Has your thyroid and adrenal disease been overlooked or mistreated? It is estimated that there are more than 60,000,000 people today with undiagnosed hypothyroidism. Find out what it takes to get tested correctly.
Due to many factors, some beyond our control, we don’t always recognize that we may have a problem with our thyroid or adrenal glands. And doctors often miss a diagnosis of hypothyroidism; tests really need to be done in a specific way to determine if an underperforming thyroid is affecting you.
Today we’re going to talk about five different factors that are important in testing your thyroid — different things you need to know and what you really need to think about to get your thyroid tested correctly. This will be the first part of two articles on thyroid tests.
- Complete thyroid blood test. A TSH is not adequate to decide if you have thyroid disease. You really need to know not just your free T3, free T4, TSH, your thyroid antibodies, which includes TPO and ATG, and you need to have reverse T3 to see if you have inactive thyroid production. Any one of them may be enough to indicate that you have thyroid disease. So if you don’t have the full panel, your doctor isn’t doing enough to test your thyroid.
- Complete thyroid exam. Thyroid disease can be detected in your blood work, but also many hints from your physical exam will suggest that you have thyroid problems. You need to examine the skin for dryness, flaking, itching, thinning hair, nails may be pitted, eyebrows, lateral eyebrow thinning is a common problem, the thyroid gland itself may show nodularity, enlargement, sometimes this it is subtle, sometimes very severe. And pretibial edema or just some slight pokes or dents on the legs when you press them with your thumb and also lower extremity reflexes can affect the and be an indication of thyroid problems.
- Thyroid questionnaire. This tool can be a great help in pinpointing if you have thyroid problems and will be provided to you after these first two articles on testing. So you really need to go through these one by one, check off the ones that seem relevant to you, and take you to an open-minded thyroid doctor who can assess all your symptoms. So we’ve looked at his labs, his physical findings, and now his symptoms alone can be a strong indicator.
- body temperature. Checking your basal body temperature is very important in evaluating whether you have thyroid problems, as the thyroid gland sets the metabolic rate. So to check your thyroid, you test your temperature in the morning, which allows you to gauge how your temperature compares to normal, which should be 98.6, or maybe minus a degree, but if it’s less than 97.6, then you really have importance for possible thyroid problems. Many people run 96 or 95 and their doctors tell them, “that’s how you are, your temperature drops.” But usually there is a reason for it and most of the time it is because your thyroid is not working fully.
- Food allergy tests. This is critical if there are any concerns with thyroid disease and especially if you have elevated thyroid antibodies, but food allergies are so common today that everyone should probably get them. And this has to be a blood test with IGG or IGA blood tests, the skin test or IGE blood tests that might be done by an allergist, or a pulmonary specialist will have nothing to do with whether your food allergies are significantly related to your thyroid. Those are going to be related to peanut allergies or asthma problems. But you do have to order and have specific GI or IGA blood tests, especially for gluten, which is related to wheat, and casein, which is a protein in dairy.
That’s all for today: 5 Tips on Proper Testing for Thyroid and Adrenal Disease. Stay tuned for more testing tips in article number two below.
Thank you for your time,
Diane Culik, MD
Wellness ABC
