Dr. Hotze on Common Symptoms of Hypothyroidism

April 28, 2023

In this podcast video and transcription, Dr. Steven Hotze discusses the common symptoms of hypothyroidism. Learn what physicians should look for when making a diagnosis and the most effective treatment to help resolve your symptoms.

Podcast Transcription:

1:42: The active thyroid hormone works as a spark plug and catalyzes energy production in your power plants in your cells. The power plants are called mitochondria.  

1:55: And literally, these power plants produce electricity.  And that electricity is carried by a currency called ATP, Adenosine Triphosphate, and it goes to various biochemical processes in the cells and catalyzes or allows the energy to be transferred so the biochemical processes can produce whatever needs to be done within the cell.

2:27: If we don’t produce enough energy in the cells, we’re low-voltage, and we tend to be sluggish, and this is what happens as we age.

3:00: T4 is inactive. It’s not the active thyroid hormone. It has to be carried and received by your cell.

3:25: …when you have adequate amount of T3 in your cells, your cells function at high levels of energy production. So you think well, you feel well, you have energy, you have get up and go. You’re not sick, you have good bowel function, breathe well, and you’re just in good shape, and you feel great.

3:46: When we don’t produce enough T3 within the cells, if the T4 is blocked from being converted to T3, the active thyroid hormone, then we tend to run really sluggish.

6:23: And the thyroid blood test routinely, what the conventional doctor looks at is your TSH level, your thyroid stimulating hormone. Now, the thyroid stimulating hormone is made by the pituitary gland in your brain. It reads the amount of thyroid hormone in the blood, which is primarily T4, remember the inactive thyroid hormone.

8:24: Well, let me tell you why you can’t go by blood work alone. Blood work can be helpful, but it’s not the end all be all of a diagnosis. The most important thing a physician can do is to listen to your symptoms.

12:08: Now, another cause of low thyroid in the cells is a condition called autoimmune thyroiditis. That’s when your immune system makes antibodies to your own thyroid hormone.

14:48: …when you have estrogen dominance, that causes the liver to produce an antibody called thyroid-binding globulin. It binds the thyroid hormone. That’s what thyroid-binding globulin binds. So it keeps the thyroid bound up in the blood so it can’t be assimilated properly by the receptors on the cells.

15:16: …there’s no measurement of how much T3 active thyroid hormone you have in your cells. That is a clinical diagnosis. And I learned from Dr. Broda Barnes that that’s the best way to make the diagnosis for hypothyroidism, is a clinical diagnosis.

17:40: …in males, testosterone enables males to properly convert the inactive hormone T4 to T3. So as males age, they tend to have the symptoms of low thyroid, as well.

19:07: The other thing we find is that in people with low thyroid, they can also have difficulty with their adrenal glands.

20:53: One thing you might be interested in…gluten sensitivity. If you’re gluten-sensitive, you make antibodies that will also attack the thyroid hormone…and when it binds to it, then that thyroid hormone can’t enter the cell.

Podcast Transcription:

Dr. Steven Hotze: Hello, I’m Dr. Steve Hotze, welcome to the program today. We have a most interesting program prepared for you, and we’re going to discuss a very critical and important topic – the topic of hypothyroidism: Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness. Now, I show you this book by Dr. Broda Barnes, which was written in 1970.

While I was a member of the Pan-American Allergy Society, and I had been president of that society back in 1992, a colleague of mine, Dr. Richard Mabry from Victoria, Texas, who was an OBGYN doctor who also did allergy treatment, came up to me and he said, “Steve, you’ve got a lot of patients with hypothyroidism.” I said, “I do?” He said, “You have a lot.” “Well, how would I know?” He said, “Well, you need to read Dr. Broda Barnes book, Hypothyroidism: The Unexpected Illness, and he will describe to you how you make your diagnosis of low thyroid condition.”

Now, the thyroid gland is located in the neck. It produces thyroid hormones. It is shaped like a butterfly. The thyroid hormones are produced and secreted into the bloodstream. They don’t do anything in the bloodstream. They’ve got to get into the cells of your body, in the cells of your body.

The active thyroid hormone works as a spark plug and catalyzes energy production in your power plants  in your cells. The power plants are called mitochondria, and literally, these power plants produce electricity.  And that electricity is carried by a currency called ATP, Adenosine Triphosphate, and it goes to various biochemical processes in the cells and catalyzes or allows the energy to be transferred so the biochemical processes can produce whatever needs to be done within the cell.

So if we have good production of electricity and we’re high voltage, our cells run well, we’re high energy.

If we don’t produce enough energy in the cells, we’re low-voltage, and we tend to be sluggish, and this is what happens as we age.

Now, the thyroid hormones are produced from the thyroid are primarily T4 thyroid with four iodine atoms. T3 is thyroid hormone with three iodine atoms. T4 is produced – about 94% of all the thyroid hormone produced in the gland is T4. About 6% is T3.

Now what’s interesting is, T4 is inactive. It’s not the active thyroid hormone. It has to be carried and received by your cell. In the cell, there’s an enzyme called deiodinase. It removes one of the iodine atoms. Iodine’s very important for the production of thyroid hormone. It removes one of the iodine atoms and leaves you with T3, the active thyroid hormone.

And when you have adequate amount of T3 in your cells, your cells function at high levels of energy production. So you think well, you feel well, you have energy, you have get up and go. You’re not sick, you have good bowel function, breathe well, and you’re just in good shape, and you feel great.

Symptoms of Hypothyroidism

When we don’t produce enough T3 within the cells, if the T4 is blocked from being converted to T3, the active thyroid hormone, then we tend to run really sluggish.

• We get symptoms such as malaise, fatigue.
• We have difficulty with weight. You can have weight gain, fluid retention.
• You get joint pain, muscle pain.
• You can have sluggish bowel function.
• You have difficulty focusing or thinking.
• You get, I hear it often described as brain fog, short-term memory loss.
• Go to bed, sleep all night, and you get up and you still feel tired.
• Commonly, particularly in women, we see hair loss at a younger age.
• Dry, thin hair.
• Dry skin, brittle fingernails.
• Low body temperature, a sensitivity to cold. Cold hands, cold feet, even during the summer.
• Headaches.
• Women not uncommonly will have menstrual irregularities or difficulty conceiving or carrying a baby to full term.

Why would all these symptoms develop? Because there’s low energy production. These symptoms are classical symptoms of a low active thyroid hormone, T3, within the cells producing energy.

So you often have these symptoms and problems, and maybe you’ve even read in magazines, commonly we’d see in women magazines, at least annually, there’d be something to talk about hypothyroidism. And I’m sure many of you have had many of these symptoms, and you go to look on the internet, and these are symptoms of low thyroid. “I wonder if I could have low thyroid?”

And inevitably you print something out, you read it, maybe you get a book and you read about low thyroid and you say, gosh, I’ve got all the symptoms. You go to your conventional doctor and your conventional doctor says, what seems to be the problem?

You start naming off these symptoms. He just kind of rolls his eyes and goes, “Oh, another one of those, huh?” And you go, “Doctor, do you think I might have hypothyroidism?” And he goes, “What makes you think that?” “Because I’ve got all these symptoms.” “Well, I doubt you have low thyroid, but we’ll check it.” Or you could say, and sometimes the doctor says, “Could you check it?” You ask the doctor.

And sometimes they’ll tell you, “Well, it’s not covered by your insurance. You don’t have the symptoms. I don’t think you’ve got it.” And you go, “Well, I’ll pay for it, whatever costs.”

So you end up getting a thyroid blood test. And the thyroid blood test routinely, what the conventional doctor looks at is your TSH level, your thyroid stimulating hormone. Now, the thyroid stimulating hormone is made by the pituitary gland in your brain. It reads the amount of thyroid hormone in the blood, which is primarily T4, remember the inactive thyroid hormone.

If you’re not making enough thyroid hormone and your T4 levels are low, and your thyroid levels are just low, the thyroid stimulating hormone is kicked in by the pituitary gland. It starts producing thyroid stimulating hormone. It stimulates…pituitary gland produces thyroid stimulating hormones to stimulate the thyroid gland. To do what? To produce more thyroid hormone.

So conventional doctors will look at that. If your TSH, thyroid simulating hormone, is elevated, they say, well, you have hypothyroidism. And they’ll put you on a synthetic thyroid T4, called Synthroid or Levothyroxine, and it’s the inactive thyroid hormone. So they give you the inactive thyroid hormone, T4.

And invariably you go doc, “I just don’t feel any better. I still feel bad.” He goes, “Well, your blood tests are all normal now, so it can’t be the thyroid. You must be a depressed person.” Next thing you know, you’re on antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, sleep medications, got you on a whole bunch of drugs, plus your thyroid, and you’re not feeling well. We see this commonly in individuals who have been diagnosed by a conventional doctor with hypothyroidism.

Although that is rarely the case. Most people come in and tell us, “doctor said my blood tests were normal, even though I have all these symptoms. But I think I’ve got a little thyroid because I’ve got all these symptoms, what else could it be?” He said, “Your blood work’s normal.” And I told him, “But I’m not normal.”

 Well, let me tell you why you can’t go by blood work alone. Blood work can be helpful, but it’s not the end all be all of a diagnosis. The most important thing a physician can do is to listen to your symptoms. If you’ve got symptoms of fatigue, low energy level, you can’t sleep soundly, you have difficulty thinking, you have brain fog, you have difficulty losing weight, or you’re gaining a lot of weight no matter what you do, even when you eat right, you have joint, muscles aches and pains, you’re stiff, you’re bloated, you’re swollen, you have thin hair, loss of the lateral third of your eyebrows.

Your tongue’s enlarged. How can you tell if your tongue’s enlarged? Stick it out. If it’s all modeled around, it’s growing, growing into your teeth, and that causes a modeling effect on it. Kind of like you see on a pie. When you have put the batter on top of the pie and put the flower on, it kind of has a little modeling effect around the edge. That’s what the tongue looks like. It’s indented.

You can have loss of body hair, and you just don’t feel well, you don’t sleep well. You get recurring and chronic illnesses, you just feel run down. You feel sick and tired. And that happens commonly in midlife. Thirties, forties, you just start feeling yucky. You can go like, what happened? My get up and go, it’s got up and gone.

So you’ve seen the doctor and he goes, “Oh, your blood tests are normal.” Well, let me tell you why the blood tests turn out to be normal. The way the lab records the blood, they take and get the range of normal. It’s determined by the lab. It’s not determined by the doctor, what’s the normal range.

The lab takes the last, all the labs from the last day or the last week, and it averages out the score on TSH and on thyroid, T4 and T3. And it takes an average. And call this the mean, it’s like a bell-shaped curve. Here’s the mean, the average. And they say two standard deviations on each side of the mean is the normal range. Well, that’s as wide as the Grand Canyon, as tall as the Empire State Building. 95% of the people will fall within two standard deviations of the average or the mean. That’s the bell-shaped curve. 95% of people fall on that.

So if it’s as tall as the Empire State Building, and you’re at one time when you were younger, your thyroid level was up in this level in an optimal range, and now it’s fallen 50 or 60%, it’s still in the range down at the bottom of the range, but the doctor says it’s low but not low enough to treat. It’s like telling a drowning person…  “I’m drowning, I’m drowning.” “Well, you’re not drowned. Not until you go down under. I’ll come and get you when you go under.” Well, the doctors, that’s what they say. “You’re not low enough to treat.”

So they’re basing it strictly on blood tests. At the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, we listen to your complaints and to your symptoms and try to determine what…we know the symptoms have an underlying cause. Routinely, there’s one underlying cause of symptoms.

There may be multiple, particularly when you deal with hormones because the thyroid hormones affect the female hormones, and affect the male hormones, and affect the adrenal hormones. Hormones work together in synergy.

So when we’re talking about hormonal decline, that creates a host of symptoms that we’ve described, and the way to solve the problem is to replenish the hormones.

Autoimmune Thyroiditis

 Now, another cause of low thyroid in the cells is a condition called autoimmune thyroiditis. That’s when your immune system makes antibodies to your own thyroid hormone. And those antibodies bind the thyroid in the blood so it can’t get into the cells. And they also attack the thyroid gland itself and cause it to produce low levels of thyroid hormone.

In some cases, and it’s very rare compared to low thyroid, people will develop hyperthyroid caused by autoimmune thyroiditis. And that’s where the antibodies attack the thyroid gland, and it gets inflamed, and it begins to weep out thyroid hormone in high amounts. And you become hyperthyroid, you get jittery, shaky. You lose a lot of weight, you can’t sleep. You’re just anxious all the time. We see this rarely. We’ve seen it, but we see it rarely compared to low thyroid.

Most women, as they march through their menstrual life, will develop symptoms of hypothyroidism. That’s because the estrogen hormone is imbalanced with the progesterone. Those are the two hormones that women primarily make, estrogen hormones, and there are three kinds, estriol, estradiol, and estrone. And they make progesterone in mid-cycle.

So the estrogen hormones proliferate the inner lining of the womb when you ovulate. Then you make progesterone that matures the inner lining of the womb waiting for a pregnancy. If there’s no pregnancy, then after 28 days the hormones stop being made and you slough the inner lining of the womb and have a period, and then you start over again.

Well, as a woman marches through her menstrual life, the estrogen hormones tend to dominate. She often has anovulatory cycles. When a woman hits her late thirties or forties, she doesn’t ovulate every month, and the periods will often time adjust to that, and they’ll become heavier, and have more clotting and more cramping, and headaches, and mood swings, and breast tenderness begins to happen earlier and earlier before a period. Instead of three days or five days, now it’s a week before the period she begins to have these symptoms, and her periods become heavier.

Instead of being every three to five days, five to seven days, there’s seven to nine days clotting, breakthrough bleeding. And this is caused by estrogen dominance. I write about it in my book, Hormones, Health, and Happiness, and I encourage you to get that book. And we’ll give it to you, you just call the office (281-698-8698) and we’ll give you that book. I want you to understand about how the female hormones work, and men about how testosterone works.

So anyway, when you have estrogen dominance, that causes the liver to produce an antibody called thyroid-binding globulin. It binds the thyroid hormone. That’s what thyroid-binding globulin binds. So it keeps the thyroid bound up in the blood so it can’t be assimilated properly by the receptors on the cells. So you don’t get enough thyroid in the cells, you have it in your blood. The doctor goes, “you’ve got plenty of thyroid.”

“It’s in the blood, doc. It’s not in my cells.” I know that because…and there’s no measurement of how much T3 active thyroid hormone you have in your cells. That is a clinical diagnosis. And I learned from Dr. Broda Barnes that that’s the best way to make the diagnosis for hypothyroidism, is a clinical diagnosis.

So instead of treating you, oh, you’re fatigued. Well, we’re going to give you a an upper, we’ll give you a little Adderall. And you’re having difficulty with weight? Well, we’ll give you some diet pills. You can’t sleep? Oh, we’ll give you sleep medication. And you have joint muscle pain and you’re depressed? We’ll give you antidepressants and we’ll give you some anti-inflammatories.

Next thing you know, you’re on a pot full of pills for all these symptoms that are caused by one primary problem, and that is the in decline and imbalance of your hormones, particularly thyroid hormone.

So our philosophy is this, if you have the symptoms of hypothyroidism, I believe you. We check the blood, we check to see if you have autoimmune thyroiditis. Our treatment won’t be any different whether you do or don’t. But we will add and give you a therapeutic trial of natural desiccated dried thyroid. And it’s derived from pork. And it has higher levels of the active hormone T3, and lower levels of the inactive hormone T4. It’s about 80-20 ratio.

So when we give this and we start off on low dose, low dose of thyroid, and we gradually increase it every two weeks until you’re… We follow you and see if you have any adverse symptoms, which you could. You get too much thyroid, you get shaky, jittery.

But routinely, people will notice they get bumped. They may not notice on the first level that we take level two, we add three tablets, four tablets over a month or two months. And then we see, really over two months initially, and we see how you’re responding. And we follow that up, and then we find out what level.

You go, “Doc, I’m really feeling good again. I’ve got energy, I’m thinking clearly.”

And we put you on a good healthy eating program, as well. Because you can take all the thyroid you want. If you don’t eat right, you’re not going to lose weight. You’ve got to eat healthy. And we talk about that and instruct you on how you can eat healthy.

So once we get you up on the thyroid and balance out in women, their female hormones, and by the way, in males, testosterone enables males to properly convert the inactive hormone T4 to T3. So as males age, they tend to have the symptoms of low thyroid, as well.

So in females, we will add a little bit of thyroid based upon their clinical symptoms, and increase it incrementally. And then we’ll also put them on natural female hormones. If they’re premenopausal, then they usually get progesterone day 15 through 28.

And then we may also give them, if they’re perimenopausal, right around menopause, and having some hot flashes and all that, we may add a little bit of estrogen. And that carries you right through the change, and you don’t have all these problems with the night sweats, and the depression, the weight gain and feeling terrible. We just kind of guide you through on natural female hormones, which you continue to take, and that helps protect your heart, keep your bones strong, keeps you thinking young, and feeling young, and feeling well.

Testosterone in men affects their initiative, their assertiveness, their sense of wellbeing, their self-confidence, their moods, their goal-orientation, their drive, their directiveness, their analytical ability. All these are brain functions.

The hormones, both female and male, affect the way you think and feel. So if you’re having problems with depression and mood swings and panic attacks and all that, your hormones are out of balance, and it may be thyroid and your sex hormones, and that can be very important.

The other thing we find is that in people with low thyroid, they can also have difficulty with their adrenal glands. They oftentimes have adrenal fatigue, don’t make enough natural cortisol, so we can address that, and we address adrenal fatigue, as well.

So this is how we handle hypothyroidism, and we follow your blood test to make sure we keep you within a normal range. And if we do that, then you’re going to find that you regain your energy, you regain your vitality. The whole goal really is for you to have energy, vitality, and enthusiasm for life.

That’s the whole basis of our program, is to help you develop energy within your cells, your mitochondria, to help you have energy, vitality, and enthusiasm for life. And quit being sick and tired of being sick and tired. We want to increase your longevity with a healthy lifespan. We don’t want you to just live longer, and be sick and tired all the time. Want you to be full of energy and full of vitality, and enthusiastic, and that’s what thyroid can do.

Now, when I started treating for thyroid back…and I found in, we did primarily allergy when I first started this practice. I found that 20% of the females and 13% of the males that we treated had antibodies to their thyroid gland. They had autoimmune thyroiditis, which is also known as Hashimoto thyroiditis after the doctor that recognized it and described it back in 1912.

So we test for that and we find that a large percentage of our allergy patients have autoimmune thyroiditis. One thing you might be interested in…gluten sensitivity. If you’re gluten-sensitive, you make antibodies that will also attack the thyroid hormone. And what antibodies do is, an anti-thyroid antibody…here’s the thyroid hormone coming down, and the antibody comes and gloms onto it. And when it binds to it, then that thyroid hormone can’t enter the cell.

Now let me mention something else to you that is a problem, and that’s with chlorine and fluoride. These are halogens. I mentioned to you earlier that iodine is absolutely critical for production of thyroid hormones. Every thyroid hormone has iodine atoms attached to it. Now those atoms are halogens. And fluoride poisons can replace the iodine in the thyroid, and competes with iodine so you don’t make proper thyroid hormone. It also poisons the enzyme that converts T4 to T3.

So you’ve got to get fluoride out of your water, get reverse osmosis. And don’t be drinking tap water, and get fluoride out of your toothpaste. That’s really critical and important.

Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us today to discuss hypothyroidism and if you give us a call at (281) 698-8698 and ask for my book on hypothyroidism (Hypothyroidism, Health & Happiness), we will be glad to send you a copy free of charge and free shipping. I want you to have this so that you can get yourself on a path of health and wellness, naturally.

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