Lab testing is a great medical tool that doctors use multiple times a day. Patients come in saying my labs show this or that and ask if I can fix them as the doctor. First of all, not all labs tell us what is actually going on. For example, I had a patient who went from walking to a wheelchair in 6 months. The labs were fine. Nothing we were doing helped so we sent him to a neurologist who was a nerve specialist. He said the patient was suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease which is a very debilitating disease that makes you weaker and weaker. The nerves stop firing and they can die. He said we had overdosed the patient on B12. The patient came back and he did not look like a Lou Gehrig’s type of patient so we looked at him genetically and we realized that he had plenty of B12 in the blood but none in his cells because he has a TCN-2 genetic defect that meant he could not get B12 into a cell. Four weeks later he is walking and just fine. You see just because a lab is so called normal or abnormal doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the problem. He was not overdosed on B12 but was actually dying because of no B12 in his cells. A number of lab tests show how much of a substance is in the blood but not in a cell.
Same thing with thyroid labs. Doctors often order TSH and T4 levels and if all is ok then that means your thyroid is ok. TSH is made in the pituitary gland in the brain and tells the thyroid gland to make T4 and T3 which are the 2 thyroid hormones. These 2 hormones are carried in the blood to 99% of all cells in the body. The thyroid is not called the master gland for nothing. T4 and T3 make hundreds of proteins and enzymes in a cell and cause the mitochondria which is the battery pack in a cell to make energy. There are so many genes involved with how the thyroid hormone works in the cell that if any of them are off or working too fast or slow you can’t make energy. There are no lab tests that can tell us that. Only specialized genetic testing can do that. But there is one test which really tells us what is happening inside your cells, concerning the thyroid, it is the basal body temperature test.
If a patient has blocked arteries i.e. coronary artery disease it is because to have cholesterol build up in an artery mucopolysaccharides will be produced by the body which acts on the matrix for the cholesterol to sit on and block a vessel. A number of European studies have shown that when mucopolysaccharides are reduced the cholesterol can’t stick to an artery. You need adequate thyroid function for this to happen. Thyroid hormones decrease mucopolysaccharides in the arteries. Mucopolysaccharides are felt to be a major cause of a number of diseases i.e. RA, chronic renal disease, depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, menstrual problems, coronary artery disease, and hypertension. So talk to your doctor and he or she can look at your basal body temperature and tell you if a thyroid issue may be underlying as your labs may not be telling you the true picture of what’s going on in your body.