Has your thyroid and adrenal gland disease been overlooked or mishandled? There are estimated to be more than 60,000,000 people with undiagnosed hypothyroidism today. Find out what it takes to get tested properly.
Due to many factors, some beyond our control, we don’t always recognize that we may have a problem with our thyroid or adrenal glands. And doctors often miss a diagnosis of hypothyroidism; testing really needs to be done in a specific way to determine if an underperforming thyroid is affecting you.
Today we’ll talk about five different factors that are important when testing your thyroid – several things you need to know and really think about in order to properly evaluate your thyroid. This will be part one of two articles on thyroid testing.
- Complete thyroid blood test. A TSH is not enough to determine if you have thyroid disease. You really don’t just need to know your free T3, free T4, TSH, your thyroid antibodies including TPO and ATG, and you need to have reverse T3 to see if you have inactive thyroid production. Any of these may be enough to indicate that you have thyroid disease. So if you don’t have the whole panel, your doctor isn’t doing enough to evaluate your thyroid.
- Complete thyroid examination. Thyroid disease can be picked up by your blood work, but many suggestions from your physical exam will also suggest that you have thyroid problems. You should examine the skin for dryness, flaking, itching, thinning hair, nails may be pitted, eyebrows, lateral eyebrow thinning is a common problem, the thyroid gland itself may show nodularity, enlargement, sometimes this is subtle, sometimes very serious. And pretibial edema or just some slight dimples or dents in the legs when you press on them with your thumb and also lower extremity reflexes can affect the thyroid gland and be an indication of thyroid problems.
- Thyroid Questionnaire. This tool can be an important help in identifying whether you have thyroid problems and is provided after these first two articles on testing. So you really need to go through this one by one, check off the ones that seem relevant to you, and take this to an open-minded thyroid doctor, who can evaluate all of your symptoms. So we looked at your labs, your physical findings, and now your symptoms in and of themselves can be a strong indicator.
- Body temperature. Checking your basal body temperature is very important to assess whether you have thyroid problems, as the thyroid determines the metabolic rate. So to check your thyroid, test your temperature in the morning so you can evaluate how your temperature is compared to normal, which should be 98.6, or maybe minus a degree, but if it’s less than 97, 6, then you really have meaning. for possible thyroid problems. Many people run 96 or 95 and their doctors tell them, “that’s just the way you are, your temperature is low.” But usually there is a reason for this and most of the time it is because your thyroid is not functioning fully.
- Food allergy testing. This is something critical if there is any concern about thyroid disease and especially if you have elevated thyroid antibodies, but food allergies are so common these days that probably everyone should get them done. And this should be blood work with IGG or IGA blood tests, the skin test or IGE blood tests that an allergist might do, or a pulmonologist has nothing to do with whether your food allergies are significantly related to your thyroid. Those will be related to peanut allergy or asthma problems. But you should specifically ask for and get IG or IGA blood tests, especially for gluten, which is related to wheat, and casein, a protein in dairy products.
That’s it for today – 5 tips for properly testing for thyroid and adrenal disorders. Stay tuned for more testing tips in article number two coming soon.
Thanks for your attention,
Diane Culik, MD
ABC Welfare
Thyroid Adrenal Disease Testing – 5 Tips For
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