Material Corrections:

Transcription

1

2 Material Corrections: For further clarification, Wilson s Syndrome or Wilson s Temperature Syndrome is a Thyroid problem. All references to Wilson s Disease in the program, refer to Wilson s Syndrome. Wilson s Disease is a liver disease.

3 Module 1 Transcripts

4 page 2 / The Thyroid Health Program Welcome everyone. This is Kevin Gianni from RenegadeHealth.com. I want to personally thank you for taking an interest in your health and investing in this program. The Complete Thyroid Health Program will teach you the cutting-edge national approaches to thyroid treatment so you can understand how your body works and how you can heal naturally. First, before we start, I d like to introduce our special guest, Dr. James Williams. Dr. Williams is a pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, longevity and the quality of life. He s the author of five acclaimed books, including Viral Immunity and Prolonging Health. With more than 25 years of clinical experience treating chronic disease, he brings his experience with over 100,000 patient visits directly to you. In this program I ll be your host while Dr. Williams shares this important information with you. Before we start I want to share this important disclaimer with you. The information in this course is intended for educational purposes only. It does not replace the evaluation and advice of a qualified, licensed health care professional. For detailed information about your thyroid health, please consult with your physician. So let s get started on this module. I want to welcome you to this very special program. It s called Thyroid Health with Dr. J.E. Williams. What we re going to do in this program is we re going to cover the thyroid, what it does, what can harm it, what can impair its functioning and how your body can repair the thyroid. We ll be talking about herbs and supplements and other considerations as well. So not only will we tell you what s going on, but we can tell you how and what are some techniques you can use to help yourself get healthy. Today is the first module. We ll be laying the groundwork for the next three. We re going to talk about the endocrine system, what exactly the thyroid does and then move on from their. So Dr. Williams, welcome to the call. Thank you so much for having me. It s always a pleasure. The thyroid is a big issue. I wanted to let everyone know that we re here to make it easy to understand and also to get into higher hormone systems and the endocrine system. So let s start with that. What is the endocrine system? The endocrine system is a network of glands. They secrete chemical substances that we call hormones. They are, in fact, chemical messengers and communication molecules. They re extraordinarily important for every aspect of the living body system. Keep in mind that all living things have hormones. Plants have hormones. All animals have hormones. Insects have hormones. Of course we re going to be talking about human hormones with a focus on the thyroid. The endocrine hormones are involved in growth and development and homeostasis. That s the internal balance of all your body s systems. That s what keeps you alive. And metabolism, which produces energy in your body, and reproduction so we can continue as a species. And response to stimuli, stress, which

5 Transcripts Module 1 / page 3 becomes a big part of your adrenal. The adrenal and thyroid overlap. The classical endocrine system is composed of a bevy of hormones. Starting from the top down we go from the hypothalamus and then the pineal gland and the pituitary. Then below that in the throat area is the thyroid. It has four other little, tiny glands called the parathyroids. Then there s the thymus in the center of your chest, the adrenals, pancreas, ovaries and testes. The chemical messengers are what we call hormones. That s what we ve called them for a hundred years. We know them now to be much more than that. They are discreted directly by these glands into the extra-cellular fluid. Then those messenger molecules, the hormones, are picked up by the capillaries where they gain access to the bloodstream. Then they go throughout the body. They have affinity for different target sites in the body and they go there. They are taken up by the cells, in particularly we talk about thyroid hormones, and they are able to cross right through the cell membranes and the work goes on right inside the cells. So hormones facilitate functional coordination between all organs and all cells in the body. For our purposes we can classify hormones into two types, major and minor, like the major and minor scales in music. They blend together, but the major hormones are critical to keep you alive - insulin, cortisol and adrenaline. Two of those, cortisol and adrenaline, come from the adrenals. The minor hormones include the sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, some of the adrenal hormones such as DHEA and pregnenolone, and the thyroid hormones. Meaning that they re important for life but you can live without them not very well. As you age the DHEA goes down and your estrogen and testosterone go down. You re still alive but you re not functioning as well and you re aging. The same thing with thyroid hormones, though a little more important. They re kind of between minor and major hormones. Absence or deficiency of the thyroid hormone doesn t completely kill you. When talking about hormones what are the certain rhythms that they go through? How do they transfer and how do they kind of move course throughout the body? This is really important. We re now thinking of hormones as chemical messengers. These are very intelligent molecules. We also now think of these glands, not just as pumps where they re just pumping and pumping like a mechanical pump pumping water into a field to irrigate it. That s not how they work. Sometimes they re quiescent and sometimes they re highly active. We know now that they release hormones in rhythmic waves and cycles. They re released in rhythmic pulses. These rhythms are superimposed, one on the other, into a highly-refined, orchestrated symphony of chemical messengers. Among all of the different hormones the relationship of them and these overlaps of them, is highly important for the body to run well and for you to feel well, for you to be happy, for you to healthy in that you have a sense of well-being, of energy, of wellness and good mood and that all of your systems are working well. What are the main hormonal networks? This is the third thing that goes together in terms of getting acquainted with your endocrine system. They don t work in isolation. It works as a symphony of different instruments in the larger, complete orchestra. From the top down we have the hypothalamus and the pituitary, and also the pineal in the brain. The two main endocrine glands that are in our brain are the hypothalamus and pituitary. They inter-relate and communicate with all of the other endocrine organs. They form different axes. Instead of just working in isolation, the adrenal, for example, works in tandem with the hypothalamus and the

6 page 4 / The Thyroid Health Program pituitary. This is the axis that is most studied and considered the main one still at this point. It s called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or the HPA axis. In respect to the thyroid there is the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis, or the HPT axis. That s very important, when we talk about restoring normal thyroid function, that we look not just at the thyroid hormone being deficient but restoring the relationship and the intercommunication between the higher centers, the hypothalamus and the pituitary, and the down-stream effects all the way down to the cells. Can you just clarify how the thyroid gets activated, how the endocrine system sends messages to the thyroid? There s a loop. These glands communicate to each other. In biology we call it the Cascade Phenomenon. For example, if you look at a mountain and you go higher and higher up, it gets colder and colder and there you have snow. As the sun comes up it warms up a little bit of the snow or a little bit of the ice and it drips down. Little by little more and more drips come together and you have a little trickle and then a rivulet and then pretty soon a nice stream with waterfalls. It s feeding plants along the way and the deer are coming to eat. Then it goes down a bit further and forms into a lake and into the ocean. All the way around this the sun is still heating that up. The clouds are forming and they rise up over the mountain and they drop snow and rain. This is the same type of cycle we have in the body, or similar. There s a macrocosmic, a big cycle, and a microcosmic cycle. The higher centers, at the top of the mountain, you have the hypothalamus. that secretes releasing factors or releasing hormones that tell the pituitary to produce hormones that are the stimulating hormones. Talking about the thyroid we have TSH that is released by the pituitary, which informs or communicates to the thyroid gland that it needs to make more T4--we ll talk about those in a minute--thyroxine, which is the main hormone the thyroid produces. That goes out into circulation. When there s sufficient amount and the cells are running smoothly then the body communicates back through multiple methods, through the nervous system and through communication molecules, that tells the pituitary it s enough so you can shut down the stimulation to the thyroid. Then the pituitary communicates back to the hypothalamus and says, We re OK now. We can shut down. Those feedback loops continue back and forth all of the time. Let s move into the thyroid. Some people may not know where the thyroid is so let s start with that and then talk about what it does and some of the main thyroid hormones that you just mentioned. The thyroid is in your throat. If you examine yourself right now and you imagine where your chin is or put your finger on your chin, the tip of your chin, and then the other finger at your collarbone where the little notch is at the base of your throat in the center of your chest and if you can divide that into thirds, approximately the lower third or one-third of the way up from the collarbone is where the thyroid is located. It has two parts. They re called lobes, one on each side of the throat. Inside those lobes there are four little glands called the parathyroid glands. If it s enlarged you can actually see it. If it gets really big it becomes a goiter. Normally it should be high-functioning and you shouldn t be able to feel it. When I examine a patient I don t want to feel the thyroid as being enlarged or soft or boggy. You shouldn t be able to see it, having a swollen throat or anything like that, from the outside. Here s something that s very important. The thyroid gland is the only gland-- that s not true. In men the testicles are palpable. You can feel them from the outside. Of the glands in the greater part of the body,

7 Transcripts Module 1 / page 5 the thyroid is the only one you can feel if something is wrong. It s the one that s closest to the external environment. So it s easily influenced because it is basically just underneath the skin and therefore easily influenced by the percentage of oxygen in the air, by chemical pollutants that are in the air. So if you re feeling around for it, how do you know, within your muscles and your skin there in your throat, what part of that is your thyroid? If it s healthy, would you feel it at all? As I ve mentioned, if it s healthy you shouldn t feel it at all. If you re palpating very lightly down your throat, they should feel their trachea. That makes up the throat. For thin people you can actually see the outline of the trachea. As you go down a little bit further there s a bone called the hyoid bone, which is a little bit larger, sort of the Adam s apple. Then just below that and around that area is where the thyroid glands are. There s really one gland with two lobes, one on each side of the trachea. You can push your fingers to the side of your trachea, the side of your throat, without causing any harm or anything and just carefully, gently move that back and forth and push that to the side. If one side or the other, one lobe or the other, of the thyroid gland is enlarged you can actually kind of displace it a little bit and feel it. You have to be trained to do that, unless you have a true goiter and it s really obvious, like a large bulb on your throat. What does the thyroid do? This is another one of those key points. It makes oxygen available to the cells. We can t live without oxygen, everybody knows that, in terms of breathing, for very long, just a few minutes. But oxygen is necessary for the metabolism of your entire system and is one of the key molecules right inside the cells. So if you don t have enough oxygen, if there s not enough in the air Remember that in severely-polluted areas we can have as low as nine percent oxygen in the air. We function better if we have 20 or 30 percent in the air. In the rain forest, I love to go there, you can feel and smell the oxygen almost. It can get up to 30 percent, even up to 50 percent. Even if you have enough oxygen in the air, you have to have a sufficient thyroid hormone and it has to be viable enough, it has to be bio-active enough, it has to be healthy hormone molecule so that it helps the oxygen to get into the cell so that your cells can breathe, just like you breathe. The most active thyroid hormones are the T3. That s the one that s mainly involved in metabolism, growth and development and temperature regulation, which all kind of falls under your basal-metabolic rate. You need the oxygen and you need that thyroid activity and you need it in the cells in key parts of the body at the right time. So that s basically what the thyroid does. It has considerable influence in other aspects of the body, including normal growth, heart rate, sweating, muscle activity, bone growth, hair growth and energy. When the thyroid gland is not working well it can mimic almost every type of disease. It s called the great mimicker, in terms of the amount of symptoms it produces. When it s functioning well it s often called the copasetic hormone. People are bright, alert, alive. They re eager for new experiences. Some of the French doctors like to call it the love molecule or love hormone. Not testosterone and estrogen, but thyroid. It s a wide spectrum of many, many things. You mentioned T3. What about T4? What are some of the other main thyroid hormones? There are two main thyroid hormones. T3, the technical name is tri--meaning three, iodo--meaning iodine, thyronine. Triiodothyronine is T3. T4 is thyroxine. Both of those are built from thyrocine and

8 page 6 / The Thyroid Health Program therefore part of the name in both, which an amino acid, and iodine. So you need the thyrocine molecule and you need the iodine molecule in order to build those hormones. The thyroid produces mainly T4. T3 is converted from T4 in the liver and the peripheral tissues. In other words, outside of the thyroid the body makes its own stores of T3. They both have different functions in the body. There is some overlap. But the most active one of the two is the T3. How are they transported in the body? Once T4 is made by the thyroid it goes into the extra-cellular fluid. It s absorbed by the capillaries, the small blood vessels, and then it goes into the systemic circulation. Once it s there some of it is freefloating around and we call those the bio-available or free forms. But mainly it has to be transported by carrier proteins. Those are molecules that pick up hormones, not just thyroid but all types of hormones, and they shuttle them around. They re like the buses in the mass transit. They pick them up and shuttle them to a different part of the city and drop them off there. Otherwise it would take forever if they were just floating around. The main transport molecule for thyroid is called thyroid hormone binding globulin, or TBG. It carries both T4 and T3 to all parts of the body where they re necessary. They readily enter the cells. They re released and converted into their active and free forms. Then they go right into the cells where many, if not most, of other substances are not that easily transported through into cells. The reason is because all the cells need this thyroid hormone to function at optimum levels. Let s run over this again so we can understand. The raw materials are amino acids and iodine. Are there any other raw materials that are needed for the production of some of these hormones? No, those are the basic ones. For the production there s thyrocine and iodine. Those are the main substances that are the raw materials and building blocks. As you go out further, as the thyroid hormones go along, there s processes and metabolism that take place. They don t just come out of the thyroid ready to go to work. T4 has to be converted into T3 and both of those have to be converted into their bioavailable forms. That takes place in the liver and the peripheral tissues, in the muscles and skin throughout the body. At that point other molecules, nutritional molecules like selenium, for example, are highly important for that conversion and that bio-availability. So the hormones are released into the blood by the thyroid and then are metabolized in the muscle tissue and the liver? Yes. OK. Great. When they get to where they finally need to go, the cells, what happens? What s the aftereffect of that process? When they get to the cells the intra-cellular metabolism takes place. The cells then can utilize the oxygen and each cell, whether it s in your hair follicle or in the liver cell or a brain cell or in a muscle cell, then can function optimally. The T4 only lasts seven days in the body. That s a whole week. So it s circulating around and is carried around and is available to be converted into T3. But the T3, some of it is also made in the thyroid gland but most of it is converted from T4 in the periphery of the body. It only lasts 24

9 Transcripts Module 1 / page 7 hours. So you have to have very good T3 conversion. That s part of what we ll talk about in terms of sub clinical and these thyroid disorders is that T3 problem and the poor conversion. Then those molecules need to be replaced and they re excreted from the liver and kidneys. Let s talk about the thyroid gland in relation to your health. We kind of laid nice groundwork in terms of what it does, where it is, what it releases. What are some of the challenges people have with thyroid issues? What are some of the problems that are surfacing now? Again, because of its function, the way I look at it is if you don t get enough oxygen to your cells you re not going to function well. You re going to have a slower metabolic rate and you re going to have underfunctioning cells and you re going to start to express a variety of different problems, all the way to true thyroid disease. The main symptoms of low thyroid function, there s a long list of these, but here s some of the main ones - fatigue, stiffness--people who complain about being stiff in the morning. It s not just arthritis. Sometimes that stiffness is actually in the soft tissue, in the muscle and tendons. Thyroid hormone is necessary to keep the tissue supple and not stiff. Weakness in the muscles. Not just tiredness but also weakness. When I m talking to patients I differentiate between if they re just tired, if they can exercise, are they better or worse after exercising and then about weakness. Are they tired and weak? If they go to the gym they not only feel more tired but they don t have the strength to exercise or to lift the weights. Also there s a lethargy. You just don t want to do anything. It s hard to get up, hard to get out of bed. Often people will attribute that to some other problems. The doctor may say, No, you re not sick at all. You re depressed. Often it s neither of those. It s a thyroid hormone problem. Sleepiness. People who oversleep, who sleep 10 or 12 or more hours and say, I need my sleep. Slow to start in the mornings. They can t get up. They can t wake up in the morning. They wake up and it takes them hours to get going. Aches and pains. We ll talk about how fibromyalgia interplays with the thyroid. Even just too much aches and pains. You ache too much after the gym. People say, I don t want to exercise because it hurts too much. Or, I already hurt. I don t want to hurt more. A couple of the symptoms that are really critical from a clinical point of view, because we usually think of fatigue as the main one of the thyroid but dry, coarse skin. If your skin is almost thickening and scaly and coarse, that s often thyroid deficiency. As you treat the person for thyroid improvement their skin starts to become silky again and moist and supple. They have more energy and they re able to exercise. Less aches and pains. Also, hair falling out. Before the hair starts to fall out they may have dry and brittle hair, cracking and thinning. Sometimes it s part of the aging process but sometimes it s thyroid. There s lots of symptoms and a lot of challenges that people have with thyroid. The main conditions are going to be low thyroid, which is hypothyroidism, and high thyroid, which is hyperthyroidism. The third is autoimmune thyroiditis, which can be either low or high. Those are the basic clinical entities. Hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism and then Grave s Disease, which is an autoimmune hyper, or Hashimoto s Disease, which is a hypothyroid autoimmune condition. The old bellshaped curve of thyroid disease, which is pretty broad, has now become narrower and narrower so that we have more and more outliers into the sub clinical low and high thyroid conditions.

10 page 8 / The Thyroid Health Program So the losing of hair. This doesn t have any relation to male-pattern baldness, does it? No, not at all. It s usually over the whole head. Sometimes you ll see by looking at the hair you ll see little fine hairs growing back in but they re very easily broken off. Like after you wash your hair, when you towel your hair dry it will break those little hairs off. At its extreme people will say that when they wash their hair they see a lot of hair on the shower floor. But it s usually the whole head. If you have a tendency to bald in certain areas, you ll have a little more thinning in those areas. Male-pattern baldness is related to too much dihydrotestosterone, a completely different problem. You mentioned that the thyroid helps deliver oxygen to the cells. There s a lot of information out there that low oxygen in the body can actually contribute to cancer. Is there a direct link between the two? Yes. There s a link, maybe not a direct link. There s probably not a direct link between low oxygen and development of cancer. There s two things we know. One is that people with even borderline low thyroid function are four to eight times more likely to develop cancer than those with normal functioning or high functioning thyroid. So there s an oxygen-cancer connection. We know that once tumor genesis takes place and a cancer s growth has developed, it starts to have its own lifecycle. As a matter of fact, they re immortal, the only cell we know that s immortal. They set up an immune island around them and they rob the blood supply and the nutrition from the body. In the core of that tumor it s very oxygen-deficient. It functions differently from normal living cells in animals and plants like we re used to. If you use oxygen therapies like vitamin C and ozone hydrogen peroxide, by getting more oxygen to the body and into the tumor, the belief is that you can defeat the cancer. So there s definitely an oxygen-cancer connection and thyroid plays a role in it. So what exactly affects the thyroid? What causes it to get out of whack? Low oxygen in the air. The most important nutritional deficiency is iodine. We now the goiter belts in the middle of the country where there s low amounts of iodine in the soil and that translates into low iodine content in the food and people in the middle part of the country, Michigan and so forth have more of a tendency to have goiter. However, now food comes from all over the place. It comes from Chili and Israel California. So Michigan people, you don t see them being the goiter belt anymore. But modern foods can be trace-mineral deficient, including selenium and zinc, also important for thyroid function. But the main one is iodine. So iodine and avoiding iodine deficiency is critical for healthy thyroid. Malnutrition itself and also low-calorie diets If you re doing, for example, a low-calorie life-extension program where you re eating 30 percent or less of the average calories that you need, for life-extension, your thyroid and these feedback mechanisms will start to shut down. It will produce sort of a balanced array of thyroid hormones, but it will start to make less. Your metabolism then shuts down because there s not enough nutrition for you to function at a higher level. So everything starts to shut down. Malnutrition or the absence or the deficiency of key trace minerals like selenium, are very important. Stress is another factor. The adrenal gland and the thyroid gland overlap in many ways in terms of the hypothalamic-pituitary axis. Certain pesticides wreck havoc on the thyroid. Hormonal deficiencies like melatonin. When treating thyroid we always add melatonin, different dosages, to the program. It has to be a whole-body program. Too much of other hormones, like estrogen-dominance in women, is going to cause imbalances in the thyroid, aging itself, but unhealthy aging. Many of my healthy, if not all of

11 Transcripts Module 1 / page 9 my healthy older patients in their late 70s, 80s, into their 90s, have relatively normal to normal levels of T3 and T4. Then anti-thyroid foods like soy and alcohol, have a negative effect on thyroid function. For someone who may be fasting on a regular basis, this would be a problem as well. You mentioned low calories so that would be in the same kind of boat for the thyroid. Not necessarily, if you re eating well in between. If you do fasting and cleansing on a regular basis and you don t over-do it and you nourish yourself in between--my rule is 25 percent detoxification and cleansing and 75 percent regeneration and building. If you re weak on the building part and you re weak on the regeneration and you over-emphasize the detoxification fasting and you re borderline malnutrition in between, or you re on a low-calorie diet in between, that could affect it. But if 75 percent of the time you have a strong diet and you do 25 percent of the time even full-on fasting, your body will cycle better and it will rebound better. It s the chronic low-grade malnutrition, low-grade absence of sufficient amount of calories, low-grade absence of the right nutrients, which you just cannot get from modern foods, even if you re on a fully plant-based diet. You re not going to get the maximum nutrient density. So you ll have to supplement that. Then you ll do OK. I ve heard that there s a connection between EMF and radiation and the thyroid. Is that true? Yes. Radiation is not very good at all for the thyroid, like medical radiation from x-rays and CAT scans. It predisposes to cancer. Here s what I was saying earlier. The thyroid gland is really the only gland in your body that is most exposed to the environment. Everything else is either deep inside, hidden under muscle and bones or underneath your clothing. The thyroid gland is right there by your throat. You can wear a hat in the cold weather. Unless you re wearing a scarf you have your throat exposed. So electromagnetic radiation, pollutants and so forth all can affect the thyroid. Sunlight, rhythms of the daytime also can affect thyroid and parathyroid metabolism and hormone activity and secretion. Two of the biggest things that I know that you experience as well as I hear about all the time are chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. What is the role of thyroid hormones in the facilitation of these two conditions? There s a direct and an indirect connection in almost all cases. Clinically I m going to first rule out the main things that cause fatigue, like anemia, vitamin deficiencies, coexisting infection and other disease like liver disease. Those would all directly cause fatigue. Most of the time in the chronic fatigue people, those don t exist or they re mild or correctable and they remain fatigued. Then we re going to look at hormones, first thyroid. I m going to look at it in a very fairly detailed way. Always I screen, right in the beginning, TSH. Then I start to look deeper if there s anything that I m suspicious of. As you know, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia overlap in about 70 percent of patients with either of those conditions, as does the irritable bowel syndrome. In fibromyalgia in particular--and we re looking at T3, particularly at the T3 portion of the thyroid hormone family, because it controls body temperature and stiffness and muscle pain. A sufficient percentage

12 page 10 / The Thyroid Health Program can be fixed, completely cured, fairly quickly with a correct T3 replacement. It s quite amazing. They complain and complain. They get acupuncture sessions after acupuncture sessions. They go for chiropractic after chiropractic adjustment. They change their diet. They do fasting and cleansing. We find the T3 part of it low, have them measure their basal temperature under their arm every day. They take their T3 and within less than a month they re normal people again. That doesn t happen to all of them but there s a significant percentage where it s a T3 problem and it s at the conversion at the periphery between T4 and T3 or what we call a resistance syndrome where they re making enough hormone but it s not getting into the cells. Thyroid hormone should pass readily through the cell membrane. But they also have to relate to the receptors on the cell. So for reasons we don t understand the cell receptors can become less in number or just resistant. They become lazy or fatigued or they won t accept the thyroid molecule and pass it into the cell. But once we get past that those fibromyalgia people respond very, very well. Another thing that s important here is that thyroid hormone plays a key role in the connective tissue and the extra cellular membrane matrix, which is a gel-like substance under your skin. It s in the dermis. It connects through all the connective tissue in your body. This is an interconnected system. It s almost like an organ system in itself, that goes from your toes to your head. The fluid portion of it bathes tissues and gives the cells a fluid environment to live in. When we become toxic two things happen at a deeper level. This is why just fasting and so forth it s very old-fashioned and doesn t work that well, in many of these type of patients. As a matter of fact it makes them significantly more toxic. The cleansing mechanisms, where the fluid is, is not free-flowing enough. It s highly important that during fasting you re sweating, that you re warming up your body. These people who have low basal temperature, if they lower their metabolism through fasting they get significantly worse. It s very hard for me to get them better. This fluid matrix now, that should be like the ocean, moving back and forth and around all the cells and the cells are moving like seaweeds and this free-flow, rhythmic pattern now becomes muddy and toxic and more plastic. It becomes more like rubber. So as the part of your connective tissue systems tries to move between the muscles inflammation develops and pain is created. You barely touch these people and they have pain because there s a high preponderance of inflammatory chemokines and cytokines that have accumulated and can t be detoxified out of that system. Where does that go? It goes out through the skin and it goes into the lymphatic systems. So a wiser, more comprehensive approach to not only thyroid health but fasting and detoxification is so important so that modern people can have more effective results. Is there a thyroid disease epidemic, from what you ve seen through your observation? I think so. It s worldwide. I ve been following this very closely now for about 12 or 14 years. Of course, treating thyroid conditions since the beginning of my career, 30 years ago. You see more and more and more thyroid conditions now. The old way, 20 years ago, the medical school way of talking about hypo and hyper thyroid was that you would see eight hypothyroid cases, predominantly women, and one hyperthyroid case. I started to see more and more and more thyroid cases about six to eight years ago. Pretty soon the ratio was one hypothyroid to four or five hyperthyroids. So it s a double amount. Those are mainly autoimmune cases. Then you start to see a one-to-one ratio, one classical hypothyroid case-- for each hypothyroid basic classical case that s just not producing enough thyroid hormone and you give them basic T4 replacement and they do just fine, they feel much better, to every one of those now we re seeing another sub clinical or autoimmune type of hypothyroidism in a wide spectrum of presentations.

13 Transcripts Module 1 / page 11 There can actually be hyper and hypo, or low and high thyroid, symptoms existing at the same time in the same patient. It s unusual. You didn t see these type of cases when I first started practicing. As I said, it s worldwide. It s not just in the United States where we re over-diagnosing or we have more naturopathic physicians or something like that. I see these cases and read the journals from all over the planet. They have the same problems. The biggest one that we look at is, is this really a spectrum disorder or is it a classifiable, sub clinical type of hypothyroidism? At least we know now that we can look at it as autoimmune types and crossover types and hybrid types an then the sub clinical hypothyroidism, low thyroid, which fall into a couple of main categories. One would be this low body temperature syndrome, so-called Wilson s Syndrome and then the pain and fatigue and constipation syndrome that occurs in the chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and IBS folks, and then the thyroid hormone resistance syndromes and then this variety of autoimmune syndromes. I think the scariest thing about the sub clinical hyper or hypothyroidism is the fact that you can go to your doctor, you can get a thyroid test and they can send you home saying you don t have an issue. Exactly. They re looking at a paradigm and a model that s 120 years old. One of my mentors in Belgium, in endocrine disorders, 5th generation endocrinology family, his great, great grandfather - and I saw the sepia pictures - was among the first in Europe to use pig thyroid glands to treat thyroid cases. They didn t know what was wrong with them. You see these pictures of people, these are 35-year old people and they look 100 years old. The hair is thin and falling out. They have droopy-looking faces. They re very pale. They have no expression at all. They feel terrible and they can t think. Then you see them a month, two or three months later with these old-style cameras from the 1800s, treated with ground-up pig thyroid, and they re a completely different person. I saw some where a 35-year old looks 60-plus years old and very unwell, gradually turning back to a 35-year old with a smile and bright eyes and a full head of dark hair. It s really quite amazing. We re going to talk about more testing and how you can read your thyroid and see how it s operating in module two. This is the end of module one. Dr. Williams, thank you so much for your time. You re very welcome. Thanks so much for listening to this module. For more information about thyroid treatment, including a discount on blood tests, please visit CompleteThyroid.com. Thanks again, and don t forget to live awesome.

14 page 12 / The Thyroid Health Program

15 Module 2 Transcripts

16 page 14 / The Thyroid Health Program Welcome everyone. This is Kevin Gianni from RenegadeHealth.com. I want to personally thank you for taking an interest in your health and investing in this program. The Complete Thyroid Health Program will teach you the cutting-edge national approaches to thyroid treatment so you can understand how your body works and how you can heal naturally. First, before we start, I d like to introduce our special guest, Dr. James Williams. Dr. Williams is a pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, longevity and the quality of life. He s the author of five acclaimed books, including Viral Immunity and Prolonging Health. With more than 25 years of clinical experience treating chronic disease, he brings his experience with over 100,000 patient visits directly to you. In this program I ll be your host while Dr. Williams shares this important information with you. Before we start I want to share this important disclaimer with you. The information in this course is intended for educational purposes only. It does not replace the evaluation and advice of a qualified, licensed health care professional. For detailed information about your thyroid health, please consult with your physician. So let s get started on this module. This is module two of the Thyroid Health program with Dr. J.E. Williams. Today we re going to be talking about the types of thyroid conditions, symptoms and how to identify what s happening through testing. Dr. Williams, thank you for being on the call. It s my pleasure, as always. Thank you so much for having me. All right. Let s dig into this. We talked a little bit about testing in module one but we re going to get into depth today. First let s talk about the thyroid in terms of different conditions. How is thyroid disease categorized? Thyroid disease is categorized into about four to six different main areas. The first one, which is the big one and the most common one and the one that we re going to focus most on in this talk is the hypothyroidism or the low thyroid syndrome. The other one is its opposite, the hyper or high thyroid syndrome. The third one is the autoimmune thyroid diseases which are some types of the hypothyroid and hyperthyroid. Hashimoto s Thyroiditis is a type of low thyroid or hypothyroid and Grave s Disease is a type of hyperthyroid. The difference is that in the autoimmune thyroid diseases there are specific laboratory tests that tell us that your own immune system is now messing around with the thyroid for a variety of reasons. It complicates the picture so you have low thyroid, for example, or hypothyroidism with autoimmune activity. The fourth type used to be considered a sub-type of the hypothyroidism but I believe now we re starting to look at it as an entity in itself. Those are the sub-clinical thyroid spectrum disorders. There s three of those that we know about. There are the low-temperature syndrome, also called Wilson s Disease, the T3 receptor insensitivity also called thyroid hormone resistance and then the poor T4 to T3 conversion. Sometimes we just say those patients are poor T4 to T3 converters. T4 is what your thyroid gland mostly makes. That s the thyroxin that we talked about module one. Every day the thyroid gland produces about 90 milligrams of thyroxin, or T4. It produces only about a third

17 Transcripts Module 2 / page 15 of that, about 30 milligrams per day of T3. So the T3 is the actual active hormone that gets into the cells and does the work in its bioavailable form, which we call free T3. Much of it is made in the body in the liver and in the peripheral tissue, in the muscles and skin and tissue underneath the skin, into T3. The T3 is then transformed into its active or free form and that s the one that gets into the cells. So we have three distinct classes of this thyroid spectrum disorder that are sub-clinical in some cases and in other cases they re actually high levels of TSH making for a true hyperthyroid condition. Sometimes you also see autoimmune involved. So you can have a triple overlapping condition and sometimes you can now see complicated conditions where hyperthyroid and hypothyroid overlap. It s very strange. It s a relatively new phenomenon. We believe that it s caused by environmental influences, toxins in the water, air and food supply. The last one is thyroid cancer. We ve heard a lot about that from the Chernobyl reactor incident a number of years ago. I actually treated several patients from that, Russian and Ukrainian people. We also know that exposure to too much medical x-rays, even dental x-rays, can increase the incidence of thyroid cancer. By the way, on the flip side of that is low thyroid. It increases your susceptibility to all types of cancer by four to eight times. It s important to have a normal functioning thyroid gland. So what does a person experience when their thyroid gland is not functioning well? Here s the interesting part. For hyperthyroid, high thyroid, it s pretty clear. People feel very, very anxious. They feel very irritable. Their eyes are almost like bulging out of their heads. Sometimes they have a goiter. Sometimes they don t. They feel very hot. They can t sleep. They re very hungry. They typically are very lean. No matter how much they eat they don t gain weight. But hypothyroid is sometimes called the great imitator. It mimics all the symptoms of anemia, of chronic fatigue syndrome. It s associated with fibromyalgia. It s associated with nutritional deficiencies. It s associated with adrenal gland deficiencies and adrenal exhaustion. I developed a list I took from my patients over the years and put it together with the medical lists. I have a questionnaire that I ask all my patients that are possibly low thyroid to fill out. I won t read the whole list but here s some. Having exhausted feelings that are not related to stress or the amount of work or exercise you do. Morning tiredness after a full-night s rest. If you re slow to get up in the morning and it takes them a half hour or an hour to get up and they sleep a lot, 8-14 hours and still aren t rested. Depression that doesn t respond to antidepressants or diet or exercise or acupuncture or massage. They have this flat affect, kind of a bland or expressionless look on their face. They can also have the opposite. They can have unexplained anxiety and panic attacks, kind of a trembling feeling. They tend to move in slow motion. They tend to take 20 or 30 seconds, sometimes up to one minute--i had one patient, we timed her. It took her three minutes to respond to every question. You could almost read a book in between. She understood what you said and her cognition was absolutely clear. It was the gap between the response of what she heard you say, what she processed and then what she said. Low voice. Hoarseness without being a smoker, especially in a woman, is often a sign of possible thyroid. And low sex drive. The French call thyroid the love hormone and the love gland, not testosterone or estrogen but thyroid. If there s not enough thyroid they have trouble with orgasms. When you correct the thyroid they become alive again and they become interested.

18 page 16 / The Thyroid Health Program High cholesterol that s unresponsive to diet or cholesterol-lowering medications. Correct the thyroid and it goes down. Achiness and pains and joint pains and stiffness, carpal tunnel syndrome, fibromyalgiatype pains, are all related to thyroid. People with allergies and multiple allergy syndrome. Nobody is that allergic. Well, every once in a while you find one. But the majority of patients are not allergic to everything. Their immune system has gone askew. There s imbalances all over the place. One of the them is the thyroid. Difficulty losing weight and dry skin and hair falling out are some of the classical signs. And there are many, many others. Let me ask you this. That s hypothyroid and hyperthyroid. When does autoimmune thyroid disease come in? Is it an extension of, a further kind of evolution of hyperthyroid or hypothyroid or are they completely different? It s not completely different in terms of symptoms. The patients will have very similar symptoms, if not the same symptoms. When you re checking their markers in the blood you might find that they re quite extreme and there are some other imbalances that we find in the blood. It will lead us to look at the auto markers and then we discover that there s autoimmune markers there. They may have an association with chronic fatigue, deficiency syndromes. They may have fibromyalgia-type syndromes, fibrocytis, myocitis, other connective tissue disorders that give you clues or hints towards looking for the autoimmune component. The symptom profile is not distinct from hypothyroid or hyperthyroid in autoimmune disease. Let s talk about the sub-clinical thyroid disorders. What are they and why are they different than hypothyroid or hyperthyroid? They re different because they re a spectrum disorder. They overlap. They blend. They mimic one and the other. If we re only looking at the paper we ll see a low TSH and we ll think that that patient is hyperthyroid. When we look at the patient we ll see an overweight, very cold, very fatigued, very pale patient who has symptoms of hypothyroid. So the paper and the patient are conflicting. It s something we didn t used to see 10, 20, 30 years ago when I first started practicing. It became increasingly more common until at this point they are probably 50 percent of what you see in clinical practice. So the subclinical types overlap with each other. They overlap with autoimmune. There are two broad categories. One is the true sub-clinical types. Their levels of TSH, T4 and T3 are normal or very close to normal. But they have additional symptoms that lead you to believe the thyroid is not working well. It s not being taken up by the cells well or there s poor conversion between the T4 and T3. So if we look at those three different ones we re going to see the first one is the low temperature syndrome. All of these sub-clinical types are T3 thyroid diseases. Classical hypothyroidism is typically a T4 disease. The thyroid gland is simply not making enough thyroxin. The sub-clinical types are primarily T3 disease. T3 controls more of the metabolism and the body temperature. So if a person has a large part of the symptoms of low thyroid, hypothyroid, and they take my questionnaire and they answer yes to many of those questions, the next thing we want to do is do the blood test. If that comes up fairly normal then we want to start measuring the body temperature. I suggest most patients now start taking their basal temperature right away. Normal core body temperature when you take it by mouth is 98.6, but it can vary several points one way or the other, the range being between 97 and 100. Sometimes people may

19 Transcripts Module 2 / page 17 have a fever at 99, sometimes they won t. They just run warm or the other way around, they tend to run cold. But usually we consider that all core body temperatures of 98 or below are too low and suggest trouble with T3. Basal temperature, which is under the arm, measures more of the basal metabolic rate in the body, how the metabolism is actually working and keeping the body. Many of those patients will have basal temperatures 96, sometimes even 95. Basal temperatures are usually several points lower than core body temperature, by a full point like down to 97 or 96. But anything in the low 97s and definitely anything that s 96 degrees, is too low. That tells us that that patient is not getting enough T3 or regulating body temperature well enough because there s something wrong with how the T3 is working in the body. So that s the first one, the low temperature syndrome, sometimes called Wilson s Disease. He was a medical doctor who really discovered this and started doing the basal temperature based on the Broda Barns basal temperature study. Broda Barns is an MD and PhD who has dedicated more than 50 years of his life to researching, teaching and treating thyroid disorders and related endocrine disorders. His most significant contribution was that thyroid hormone blood tests left many patients with clinical symptoms of hypothyroidism undiagnosed and therefore untreated. So he used natural desiccated thyroid. When he treated his patients he found that their symptoms improved a lot better than with synthetic thyroid hormone. Since then Dr. Wilson picked that up, also an MD, and discovered that it was really in the T3 aspect of the thyroid hormone. So he focused on a slow release, bio-identical form of T3. At one time it was only made in Alabama at one compounding pharmacy, about 20 years ago. It was the only place you could get it. Now all compounding pharmacies make it. It releases slowly because T3 tends to go into the body very quickly and dissipates also very quickly. So you want it to release slowly or you want to take it in small amounts spread out throughout the day. When you take the T3 we usually start off in low dosages then gradually bring the patient up. Watch their temperature as well as their blood tests, until their temperature is up into the mid-97 range and preferably about 97.7, 97.8, closer to 98. As the temperature goes up the numbers on the blood test also improve and usually the patient improves as well. So that s the first one. That s easy to follow and check. The second one is the receptor sensitivity or thyroid hormone resistance. That s very difficult to look for. How we do that is we look for the T3 uptake, which gives us an idea of available hormone-binding sites. The binding proteins in this case thyroid hormone binding protein or globulin, is measured in the blood and then the uptake of that, the T3 uptake, is measured. That gives us an idea if it s T4 or true T3 disease and if there s some trouble with their receptors. It s a good test. The test mechanisms are very, very good, however it will only provide some clues to make decisions on that, whether you would give a patient T3 or not T3 or how you would treat that patient. Then the poor T4 to T3 conversion, that s very difficult to test. We don t know what s going on in the periphery. We don t know what s going on in the liver. So in all of these disorders, including the autoimmune diseases, we tend to treat them as if there was a combination overlapping. We provide nutrients, particularly trace minerals like selenium that help the T4 convert into T3. We also provide iodine in the organic forms to help build the molecules in a better way, and thyrocine, an amino acid. We ll talk about more of that in detail in the next modules. I want to ask about thyroid hormone resistance. Is this similar to insulin resistance or is it completely different?