By Bob Livingston
#Depression #anxiety #sbalich #twill #tcot #health
A good friend of mine lived with the symptoms for years.
She was exhausted and slightly numb sometimes. And she felt anxious and depressed on a daily basis for no particular reason and with no explanation.
Well, no real explanation. The Medical-Drug industry has a vested interest in making you think that it’s your brain’s fault — that you have a “brain chemistry” problem and that’s why you’re depressed.
Well, who says? The very Pharmaceuticals that created chemicals which play havoc with your brain chemistry? Curious indeed.
Even more curious is a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine which found nearly a third of the 74 industry-sponsored studies of antidepressants they examined were not published. Further, most studies showed negative outcomes for the drug involved. Of that ones that were, 94 percent were reworded to depict a more promising outlook for the effects.
The truth is that many of the “scholarly” studies about the safety and effectiveness of antidepressants and anti-psychotic meds were really ghostwritten by pharmaceutical marketing execs.
Worse, if you are a woman and you go to the doctor with unexplained fatigue, depression and weight gain, they are not going to consider anything other than putting you on an antidepressant.
I can still remember our friend calling my wife in tears after one such visit. After years of suffering, she finally found a doctor who did the one test that many doctors overlook in their haste to prescribe, and under pressure to see the next patient…
My friend was suffering from Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. You wonder, how can the best-known thyroid disease go undetected by doctors for years?
Because doctors are also under the impression that all anxiety and depression is caused by “brain chemistry.” Therefore, the differential diagnosis requires them to prescribe an antidepressant for those symptoms.
However, what many don’t know, and what you need to know for yourself, is that patients with autoimmune thyroid conditions are 3.5 times more likely to suffer from depression and 2.3 times more likely to suffer from anxiety than the average person.
Further, and here’s the crux of it all: Hashimoto’s patients account for more than 40 percent of all cases of depression and 30 percent of all cases of anxiety.
So, the problem really isn’t with most people’s brain chemistry. It’s with their thyroid hormones, much in the same way the rest of the hormones in our bodies are being affected today.
Tests your doctor should run, if you have depression, anxiety, numbness, or other symptoms like…
• Weight gain
• Sensitivity to cold
• Fatigue
• Joint pain and stiffness
• Muscle weakness
• Constipation
• Puffy eyes
• Slow heart rate
• Swelling in your extremities
…include blood tests that measure levels of thyroid hormone and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) as well as autoantibody tests to check for the presence of an autoimmune reaction.
If you test positive for Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, your focus should be on enhancing your natural thyroid function and lowering inflammation levels in your body to decrease your symptoms.
Of course, here again, most conventional doctors will prescribe synthroid immediately. Do not accept synthroid or any other synthetic. Synthroid slowly destroys thyroid tissue.
As always, diet is key. Eat natural, raw foods. Processed foods are filled with chemicals that affect thyroid hormones and cause constant, low-level inflammation. Amino acids feed the brain and regulate hormones.
Eat foods with vitamin B1 in particular as it helps stave off depression, memory loss, fatigue and numbness — all signs of Hashimodo’s. B1 itself might fight off fatigue in a matter of days. Doctors do not believe in nutrition, and many will therefore not know about you this startling cure.
You need iodine for a healthy thyroid, as you already know, but a mineral that is in many items we use regularly is not one you think of for optimal health, much less thyroid health. But copper helps stimulate your thyroid and protect your body from too much thyroxine building up in your blood.
Additionally, we have known for many years that there is a group of herbs that are called adaptogens because they seem to provide us with a general sense of wellbeing and health. What we know now is that many of them balance hormonal activity, as does the ashwagandha root.
Turns out, one of the effects of taking this root is that your thyroid simply works better with it, and it allows for more T4 production. Plus ashwagandha root works as an immune modulator to help regulate autoimmune inflammation (like what occurs in Hashimoto’s) that can cause an under-active thyroid.
You need only 1 mg of copper, but a full 200 mg of ashwagandha to balance and maintain the thyroid gland.
If you have low body temperature, it likely means that you have low thyroid function or hypothyroidism. Even if your thyroid is just slightly underactive this should be corrected.
