The Thyroid Gland controls the speed of every process in your body
The thyroid gland is a butterfly shaped hormonal gland that sits in your throat. It sits just below your Adams apple and has two lobes that sit either side of your wind pipe. It produces the thyroid hormones (called T4, T3, T2 and T1 and calcitonin). These hormones act like chemical messengers and deliver instructions to various tissues and organs via the bloodstream. The cells within the target organs then use the thyroid hormones and respond by using energy to speed up or slow down their activities. one important example of the thyroid gland’s hard work is Calorie burning. As you probably know burning calories is an essential bodily function, our tissues and organs simply cannot function at a healthy rate without it. So balancing your thyroid gives you the best possible chance to lose that extra weight.
Overall, the thyroid gland is responsible for the speed of your metabolism (the process of how your body converts what you eat and drink into energy). This complex biochemical process is directly responsible for your reflex speed, heart speed, mental speed and much more. Your metabolism affects every cell, tissue, organ and organ system in your body. For this reason the thyroid gland is essential for life, weight management, growth and development. It works with all the hormones in the body to tell them what to do and how to do it.
The truth about your Thyroid hormones
Your thyroid hormones are responsible for telling every cell what to do, when to do it and how efficiently to do it. As a result of this, when there is an imbalance all systems in your body can be affected. If your thyroid isn’t performing at 100% all of your body systems will be affected negatively. This can cause a multitude of symptoms such as fatigue, weight gain, insomnia, muscle and joint pain, sugar carvings, hair loss and depression. It can also impact ALL hormone related conditions (e.g. Menopause, Endometriosis, PCOS) as the Thyroid gland regulates the hormonal system as well.
Thyroid conditions are often missed due to the wide reference range of the routine TSH blood test, which is widely used to diagnose thyroid conditions. Clinical assessment is what is really needed to get the full picture. We have found that many of our clients might have a normal TSH range (the result you get from a standard blood test) but they have all the symptoms, which indicates an underactive thyroid. A wider thyroid function test (conducted by our in-house lab) reveals that there is actually an imbalance. Click here to read about one of the Lucy Rose patients that this happened to.
What Is Clinical Assessment & Why Is It So Important When It Comes to Thyroid Health?
Clinical assessment is needed for an accurate assessment of the thyroid. The thyroid puzzle comes together with comprehensive blood tests, nutritional and heavy metal testing and salivary hormone profiles.Then we test for: pulse rate, symptom picture, skin texture, tolerance of cold, bowel function, and deep tendon reflex speed. Once we have a clear picture of the thyroid status and the drivers responsible for it’s imbalance, our treatment can be tailored to the individual. This is our expertise at The Lucy rose clinic and we live and breathe thyroid to help you get back to true health, permanantly.
So many of our patients say they thought the way they felt was normal as so many of their friends felt the same way but when we get their thyroid balanced, they feel like a completely different person. Happy, healthy and energised!
Being overweight and tired all the time has the insidious effect of eroding your self-confidence and as you know, that impacts your life in ALL areas. It doesnt need to be something you just accept anymore, there is an real answer to your health issues at The Lucy Rose Clinic.
The misleading nature of the standard thyroid test (TSH)
TSH is a pituitary hormone that stimulates the thyroid gland to manufacture the thyroid hormone T4. 75% of your thyroid hormone is in your muscle and brain so running TSH alone can be misleading as a blood test. The reference ranges are too broad and many results fall within the reference range, giving a seemingly healthy result, when they actually do have a thyroid problem. We found that 98% of our patients have an underactive thyroid yet only 4% had a TSH out of range and 25% had the serious autoimmune thyroid. Unfortunately, the thyroid has been misdiagnosed, mismanaged and misunderstood since the 1970’s when the TSH test was brought in as the gold standard in thyroid testing. More and more people were undiagnosed and this has lead to an epidemic of women giving birth to children with low thyroid function. With a chronic underactive thyroid, chronic disease can manifest later in life.