Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, welcome to It's a Kinetic thing with Karen K. I'm Karen, and today we've got a lot of things to talk about, so we're excited to bring you this episode.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: We're going to talk about your health today and your weight loss.
[00:00:12] Speaker A: I do want to talk a little bit. You know, one of the mantras of all of us that have gone through WorldLink medical hormone training is normal isn't optimal. And that's kind of our motto, our logo. In fact, I just came back from a conference in San Diego, the 10th annual academic update Summit, and they actually gave us hats that said normal is not optimal.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: So it's really.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: It. Really it is. And. And you know, one of the things that I experienced myself, and frankly, I knew better, but I thought, I'm gonna defer to my primary care doctor and make her happy. So I let her draw my thyroid labs. So back in 2010, I was diagnosed with Graves disease. I had lost a lot of weight. I had resting heart rate of 120, 130. I was getting short of breath, just walking up a few stairs or a block. And at that time, before I got diagnosed and had these symptoms, I was running 10Ks. So this was really concerning to me that my legs were shaking and I was getting short of breath, you know, walking up a few flights of stairs. And it was funny. I was sitting in a physician meeting with several physicians that I worked with, and one of them looked at me and he said, have you had your thyroid tested? And. And he said, your hands are shaking and you've lost weight. Suddenly you need to go get your thyroid test.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Oh, wow. And I love stories like that.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Yeah, he just saw it. Really perceptive. And I hadn't really come to the conclusion, you know, I just, I just need to get in better shape. Something's wrong. Sure enough, I went and get my thyroid test in. I'm diagnosed with Graves disease. And that was the year, just a couple months before I was going to start nurse practitioner school. And I was flying from Oklahoma to Nashville, Tennessee to Vanderbilt University.
And so they gave me a couple of options. It was either take a thyroid suppressing medication, but the endocrinologist said if you get the slightest fever, the slightest cough, you need to get seen immediately, you need to have a CBC draw, and you're probably gonna have to be on antibiotics, this medicine, and eventually it'll quit working. And I'm like, well, that's not a good option. I'm getting ready to fly back and forth every five weeks. To Nashville for school. And so the other option was you take a radioactive iodine pill and we try to dose it so that we kill off part of your thyroid, but not all of your thyroid, which of course it doesn't. It's not very exact. And so then, of course, I ended up with a very underactive thyroid after that. And so it's been a struggle ever since then to manage my thyroid. And unfortunately, a lot of primary cares, including mine at the time only look at your tsh, your thyroid stimulating hormone. And so I had been dosing myself, which is, you know, you're not supposed to do, but that's what we do.
And I had my thought, I felt great. Everything was going well. I had no symptoms. But when the test came back, my TSH was basically very, very low. But that's the only test she checked. She got completely upset and concerned that, oh, your thyroid is overactive, you're going to have a heart attack, something's going to happen. You're going to go into atrial fibrillation with your TSH so low.
And just to clarify with everyone, your TSH is a little backwards from other labs because when it's really low, it means your thyroid's overactive, and when it's really high, it means your thyroid is underactive or underperforming. So she did my TSH and it basically was undetectable. It was like 0.01. And so she immediately said, we've got to reduce your dose of your thyroid medication.
So I went from NP thyroid, 120 milligrams. She knocked it down to 90 milligrams. In my gut, I knew I should not do that, but I just didn't want to argue with her and I let her reduce my dose. Within a couple months, I met my hairdresser and she's like, what is going on with your hair? Your hair is breaking, it is thinning, it is coming out in handfuls. What is happening? You need to. You need to see someone. So I drew my own blood and checked and of course, then my TSH had went from 0 undetectable up to 16. And normal. Normal is like, depends on which lab you're looking at. But you wanted somewhere around one to four.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Oh, wow. Okay.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: So with. So with it, being 16 meant my thyroid was basically not functioning at all. And so I started losing hair, thinning, falling out, was tired all the time. But the whole picture that she forgot to look at and that I did when I drew that lab was, you know, that thyroid and stimulating hormones splits into two different enzymes or hormones in your body, T3 and T4. And T3 does about 80% of the work of your metabolism and things and T4 about 20%. And so if people don't look at that T3 and especially the free T3, meaning it's not bound to protein and it's doing its job, you don't get the whole picture. And so at that point, my thyroid was super underactive. My hair was a mess. I had bald spots on the top of my head, at my temples. It was extremely embarrassing. My hair was brittle, it looked horrible. I ended up having to cut six inches off to even not look fried. Fried and fuzzy. It has taken me almost a year to get my hair back because any change in your hair is going to take about at least six months minimum. But what the picture is, and you know what I tell people, is you can't just look at the TSH because now again, I went back to managing my own thyroid. My TSH is back to zero, undetectable, which if you looked it up, it would say your thyroid is overactive and you're in danger.
But my free T3, even with my TSH at 0, we usually want it somewhere around 4 is the upper limit of normal. 4.4.5. Even with my TSH 0, that free T3 that breaks off, I can barely keep it at 3. So in the low end of normal. And so if somebody's just looking at my tsh, they're saying I'm overdosed on thyroid medicine. But if you don't look at the whole picture, the T3 and the T4, I'm actually very under dosed. And, and you know, the other thing that sometimes providers lose track of is A, there's a difference between normal and optimal and B, the other thing you want to look at is a symptom of a disease can be abnormal lab meaning originally when I was diagnosed, I had a very low TSH because I had an active illness. I had Graves disease. That's been treated. But an abnormal lab does not necessarily mean you have disease. Does that make sense? So I purposely making my lab what we call super physiological above what normal is. But I don't have Graves disease, so I'm not going to go into atrial fibrillation.
I'm not burning up all the time. I don't have tremors and palpitations because I don't have Graves disease. I am pushing my thyroid so that I function better and feel better, but I don't have a disease. So there's a difference between a symptom of a disease being abnormal lab versus abnormal lab. Absolutely. Meaning you have disease.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: And so you can cure Graves disease and Hashimoto's disease by getting the right.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Dosage, but you can actually control it. You know, with Graves disease, typically what they do is they ablate your thyroid either with radioactive iodine, they take your thyroid out, or they correct it with a suppressing medication. And so once that disease is gone, you don't have those symptoms of the disease. And you with Graves, you have a hyperactive thyroid and overactive thyroid. But once we've treated it by removing your thyroid or ablating your thyroid, that's gone. Okay, so just because my labs don't look like the average person's lab doesn't mean I have disease. I'm not having symptoms of Graves disease. I'm not having palpitations, I'm not having rapid heart rate, I'm not having an abnormal rhythm, anxiety, things like that.
So I feel great. I'm completely normal. When you look at me, physiologically, I just have a lab that looks different than what the lab place says. It's normal for the average population, but it's optimal for me. For you, I feel great. My hair is finally growing back in. You know, I'm not having palpitations, I'm not short of breath. I'm not having any of those issues.
And same, you know, with Hashimoto's. You're going, just because your labs aren't what is in the range doesn't necessarily mean you have disease. There are other markers of that disease, and you have to have the symptoms that go with that disease. So it just like you, you know, I see a lot of men, for instance, come in and they will tell me, oh, my doctor said I don't need testosterone. My testosterone level is normal. Well, normal is, in today's world, is somewhere around 250 to 500.
Ten years ago, it was 700 to 1200.
So why all of a sudden is this man that 10 years ago, testosterone should have been 900, it's now 200, and he's normal.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: But he feels horrible. He's got no energy, he's got no sex drive, he may have erectile dysfunction, he's in the gym all the time, but can't build any muscle mass. And so that's why our mantra, our motto is normal isn't optimal. And none of us are exactly alike as human beings. So we have to look at how the patient is feeling, what symptoms that they have in addition to the lab and not solely focus on the lab and make a diagnosis of that.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: So back to your thyroid. Did they kill your thyroid?
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Yes, they did.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Okay, so you're on medicine.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: I'm going to be on the medicine the rest of my life. Otherwise, my thyroid's very underactive, which means my metabolism is slow and I'm sluggish and you have constipation, you be cold all the time, hard to get weight off, eat easy to gain weight, things like that. So, yeah, I'll never have a normal thyroid function again.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Okay, and are you on the normal medicine? They give people the lip. What is it?
[00:11:20] Speaker A: The levothyroxine? Yeah, I'm not. Because I can take as much levothyroxine as you will give me and it will not change that important number, that T3, because levothyroxine is only T3.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: Or excuse me, I said that backwards. Levothyroxine is only T4. And if you remember when I said earlier, T4 does 20% of the work.
And so I can take a bunch of levothyroxine and my thyroid stimulating hormone, my TSH can be zero, but I don't have any T3 on board. And so I have to take what we call a desiccated thyroid, NP thyroid that has both T3 and T4 in it. And then I take an extra dose of leothyrene, which is only T3. So, you know, and that's the other thing. A lot of times providers, and unfortunately insurance don't want to pay for a desiccated thyroid for something that has T3 in it. They expect we'll give you T4 and your body will convert it to T3. Mine doesn't do that. There's a lot of peoples that don't do that.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: So there's a lot of controversy around that.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: There is.
Well, around MP thyroid.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Yeah. They. It's. Again, I. I hate to say it, but I believe that unfortunately our insurance and our health care is governed by big pharmacy and big pharmacy doesn't want us compounding medicine like that. And like, for myself, you can give me mega doses of levothyroxine, T4. It's not going to do any good.
My body won't convert it to T3. So if you don't give me T3, I'm going to be sickly.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: So yours is compounded versus that which is through the regular pharmacy.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: Is that.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: I'm just trying to get that straight.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Okay.
So it's so confusing.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: It is so confusing. And unfortunately, you know, there's not a lot of time spent on that in traditional medical school.
Like when I was just at that academic summit this weekend. There's a famous physician who wrote a book called the Lies I Taught in Medical School and he talks about how, and he's a professor of a medical school and how badly he did at teaching his student doctors. He taught them things that he was taught that somebody before him was taught. And nobody's keeping up to date on the research and what, what is true and accurate and what's best for the patient anymore. We just keep handing down these myths. I mean, we might as well be continuing to put bleed people and put leeches on them and things like that. I mean, as far as how we manage endocrine disorders and metabolic syndrome and thyroid disorders, we're still teaching from 50, 60 years ago instead of what we know now is true and accurate.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: That's so crazy because I, I mean, I've listened to you for two years talk about thyroid. Yeah, you've looked at my thyroid number, which aren't great. And it's still like just hearing you today, it's like, man, there's a lot to it. It's not simple.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: It's not simple, but you really have to, you have to dive deep into what's the root cause. And you can't just go, here's one lab test and that must be what it is. And that's all they need because if you treat on that, you know, single line view instead of looking at the full panoramic picture, you're going to mistreat and misdiagnose someone. There was a really great speaker, a pharmacist, and she now works for WorldLink Medical because she was talking about she had PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, which really has very little to do with the ovaries. And it really is all about, it's a dysmetabolic syndrome and it's a whole body system. And now they're even finding that men have some characteristics of this.
But this poor woman almost died multiple times because she was. People were just checking the basic labs that are primary care and telling her she's fine. And she even had a classic seven pound cyst on her ovary when she was very young. But they told her they took it off and she was fine. And she had multiple miscarriages.
She gained 100 pounds in a short period of time. No matter what she ate, she couldn't get that weight off.
She had horrible. When she finally did conceive and carry a child. She had horrible postpartum depression to the point she thought she was going to harm her newborn and, you know, was cognizant enough to know this isn't normal and something was wrong. She was having horrible allergic anaphylactic reactions. She had to carry an EpiPen. She finally found the only thing she could eat were food. She grew herself.
And having finally come to WorldLink and listening to the lectures and hearing what Dr. Rosier taught and seeing the true research, she finally got a diagnosis and was able to heal herself by optimizing her thyroid, optimizing her vitamin D level, you know, managing her weight and watching the foods that she ate and knowing how foods acted in her specific body. And so she hasn't had an anaphylactic reaction in a long time.
She was talking about even when her child was three, like, she ended up having an anaphylactic reaction, ending up on the floor. And her child was so used to it. At 3, Child grabbed her EpiPen and gave it to her. She's like, she knew mom needed this. Wow. And like, sad.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Really sad.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: Yeah, she had. She ended up fracturing her neck because her bones were brittle because she wasn't absorbing vitamin D. So it's not just, oh, you might have a cyst on your ovary. It is a whole metabolic thing that affects your entire body as well as your fertility.
And if you don't have someone well versed in that, they're going to check a couple of basic labs and tell you everything's fine.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: That's what I've learned so much in working with you for the past two years, is that a medical doctor, Primary care is necessary and everybody needs one and go to one. But I also think being involved in a. With a wellness clinic that look at things so differently and bigger sometimes than just throwing a pill at it, like you say all the time, is so important to your health, especially if you've got something, you know, you don't feel right.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think you've got to be an advocate for yourself. You know, I think sometimes you get dismissed as a difficult patient, a crazy patient, and no one's listening to you. And, you know, in your heart, I wasn't always like this. There is something wrong. And I've heard stories like that over and over from my patients that I've been telling people something's wrong with my thyroid. I've been telling people my hormones are low. Nobody will listen to me, and I don't want to. Like you said, there are Very good primary care physicians out there, but they don't know what they haven't been taught, unfortunately. And until we overhaul our medical schools and how we're teaching, I don't think things are going to change. And you know, it's really refreshing when you meet a professor at Harvard who writes a book that says all the lies I taught in medical school that he has since come to realize how wrong the curriculum is.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Well, and I love that you guys are always going to conferences and learning and training and going through that process and learning the latest and the greatest.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: Always, always, always something new coming out.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: And I also love. Probably you wouldn't say you love it, but that you are a patient, that that's actually can you've experienced it so you know when you don't feel right, it means something is off.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: And I do think we tend to ignore those symptoms a lot because we don't want to deal with it, which doesn't seem fair that we're going through that.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: But I also sitting listening to you, it's like so unfair to women in this day and age that we are blamed for being overweight. We're blamed for all the things when 99, probably 99% of the time it has nothing to do with your eating habits. And I mean there's so many women and I'm one of them that try really hard. I eat right. And it's just a struggle.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: Yeah, you a prime example. You under eating by several hundred calories a day and getting all the protein that's recommended for you and you still couldn't lose any weight.
Um, and you know, I. Women, I think especially get dismissed as crazy difficult. They're hormonal. It must be that time of month when no, there's something wrong. And they're trying to advocate for their self. It always amuses me, I think when patients come in and they start telling me and they're like, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job. And I'm like, I don't. You know your body better than I know your body. I want you to tell me these things.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: Well, I think women, the women I know in my circle actually are doing their own research to try to. Because they're not getting that with from their primary care. And so I think everybody's, you know, maybe Google's not the place, but there's just. You're just begging for information to try to figure out what's going on because you are told you're fine. Your labs are fine. I mean, I've told, I've been told that a million times and we know that's not always the case.
Normal is not normal.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: Yeah, normal is not optimal.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: And that was the question I had about that. So when they say normal, it's always normal for your age. Right. So that bar goes up as you age. So, you know, I've always heard that you don't need as much sleep when you're in your 70s and 80s and so it all kind of moves up. So it's not. You still don't feel great, even though for your age group you're in that normal range.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: But there's a lot of 70 and 80 year olds out there that are hiking mountains.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: Working out. And it's because their health is optimized. And, you know, we know more and more that hormones play a big part in how people age and especially how they maintain their muscle mass. And muscle is the thing that's going to make you age well. And lack of muscle is going to make you not age well. And you know, we had some conferences or some lectures on that during this last conference again, but it's always coming back to if you want to age well and be vital into your 70s and 80s, you really need, need to take care of yourself. You need to maintain muscle mass and you need to get up and move every day.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Boy, I learned that the hard way too, because I stopped working out about five years ago just from I couldn't recover just after going through everything I'd been through. And so, and to see the difference in my body just from not working out and how it has truly declined. And then it's like that uphill mountain to try to get back to working out. It just seems so difficult.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: It really does. Which kind of just really got to take an effort. And it doesn't have to be three hours a day with a personal trainer, but you do definitely want to lift some weights and you do want to be walking and moving. You don't have to run or, you know, do a marathon, but you definitely want about 10,000 steps a day and you want some weight training and that's important.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: Yeah. So let's talk about your overall health because you got your thyroid optimized. You also went on the injections, the weight loss injections, and you've lost your weight and you've kept it off.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Talk about that a little bit.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Well, definitely I could tell the difference. As I've said before during COVID I went from being an active, busy person probably working 80, 90 hours a week to suddenly being homebound.
I was doing some telehealth visits, but wasn't getting out and about.
So it was way too sedentary and I spending all day just sitting at a desk waiting for the next call, the next visit.
Frankly, very depressed and drinking way too much alcohol, which is a metabolism killer.
And so put on about £45 during that time. And gosh, I just. You know how Facebook pops up pictures from there? So there's a picture that popped up from COVID time Easter, and I was like, oh my goodness. I thought I'd gotten a little heavy, but I was fat.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: Those are some scary pictures to look at when you actually see yourself in a picture.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it really is. And I really didn't even think I was that out of shape then, but looking back now, I realized I was. And I started the GLP1 injections mostly as an experiment because I wanted to offer it in my clinic, but I didn't want to do that without being able to speak firsthand to what, you know, what I experienced, what side effects have, what worked, what didn't work.
But I've got that weight off and I'm at, I think, the perfect weight and BMI for myself now.
And I've been able to maintain that really well.
Gotten back out on my bicycle, my knees are bad enough I can't run anymore, but I definitely walk and ride my bike and ride my stationary bike and it does make a big difference. And it's so funny. I have a daughter that 30 and she recently was at an all weekend music festival event and she texted me and she said, mom, I gotta hand it to you, I gotta think. She goes, when we were kids, you took us to play paintball, you took us to amusement parks, to water parks, you walked all day, you had, you wrangled six kids around. And she said, I don't ever remember you setting down. I don't ever remember you complaining that you were tired.
And she said, I'm 30 and I've been walking six miles a day and I'm exhausted. And you were in your 40s and 50s. I don't know how you did it. She said, I just gotta, I gotta give you props, mom. And I thought, that's the sweetest text.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: Yeah, that's funny. Well, just even with me working, you know, with you for the couple years just to watch your transformation, I think you look younger, you're obviously fit, your weight loss, all of it, it's. It's crazy.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: I don't feel 60. And I. Yeah, I hope people don't look at me and think I'm 60.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: No, you wouldn't. And I think that's the beautiful thing about what you guys are doing is that you really are helping people. The overall wellness of somebody with hormones and weight loss and peptides and.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Optimized skin care, your vitamin D and good skin care. And, And I do recognize, and I hate that our healthcare system doesn't appreciate those things and reward you or pay for them. Unfortunately, I know they're not out. They're somewhat out of reach for some people because it's all private pay. But you can do, you can do some things. You may not can afford pharmaceutical grade skin care. You may not, you know, can afford a bunch of other tests outside of what your insurance. But you can certainly eat healthy. You can get out and walk. You don't even need gym membership. You can move.
And so just, you know, encourage people to do that if you don't want to be somebody.
You know, I round in the nursing home one day a week and I see people my age or younger or very just a year or two older me that are living in a nursing home and have been for a while. And that's so sad to me.
[00:27:18] Speaker B: Yeah, that is really sad.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: And I'm determined to not be that person.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. I see that too. I used to say that to my mom. I'm like, mom, there are people my age that are walking with a walker because she hated that she ended up having to do that.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: And she was 89. It's like, mom, you've done well. Because, I mean, there I see so many people my age.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: And then I have my neighbor who's 66 maybe, and she's climbing Machu Picchu right now, hiking it. She's been gone for two weeks hiking that mountain. And it's like, well, I'm not going to do that, you know. But it does encourage you to keep going. The muscle piece of it is huge.
[00:27:54] Speaker A: It is extremely important. I've heard it put so many ways. You know, the key to longevity is muscle. Muscle is the currency of aging. However you want to put it. If you want to age healthy, you've got to have muscle mass.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: Boy, and I did not realize that until just even working with you. And it's like, man, that's so important.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: Well, I think you look great.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: And I love that I'm working with you because it's taught me so much about hormones and just all of it that goes together because I will tell a quick story. When I was going through chemo and I was gaining so much weight on the steroid, she the oncologist said, well, I'm going to send you back down to the lab. I think we might have killed your thyroid. Well, they did the one test like you talk about and it came back normal. She goes, oh, no, I guess we didn't. And that was the end of that discussion. Which obviously they probably did something to my thyroid, but they didn't run the right test to determine if there really was something going on with it.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: You really, you need that TSH, but you also need T3 free, T3 free T4 thyroid antibodies because sometimes you could have some autoimmune that's attacking your thyroid. And so you need to look at all of that stuff and then optimize your vitamin D, your B12 levels, hormone levels and you know, I just want to encourage our listeners that be your own fierce advocate and just because, you know, 60 year old Dr. Jones down the road said everything's normal, push for more.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. Well, we're out of time, so we'll see you next week.
