I want to take a minute and talk to you about checking your blood pressure. I had this discussion yesterday and it was suggested to me to do a video on it, and I think that's probably a good idea. I'll briefly go over mechanically how to check your blood pressure, but the bigger point of this video is to talk about how much data to collect to get an understanding of what's going on. So I'll get to that in just a second. As far as mechanically how to do it, I mean we all have the experience of going into our doctor's office or dentist or whoever, and you get your blood pressure checked and maybe it's good, maybe it's not, but it's a single reading and a single reading is never, well, I shouldn't say never. A single reading is generally not considered to be enough to make clinical decisions like should we put someone on medication or not.
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Now, there are readings that are so out of the normal range that you have to take action, right? But when you're talkin...
What is functional medicine? It's a question I get fairly frequently worth doing. A video on functional medicine to me is best described starting out by comparing it to conventional medicine or prescriptive medicine because that's what most people are familiar with. Anytime you do Teladoc or you get a sinus infection, you go to the doctor, whatever you're doing, conventional or prescriptive medicine in most cases. So it's all diagnosis based. It's about gathering up information on you. What are your symptoms? What are your signs like? Physical signs, symptoms would be like, I have a headache. A sign would be, look at this rash, right? They're a little bit different, but you get the subjective ones, which are the symptoms, the objective ones, which are the signs. You put that together, you add some lab work to it, and hopefully at some point you qualify to be labeled with a particular diagnosis.
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So you have your complaints, you gather the information, you...
I had a request to do an updated thyroid testing video, like what's in a proper thyroid panel and why do we do it and what do the numbers mean? So I'm kind of going to just go through the list. Name the test. What are the normal ranges for us, the functional normal ranges, why do we do it? What does it mean? How does it interact with the other tests? So if you have a thyroid panel either from me or from somebody else and you want to pull it up and go through it while I do the video, hopefully it'll help things make sense for you. But I think I've done these in the past. Someone was having trouble finding one, so they asked me to do an updated version. Here it is. So when you do a thyroid panel, the lab mixes it up and presents it in different chunks.
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So I'm going to go through it in the order in which your body makes and processes thyroid hormone from asking for it in the beginning, all the way to active thyroid hormone at the end of this. So you may hav...
I want to share with you a couple of strategies for respiratory illness. These were things that were kind of battered around during covid, and of all the things going on during covid, these were a couple that I thought were pretty helpful for people, and I think that they still have some utility moving forward. So I want to share them with you. The first one I'm going to give you is a recipe for nebulizing. Now, if you don't have a nebulizer, this isn't going to help you. You can get a nebulizer on Amazon relatively inexpensively. I think it's like 50 bucks at this point. I would say every family probably ought to have a nebulizer in the house and know how to use it. You may never need it, but for the expense and the peace of mind, I think it probably makes sense to have one around.
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I will also say, in my opinion, respiratory illnesses post covid are not behaving like they did before. Covid, I don't know if we're different or if the illnesses are differen...
I have a list of things that I wish most of my patients had at home, and I would imagine most doctors feel the same way. So I'm going to share that list with you and see if there are gaps in this or someplace where you could kind of fill in and make sure that you have a full compliment of these things at home. Now, this is more about assessment or diagnostics. This is not for treatment. That's a different discussion. But if you were to call me after hours or on the weekend and say, Hey, I've got this situation, I'm not sure what to do, being able to get some information from these few things would likely help me make a decision. So let's run through the list real quick. This is not in any particular order. The first three or four of these could probably all arguably be in the most important spot, but the first thing I put on the list was a blood pressure cuff.
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Being able to know if you're dealing with either a high blood pressure or low blood pressure sit...
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. 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.
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Let's talk about how something like Hashimoto's would develop Hashimoto's. Again, quick reminder, it's antibodies to the thy...
Back in 2015, not too long ago, in a medical journal called Diabetes…aptly named. There was a research article that just recently came across my desk. The lead author's last name was Nolan and N-O-L-A-N if you want to look it up. The article was basically discussing what they present as a new concept that maybe with type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance, maybe the insulin resistance itself is not the enemy. That's a pretty new concept in conventional medicine. So what they lay out is for the worst cases of type 2 diabetes, the ones that don't respond well to medications, they're obese, they've got substantial insulin resistance...in those cases, maybe we should rethink focusing on insulin resistance as the enemy. So let me find a way to describe this to you that will make some sense. Basically in type 2 diabetes, we have sugar entering the body, then sugar gets in the bloodstream than sugar has to go from the bloodstream into the cells.
There's this cell membrane and the blood suga...
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