that is unfortunate, but it’s there. So what happens is you go online and you start looking and you start finding all of these, I won’t name names, so and so’s leaky gut program or so and so’s small intestinal bacterial program for Hashimoto’s or so and so’s Hashimoto’s program. And I’m thinking of specific doctors as I say this.
And then I look at them and I go there is maybe 10%, maybe 15% of people who put out 1500 bucks or whatever it is for the supplements and the diet for that, that program’s going to put you on. And maybe there’s 15% of people who are going to do that that are going to do well because maybe they are in the early stages of Hashimoto’s or maybe that particular diet, I’m even stretching it here, maybe that particular diet might be specific for that person. And just by doing the low level of vitamins, they might get better and get their… Better meaning putting their autoimmunity into remission, their Hashimoto’s into remission.
But that is such a crapshoot. I mean that’s such Russian… Which is why you don’t see Dr. Martin Rutherford’s Hashimoto’s, save your Hashimoto’s, cure your Hashimoto’s. I mean there’s one gal out there who’s very, very popular on the top 10 list on the New York Times selling list, I think, a couple of years ago who claims you can cure Hashimoto’s. I’ve read her book. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. There’s also a lot of stuff in there that maybe isn’t right, but there’s a lot of stuff in there and it’s hard to even read…
My mentor has a book out called Why Do You Still Have Thyroid Symptoms When Your Lab Tests Are Normal? It was written in 2008 and 2009. There’s a lot of advances taken care of, have been taken on since then. But even if you tried to take that book and do it, and I know this from patients who’ve tried to do it, it’s almost like impossible to do it for yourself. And there’s like 10 or 50 or 20 other triggers that have come around since that book was written. So if I get a hundred Hashimoto’s patients, no two of them are the same. It is a massively complex issue. You have to be looking at diet. Listen, there is no one diet that’s right for all the Hashimoto’s patients. I’ll even go a step further. There’s no one diet that’s right for any Hashimoto’s patient.
One of the things that we’ve come to be aware of is you’re usually going to have to look at that person who has Hashimoto’s, maybe they have diabetes type 2, they have food sensitivities, and you’re going to have to craft like three diets out of there. Now you might get on a diet, just before we did this, I was talking to someone who was talking about, “Oh, let’s do the carnivore diet. Well, you should get together with these. I have two people who got on it, they felt great.” We’ll see how great they feel for how long. Because basically, very few people are allergic to meat. Some people are sensitive to beef and things of that nature. So you’ve removed all the antigens and you feel better, but you’re going to start not feeling better ’cause eventually, you’re going to start developing reactions there. You’re going to start breaking your digestive system down, so on and so forth.
But this goes even for the paleo diet. This goes even for the autoimmune paleo diet, which was really the cornerstone diet when we started on all of this. But a lot of you already know that because a lot of you got on the autoimmune paleo diet and you started to bloat. And you’re going like, “Wait a minute. I thought this was the autoimmune paleo diet, was the right diet for Hashimoto’s?” It’s ’cause there is no one diet. There is no one diet.
That person who just bloated probably needs a combination of… Just knowing that they were on the autoimmune paleo diet and bloating, they probably need a combination of three diets put together. And if that person happens to have ulcers, then that’s four diets that you need to manipulate together to give to that person to get their system to a baseline. And that person’s going to feel better, but they’re not going to be… But the vast majority of time, the diet alone’s not going to do it. You’re going to have to fix what caused the problems that made you have to figure out what the four diets were for that patient in the first place.
If that person’s chronically stressed… And who’s stressed coming into my office? Like everybody, okay? Different degrees, who’s stressed here, for who is it daily stress, for who is it they’re getting a divorce, who’s got PTSD, but they’re all various levels of stress. You got to handle those various levels of stress. And how are you going to do it? I happen to practice functional medicine mostly, but I practice functional neurology and this is where that comes in really handy ’cause a lot of times, you’re a little bit more conversant in the nutraceuticals that are effective in that area. And then you have to [inaudible 00:07:24] and then you really have to know the order to attack. If you’re watching this, you probably know everything I’m saying is true. You have to know the order to attack.
I had a lady came in not long ago and by the time I got done, she had everything that she told me she thought she had. And I can tell by looking at her intake paperwork that she was taking all the right supplements for her stuff, but she was missing a few things. She was missing the fact that she had food sensitivity. She was missing the fact that she didn’t think she was stressed. Until we got done talking and she says, “Well, I guess I would have to admit that I do get stressed pretty easily.” I mean it was written all over her paperwork.
But the point is there’s so many different moving parts. Just food alone is 25%, but should you be on a FODMAP diet? Should you have taken away all the nightshades? I don’t find that to be true. I don’t find that, okay, I just take the nightshade. If you want to really feel good, you go on a water diet. Go on a water diet, you’ll remove all the antigens, you’ll feel better and life will be good. So there’s so many. There’s no one silver bullet for this.
And if you’re… So many people are looking for the generic… A lot of the people… A lot of these programs online are generic and I’m guessing that they got to know that they’re not sending them out and having like 85% of their patients get better because you can’t. You have to know what that patient’s mental status is because your stress components are directly flaring up immune responses, but they can be annihilating the rest of the system and affecting 30 of those different triggers.
You have to know if there’s pathogens involved. If there is a pathogen involved, okay, you got to get rid of it. Are there toxins involved? If there’s toxins involved, you can shotgun it. Sometimes you really got to know what that toxin is or what that pathogen is. If that pathogen’s mold and you don’t know it and you live in a moldy house and somebody just gave you a shotgun to get rid of your viruses and bacterias, but you’re living in a… You better know that mold is screwing up your autoimmune thyroid disease so…
And as far as supplements go, there’s no supplement patented just for Hashimoto’s disease, not in and of itself. It might be that you can access one of these areas. You can have somebody, you could do a SIBO diet and feel better for three months, but it’s not going to last because you haven’t taken care of the things that caused the SIBO in the first place, okay? And then if you have small intestinal bacterial growth, trust me, the FODMAP diet alone is not going to do it. If you don’t believe me, look on the SIBO websites and on their boards, and they’ll tell you that it doesn’t do it. And it doesn’t do it for them because they’re not going back and fixing all the things that causes SIBO.
What causes SIBO? One of the things that causes SIBO is Hashimoto’s, but SIBO screws up Hashimoto’s so you have this big vicious cycle going. So where do you enter that vicious cycle? That’s where the magic happens. When you have somebody who looks at your whole case, looks at all the 40 triggers, looks at other physiology that’s going to be screwing you up and then says, this is what’s going on with you and here’s how you attack it.
And that’s the other thing, unless I’m the only one on planet earth that has figured this out, and I’m not because I was actually taught this by some very brilliant people, but there’s an order in the way you have to attack each area and there’s a order in the way you have to attack Hashimoto’s. So if you attack it in the wrong order, if you have gut problems, but you’re attacking those and you decide you’re going to attack the brain later, and stress happens to be a problem for your gut problems, good luck. If you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which this is going to sound really strange, actually starts in the large intestines, which is the end of your digestive system, but you don’t fix what’s going on upstream first, forget it. It’s not coming back. And if you don’t fix all that, you’re not going to be able to fix your Hashimoto’s.
So if I seem like I’m rambling, I’m not. These are very, very specific things that I see all day. And what I just talked about is this much of this much. I used to have this huge chart here of all the inter… Oh, I don’t. I thought… I was just looking to see if I still had it. I don’t have it. I don’t have it here anymore. Of all the inter-relations in Hashimoto’s and it’s like crazy. It’s this whole big chart with all arrows going this is affecting this, and that’s affecting this, and this is affecting that, and that’s affecting this. And then in the end, all of it feeds back to where the origin comes from and there’s a lot of different areas on that chart where it is. So it looks like this big mishmash of things, but it’s not a mishmash. It’s what happens in Hashimoto’s.
So there’s no magic. It’s not all Epstein-Barr virus. It’s not all metals. It’s not just taking high dose of vitamin D and glutathione. It’s not taking low dose naltrexone. If you’re watching this, you already probably know it’s not taking just thyroid medication and I’m not anti-thyroid medication, but I’m just saying it’s not the silver bullet. There is no silver bullet, not even close, there’s nothing. There is nothing that is even close that’s going to give you a long-term response, that’s going to dampen the immune responses against your thyroid.
Even if you’re in the lower end of the spectrum, even if you’re not in the severe spectrum, there’s no one thing. It’s not going to be the selenium. It’s not going to be the zinc. It’s not going to be the myo-inositol. You can take all those. You might get a little bump from them. You might get a little bit of a change, but it’s not going to handle the overall goal of putting Hashimoto’s thyroiditis into remission to where it’s not getting attacked anymore. Doesn’t exist. If it does, send it to me, I’m open to it, make my life so much easier, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. So no silver bullet, no silver bullet for Hashimoto’s disease.