O TYM ODCINKU
Most of what we were taught about reading a thyroid panel assumes a young, healthy patient with no stress, no toxin exposure, and no chronic illness. I have yet to meet that patient in practice. This lecture is the first of three I recorded for practitioners, and it lays the groundwork for everything I teach about thyroid, peptides, and bioregulators.
I start with the immune system because, in my experience, it sits underneath most chronic illness and aging. Stress, mold and toxin exposure, chronic infections, and age push the immune system away from TH1 and toward TH2 and TH17. A weak TH1 response makes it harder to clear intracellular infections and senescent cells, and psychological stress is one of the biggest triggers I see. The thymus starts to shrink in adolescence, and I explain why I watch the CD4-to-CD8 ratio as a marker of immune age.
Then the thyroid. The pituitary relies mainly on type 2 deiodinase, which keeps converting T4 to T3 under stress. The body's other cells shift toward type 3 deiodinase and make more reverse T3. So the pituitary can have plenty of T3 and turn TSH down while the periphery is short. The pattern I see constantly is a low-normal TSH, a high-normal free T4, a low-normal free T3, and a high-normal reverse T3. I also cover how repeated dieting, insulin resistance, and inflammation affect T4-to-T3 conversion, why I still check basal metabolic rate and reflex relaxation time, and the studies that make me question relying on TSH and antibodies alone in Hashimoto's.
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About the Host:
Dr. Kent Holtorf, MD, is the medical director of Holtorf Medical Group and the founder of Integrative Peptides. He is also a founder and director of the nonprofit National Academy of Hypothyroidism, which exists to provide evidence-based information on the diagnosis and treatment of hypothyroidism to doctors and patients.
His clinical focus is the patient nobody has been able to help: tick-borne illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, CIRS, MCAS, long COVID, and neurodegenerative disease, alongside hormone optimization and longevity medicine. He works at the mechanism level, and he is candid that much of what he teaches sits ahead of where mainstream guidelines currently are.
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Social Handles:
Websites: https://holtorfmed.com; https://integrativepeptides.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/integrativepep ; https://www.instagram.com/holtorfmedicalgroup
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