The thyroid thing happened without me realising it! I didn’t have any obvious underactive thyroid symptoms. I have always been of slim build and didn’t easily put weight on. I had never been a sluggish person, I was always driven and as active as the RA would let me. I had been suffering from low energy, however and at times, extreme fatigue. I also found it hard to get up in the mornings but I had put that down to RA or being peri-menopausal. It’s hard to pin-point those kind of symptoms when you already have an autoimmune condition and are of a certain age. So I had not considered I had any other condition, I thought I just had to put up with just feeling tired all the time.
Finding out I had an underactive thyroid and due to the high antibodies (both thyroid peroxidase (TPO) and thyroglobulin (Tg), indicating I had the autoimmune version, Hashimoto Thyroiditis, was a huge shock but it did explain my fatigue and why a lot of the time, I simply didn’t feel 100%. The antibodies also indicated, that my body was attacking my thyroid gland! What with my joints also being under attack, I was beginning to think my body didn’t like itself!
So apart from trying to get my antibody numbers low and my immune system in balance, and a desire to feel less tired, there were not any major symptoms to get rid of, therefore my main drive was to protect the gland itself (and hope that it was still there and that my body had not yet attacked it so badly that there wasn’t much left!). You can get a scan which will tell you the condition of your thyroid but this is not available on the NHS unless doctors suspect something more sinister may be happening so you’d have to do that privately if you just wanted to know what you were dealing with and to rule out any other issues. The prime indicator that my thyroid was no longer under attack would be getting the antibodies down to normal level – so that became my main aim.
They say become an expert in your own disease so I was well on my way to becoming an RA expert and still had aching joints to fix, but I simply didn’t know where to start with the thyroid. So, once again, I began researching online and reading as much as I could. I found it was a complex area.
I’m not going to go into the science behind it all as there are plenty of experts out there that will do a better job, my aim is to cut through the hours of reading and point you in the right direction and share what I’ve learned and who from so you can speed up your own healing journey and find out what really works for you.
Here are the books and websites that really helped me:
Dr Becky Campbell’s The 30 Day Thyroid Reset. I really love how the pages are laid out. Colourful, helpful, easy to digest (let’s face it thyroid hormones are a complex thing!). Full of facts, lifestyle/health guidance and recipes. So this is highly recommended, as is her website – https://drbeckycampbell.com/ She has also written an excellent book on histamine intolerance and you can read more about that here.
This website is amazing – https://thyroidpharmacist.com/ – by Dr Izabella Wentz, an internationally acclaimed thyroid specialist who reversed her own Hashimoto’s. I discovered this on a usual search and as it happens, Dr Frey, my thyroid doctor thinks she is an authority too. Her book, Hashimoto’s Protocol – A 90 Day Plan for Reversing Thyroid Symptoms and Getting Your Life Back gives all the medication, supplement, diet and lifestyle guidance to get your own disease under control. She has a couple of cook books too that are meant to be great, which I haven’t tried yet.
Another doctor I discovered online is Dr Alan Christianson – https://www.drchristianson.com/
He’s written on liver and adrenals but has rewritten his thyroid book, recently published – I signed up for his thyroid course before the book was launched and it was very informative. It was this expert that highlighted that although iodine is needed for thyroid, taking too much iodine (that doctor I was talking about in My Autoimmune Journey, flooded me with iodine and (as you may have read, that didn’t work for me!) that can be the worst thing for Hashimoto’s, in other words it has a negative effect on the antibodies.
Interestingly I mentioned this to Dr Frey in 2020 and although he hadn’t hear this (he asked me to send him the link) he also said a similar thing in relation to selenium and that Dr Wentz has some interesting data on her website – so this highlights that research is happening all the time and, as a result, the recommendations will change so it’s worth keeping an eye on it all (hence my website idea!).
I have since been recommended to remove all sources of iodine from my diet (apart from the multi-vitamin and mineral supplement I take, which has a small amount of idodine but bear in mind, we don’t always absorb the full amount of vitamins and minerals anyway). Be aware that iodine can also be hidden in our cosmetics, personal care products and other supplements so do look at Dr C’s site.
My own medication
When I had to come off Levothyroxine due to an allergic response, I was scared at having yet another autoimmune condition and increased chronic fatigue led me to do more research to find an alternative to the synthetic thyroid drug. I was worried that a bit of my thyroid was being destroyed each day without treatment so after much research, I decided to try LND via doctors at another integrative health clinic. This was in November 2019 and shortly afterwards, the rash developed into urticaria, it was back with a vengeance, so I came off LND and it calmed down until the middle of January 2020 when it came back again, this time it was worse than ever. Now I felt I was ignoring the RA, trying to find a solution to save my thyroid as well as dealing with chronic urticaria. I now had three autoimmune conditions, the two new ones appearing at the same time – I was terrified, how could I live like this, carry on working and trying to be normal with all this pain and exhaustion?
I did what I always did, cried, slept and went back to the drawing board – more research! I found a new thyroid doctor who could prescribe natural thyroid such as Armour Thyroid, they are not easy to find but he has been working with me for a few years now – virtually that is, Dr Oliver Frey – www.countryhealth.co.uk – the website is not so good functionally but as all the information you need and more. He is amazing and offers great value as he is aware of the cost of on-going functional or integrative medicine, plus supplement programmes etc. so unlike some practitioners, he doesn’t make you over spend and he also said he would start me on a low dose. The crossover GP/Functional doctor I first saw put me on such high doses of Levothyroxine and supplements, I immediately got urticaria as well as other reactions such as swellings in my joints to the point I couldn’t bend my knees –so to hear that from Dr F, really put my mind at rest. OK you may be good on your current meds/programme but this site has a lot of info so it’s work digging around.
I am working well with Dr F and Armour Thyroid has worked well for me so far. I have managed to lower my antibodies, finally, but not without working on the mental side – read more of that here.
Now before I did a comprehensive intolerance test through Dr Frey, he recommended the AIP or Autoimmune Protocol to get me on the least irritating diet for my thyroid and skin – I’ve been gluten free and dairy free for years for RA and I’d definitely recommend removing both from your diet to start with, but the AIP diet is recommended for those with autoimmune issues that are not getting the results they want from their current interventions, so as I now had 3 autoimmune conditions, the AIP made sense – learn more about the AIP diet here.