I had a patient mention to me, she had spoken to her family doctor about doing the cleanse. And, her doctor told her, "That's ridiculous. We have a liver and some kidneys and their job is to detoxify us, and you don't need to take a bunch of pills for them to do their job. It's what they do."
I've heard that before. It's a common discussion that happens. Generally... I have a truck that's designed to drive around and get me to work and back, but if I don't put gas in it, it can't do that. If I don't have oil in it, if it doesn't have transmission fluid or coolant in it, if the battery's not charged. There are a lot of things that need to be in place for that vehicle to do its job the way it was intended.
So, our liver and our kidneys are not all that different. They need certain nutrients, they need certain processes to work the way they're supposed to and to be supplied with lots of things.
Now, if we don't have, like magnesium, for example. Magnesium binds to certai...
So I had another patient I wanted to talk about, another interesting case. This one also has to do with blood sugar management, type 2 diabetes, that kind of stuff. So I just posted another one kind of in that genre. I figured I'd stick with the trend and throw another one of these up here.
This is an older gentleman. We've been working with him for a while. He does have a cancer history, and blood sugar is not well managed. We're running fasting blood sugars in the 150s, 140s most of the time, and that's pretty much with diet. Triglycerides tend to run in the 165, kind of 170 range. I like it below 100, so definitely not saying this is good blood sugar management. But we had seen worse on him. Hemoglobin A1C had been running in the upper sevens. Again, not where I'd like to see it, but better than it's been. We didn't have a fasting insulin, partly because I wasn't the one that ran the previous blood work, but that's kind of where we were.
Now, he had gone in for a su...
I want you to understand when you were born, you were little bitty. I don't know. Your mom will tell you. Five, six, seven, eight, nine pounds, something like that. Now you weigh considerably more. Let's say, I'm guessing, let's say you're 115, 120 pounds, something like that. That's a difference of over 110 pounds from when you were born. That 110 pounds did not come out of thin air. You didn't photosynthesize it. It's not sunlight. That 100 plus pounds is from what you ate. Those were the building blocks to build who you are today.
Moving forward, you need to understand and ask yourself regularly when you see your food on the plate, "Do I want to build my body out of what's on that plate? Do I want to build my body out of steak and vegetables, or do I want to build my body out of mac and cheese and some crackers? Do I want to build my body out of McDonald's or Wendy's or Taco Bell, or do I want to build my body out of chicken and vegetables?" Those are questions we al...
Another common question that came up is, how do you swallow supplements? Some people have trouble swallowing pills. And so I give this advice quite a bit at the office. It usually works very well. The two things I point out to people, one is, "You swallow chunks of food larger than those pills on a very regular basis." If you were to take a bite of something, chew it up, and right before you swallow it, spit it out and look at it, don't do this in public, it's bigger than you think. And you swallow that stuff all the time without an issue. So a lot of times it's your brain getting in the way, making you tense, making you think you're going to choke, and it keeps you from doing that. So be aware, you swallow bigger things all the time.
The second important note to make is that pills and capsules behave differently when you swallow them or when you put them in your mouth. So if I were to put water in my mouth and then drop a solid tablet in my mouth, that tablet is going ...
Dr. Krupka (00:01):
So I just had a situation with a patient. I thought I'd discuss it since we recently did a couple of thyroid hormone related videos. Had a patient call in today. We were going over some of her thyroid results. She deals with another practitioner to get her thyroid hormone prescribed. She takes NP thyroid, which is kind of a mix of T4 and T3. So there was a misunderstanding on the part of her practitioner, and it's a good example of what can happen if you don't understand what the different numbers mean.ย I'm just going to go over it with you real quick. Because she's taking thyroid hormone, her TSH is very low. Remember, TSH is how you ask for thyroid hormone. If you're taking pretty much everything you need for thyroid hormone, your pituitary doesn't have a reason to ask you to make more, right?
(00:56):
So your TSH is going to go very low. It's perfectly normal. We expect it. In fact, in cases where someone's had thyroid cancer, they'll give them enough T4 that...
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Autoimmune thyroid problems to some degree autoimmune problems in general, but I'm going to kind of try to keep it to Hashimoto's on this video. But how do they develop? What goes wrong? Can you do anything about it other than just replace hormone? Can you reverse it? Can you get back off thyroid hormone once you've been taking it? Let's tackle those issues in today's video. So I did a video previously about Hashimoto's. What is it? How you test for it? What are the criteria for diagnosing it? I'll put a link to that onto this one, but otherwise, just go back through my blog. You'll find it. It should be posted very close to when I'm posting this one. The intention is to post that one in the following week, post this one, so it shouldn't be hard to find, but assuming you remember all that or you took notes or you've just watched it.
(00:51):
Let's talk about how something like Hashimoto's would develop Hashimoto's. Again, quick reminder, it's antibodies to the thy...
(00:02):
Hypothyroidism, TPO antibodies, some lab numbers kind of criteria for diagnosis and the physiology of making thyroid hormone. Let's talk about that today. I've had some questions lately. I realize I haven't done one of these videos in quite a while, so let's knock this out. Hashimoto's is going to be a name used for the condition of having antibodies toward your thyroid. I'm going to get a little more specific with you, but I think in common terms, I think we've come to the point where if you have an autoimmune thyroid condition, they're just going to call it. I think that's probably fine. I don't think getting super specific about that really makes much of a difference. You'll see why I say that in a minute. So if you have an autoimmune attack on your thyroid, it's going to be called Hashimoto's. Now, let's go through how you make thyroid hormone so that we kind of have the same terminology as I talk about testing and diagnosing.
(01:00):
So you have a gland kind of tucked...
I received an article just recently written by Dr. Ron Grisanti and he is with Functional Medicine University. That's one of the places where I trained. So I get their articles from time to time. They are usually pretty good. They're very concise. So I want to share this one with you. This one's about a lab test called APO B or Apolipoprotein B. Now we're all used to doctors using a standard cholesterol panel or lipid panel to kind of judge the risk of cardiovascular disease. Well, if you've been seeing me for any length of time, you know that I kind of disagree with the utility of a basic lipid panel for that. I think you can learn some things from the triglycerides. There are a couple of ratios you can run, but it's limited in what it can give you. So one of the tests that's becoming more popular now, and we do it on our annual physical panel is called Apolipoprotein B, and it's proven to be more predictive of who's likely to have cardiovascular disease or plaque in the arteries than...
So a question I get regularly from patients is, can they get their family practice doctor, or gynecologist, or endocrinologist, whomever, to run our lab panels instead of us running them? Which I don't mind. I tell the patients regularly, I don't care who orders it. As long as it's got the components that I need, it'll work for us. So that comes up regularly.
Well, there are several reasons why we've had very little success getting other doctors to run our lab panels. So I just want to run through this real quickly. It's, again, something I answer pretty regularly during an average week at the office.
So number one, understand that I do functional medicine, and the lab panels that we've put together are specifically geared toward finding underlying mechanisms. Looking for problems before they are so far down the road that they're diagnosable. Looking for indications that there's dysfunction even if there's not disease at this point.
That's, to a large de...
Magnesium deficiency is probably the second most common nutritional deficiency in the industrialized world, right? Definitely in the us. Um, it, it kind of goes back and forth with vitamin D depending on who you talk to, but that's how it made its way onto our foundational five. We find magnesium deficiency in, I probably, I would say 50 or 60% of the patients in which we test magnesium. If they're not already supplementing with it, they end up being deficient in it. Um, vitamin D is probably a little bit higher than that. Um, and, and I don't know if that's just because more people are supplementing with magnesium, but it's an issue. So real quick testing for magnesium, uh, very specific test. You will get a magnesium test a lot of times in your regular lab work, but it is a serum magnesium test. The normal range will be somewhere between probably one and three, something like that.
(00:57)
Um, and, and that's not an appropriate test for magnesium. It's accurate...
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