5 hashimoto’s secrets you can use today… · 5 hashimoto’s secrets you can use today… most...

Travis J. Elliott, ND (802) 489-5913 [email protected] 5224 Shelburne Rd #102, Shelburne, VT 05482 www.DrTravisElliott.com

5 Hashimoto’s Secrets You Can Use Today…

Most people assume that Hashimoto’s is a thyroid disease. But the primary issue is actually an immune problem. Your immune system is body-wide, so in order to heal your Hashimoto’s, we have to take your entire body into account. I pride myself on creating individualized treatment plans for my patients. However, there are areas of constancy for nearly all of them. Here are 5 clinical secrets that I find myself going back to again and again.

1. Modulation of the immune fire. 2. MTHFR/methylation 3. Is your brain working for you or against you? 4. How are your emotional storms? 5. Eat food that loves you back. 6. How to test and treat (and how NOT to test and treat) environmental toxicity.

1. Consider pouring water on your immune fire

If you have Hashimoto’s, your problem is not your thyroid—it’s your immune system. Sure, you may need thyroid hormone because your thyroid has been damaged, but it’s the raging fire of your immune system that is at fault. The immune chemical IL-6 is a common marker of this inflammatory fire that is high in chronic infections.

In my practice, I always consider adding some immune modulators to the mix. Three common choices are:

Glutathione, High dose turmeric, and Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN). Glutathione is a master antioxidant and key detoxifier in your body. Do you experience

any kind of physical reaction (headaches, nausea, rash) to perfumes, dyes, or exhaust fumes? If so, it is critical for you to get more glutathione into your body. Glutathione is like a hero soldier who throws herself on a grenade to save bystanders. It will sacrifice itself to enable you to safely escort foreign chemicals out your liver and kidneys. S-acetyl-glutathione is a good oral form, but I usually use a liposomal form of glutathione that is whisked easily into the body. A good target is around 400 mg per day. Do you have brain fog or transient joint pain? These two symptoms are caused by an out of control immune fire. One way to put it out is a 10-day burst of high-dose turmeric or curcumin. I use a liquid form of turmeric that is blended with some black pepper to increase

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effectiveness. It won’t work for everyone, but 500-1000 mg of turmeric two-three times per day can bring down the fog and the joint pain. LDN is a compounded medication that increases body endorphin production and increases regulatory T-cells. In other words, LDN helps you make more opioids and controls the wild impulses of your immune system. Who wouldn’t want that? LDN is made by a compounding pharmacy and requires a doctor’s prescription and should be started at a low dose—around 1 mg and slowly increased. It controls inflammation in multiple pathways, leading to better overall function of the immune system and the thyroid. 2. Assess and improve your methylation and MTHFR status What? What did you just call me? Sorry, enough joking…MTHFR is an acronym for an enzyme that activates folate—an important b-vitamin. The essential thing for you to know is that MTHFR is a common sticking point in the production of key methylation compounds like SAMe. Methylation helps with neurotransmitter balance, the production of energy, detoxification—especially of hormones—and hundreds of other functions in the body. Every day I see patients who have improved energy from high doses of methylation support. I test every patient for MTHFR variants and I intervene if my patient has one or two copies of the C677T variant and/or two copies of the A1298C variant. This appears to be especially important for my autoimmune thyroid patients who are fatigued. I start with a normal dose of a full b-complex and a multi-mineral. This helps all the enzymes in the methylation process, not just MTHFR. After one week, I ask them to take 3-4 times the amount of b-vitamins by using a specialized methylation product that contains methylcobalamin, P5P, methylfolate, and trimethylgycine. I have patients note their reactions to each level of supplementation and stay on the most effective level for up to six weeks. This “burst” repletes all the pathways and enzymes with the necessary cofactors. By going through this process, you get an idea of exactly what you need. You also gain a tool in your toolbox. In the future, whenever you are stressed or ill, you can go back to the “burst dose” of methylators and whip your biochemistry back into shape.

I recognize that this is a complicated topic that cannot be adequately explained in this handout. If you would like a deeper explanation as well as some more dosing hints, please enroll in my video-based Healing Hashimoto’s class.

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3. How is your brain doing? Do you have brain fog? Is your memory slipping? Do you feel more tired when you exercise your brain by reading, driving at night, or studying? All of these symptoms are symptoms of brain dysfunction. And here are a couple of other relevant symptoms:

• Is your balance getting worse? • Do you need to take enzymes and HCL with meals in order to digest your food? • Do you have chronic, unexplained pain on only one side of your body? The good news is that there is an explosion of research about functional brain issues and how to

treat them. In fact, doctors called functional neurologists (usually a chiropractic specialty) have been teaching us how brain dysfunction is often at the heart of chronic digestive symptoms and chronic pain.

Here’s a test: try walking 5-6

steps heel-toe, heel-toe with your eyes closed. Can you do it? If you have trouble, consider taking turmeric, a fish oil with a high percentage of DHA, and nootropic substances like n-acetyl carnitine or huperzine A.

A great read on this subject is “Why Isn’t My Brain Working” by Datis Kharrazian. This book is packed with great information, but warning(!)—it’s pretty dense and is definitely not much of a self-help book. For adequate self-help, it’s going to be necessary to dive into your own symptoms and explain more about the benefits of certain nutrients for the brain. In my video series, I will walk you through a detailed brain questionnaire that was developed by Dr. Kharrazian and share with you some balance and brain tests that will help you evaluate your own brain function—including which neurotransmitter function may be deficient. It’s a truly fascinating subject that I really don’t want you to miss. Therefore I’ve package the brain module directly into the flow of the Healing Hashimoto’s video class. 4. Take charge of your emotional health

Research shows that stress will directly increase inflammation. I’ve found that a key source of chronic stress is underlying emotional trauma that becomes “stuck” in the body and mind. Releasing some of these pent up emotions can be a key to healing, and mindfulness work is a great way to go about it. You may want to consider reading Cabot-Zinn’s many mindfulness books. If you have chronic pain, please check out “Healing Back Pain” by Dr. Sarno or “Unlearn Your Pain” by Dr. Schubiner. However, the simplest thing that you can do right now is to try a technique called the Suspended

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Breath. It takes about one minute and it will immediately stimulate your parasympathetic (relax! digest!) nervous system. You can download the Suspended Breath Handout here. 5. Eat food that will love you back Here’s the deal: 70% of your immune system is lining your gut, so gut health is critical to your overall immune health. The problem is that some of the foods that we eat make all that immune tissue very angry. For lots of reasons. For example, sugars and starches can feed bacterial and yeast overgrowths in your gut, leading to toxic by-products that your immune system doesn’t like. Or your body may have developed a slow onset allergy to a food like gluten or dairy proteins. Your immune system could be angry at your food even if you don’t have any digestive problems! How would you know? One way is to order expensive food allergy tests from a lab like Cyrex. However, those labs aren’t perfect. A better way is to bite the bullet and try 3-4 weeks of a restricted anti-inflammatory diet. This can mean an anti-inflammatory diet like Jessica Black ND espouses, or a full-blown Autoimmune Paleo Diet. I ask my patients to do the AIP for three weeks and then follow a guided reintroduction. This single prescription is BY FAR the most powerful tool I have at my disposal and the results can be humbling. If you do have digestive symptoms like bloating, cramping, or constipation, please consider the Healing Hashimoto’s video class. As part of the class, you will grade the function of your digestion and I will help you isolate the part of your gut that is the problem. Eating food that loves you back is helpful, but sometimes we need to dig deeper to keep that 70% of our immune system happy. 6. This (toxic) land is your land—how are you dealing with environmental toxicity? When you’ve changed your diet, balanced your blood sugar, treated your gut, addressed MTHFR and balanced your thyroid and adrenal glands, and you sti l l feel terrible, it ’s t ime to start thinking about heavy metal or other chemical toxicity. I also have a higher suspicion of toxicity with patients who have risk factors like non-biological removal of silver fillings, a toxic occupation like hairstylist, or severe reactions to chemicals like gasoline fumes. This is a big topic, but let me see if I can distill some useful nuggets of information:

• My focus is not how high are your levels, but how are those levels affecting you? You could have a normal level of mercury in your body, but your immune system could be reacting to the mercury, leading to problems. Cyrex Laboratories Array 11 measures antibody responses to 15 different categories of toxins. These categories include heavy metals, organotoxins, phthalates, and many more.

• Secondly, I might look at how a toxin is being excreted from your body. The Quicksilver Scientific Mercury Tri-test analyzes absolute levels of mercury and (by comparing levels in blood, urine, and hair) how well your kidneys and liver are excreting mercury.

• If you do have a problem with heavy metals or some other toxin, I generally do not recommend chelation. Chelation usually involves the use of a strong chemical binder that forcefully grabs the metal and pulls it into your blood and out of your body. I was taught by

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Dr. Kharrazian and others that this aggressive approach can be dangerous for chronically ill individuals and I have seen this concern borne out with new patients presenting to my office. For example, an IV chelation can pull mercury into the blood and this mercury is then circulated throughout the body—including to the brain. If the blood-brain barrier is compromised, this mercury—that may not have been doing any harm in the fat tissue—could start immune fires in the brain and create a downward health spiral.

• Instead of chemical chelation, I recommend ramping up the body’s natural detoxification of chemicals using nutrients like glutathione, alpha-lipoic acid, and Vitamin C. In my Healing Hashimoto’s Video Class I will be going into the mechanisms of effective detox in more detail.

Thank you for reading! Would you like a more personalized help? My customized

video class uses an individualized assessment and powerful treatments to teach you how to calm the fire of your immune system disease—whether you have Hashimoto’s, Lyme, or some other autoimmunity or infection. Please click here to learn more about the class and to add your name to a notification list. By adding your name, you will be among the first to know about the great learning opportunity. (estimated completion date is September 2015)

My mission is to l isten to your story, teach you how that story relates to your health, and guide you on a path of restoration.

5 hashimoto’s secrets you can use today… · 5 hashimoto’s secrets you can use today… most...

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