Autoimmune Thyroid Disease and Your Skin with Izabella Wentz

Trevor:             Hi there. Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast, I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Today, we’re talking about how to overcome autoimmune thyroid disease with my guest, Dr. Izabella Wentz. Dr. Wentz is an internationally acclaimed thyroid specialist and licensed pharmacist who has dedicated her career to addressing the root cause of autoimmune thyroid disease after being diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis in 2009. Dr. Wentz is the author of The New York Times bestselling patient guide, “Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis: Lifestyle Interventions for Finding and Treating the Root Cause”, and the protocol-based book, “Hashimoto’s Protocol: A 90-Day Plan for Reversing Thyroid Symptoms and Getting Your Life Back”. This is her new book that’s just coming out.

As a patient, advocate, researcher, clinician, and educator, Dr. Wentz is committed to raising awareness on how to overcome AutoImmune Thyroid disease through the Thyroid Secret Documentary Series, The Hashimoto’s Institute Practitioner Training, and her international consulting and speaking services offered to both patients and health care professionals. Today, we cover the symptoms, triggers, testing, root causes and integrative treatment options for auto immune thyroid disease. Dr. Wentz is a wealth of knowledge. Her last podcast was my most viewed, my top podcast and this I interview is sure to be another hit. Please enjoy this interview with Dr. Izabella Wentz.

Izabella:                  Thank you so much for having me, Trevor. I’m so excited to be here.

Trevor:  I know that you’ve been on my show before but it’s been awhile. For people who aren’t familiar with who you are, did not see your other podcast, let’s start off with your background and what led you to be so passionate about treating Hashimoto’s.

Izabella:                  In full disclosure, I was never really interested in the thyroid glands … myself with Hashimoto’s in 2009. After almost a decade of some pretty debilitating symptoms. I started off with fatigue during my first year in undergrad. This meant that I was missing exams, I was missing class, not showing up anywhere like to parties or social events because I had to sleep 12 to 14 hours each night. Then, that progressed into irritable bowel syndrome when I got into Pharmacy school. Year after year, my life just kept getting smaller and smaller where I was then diagnosed with panic attacks and anxiety. I was diagnosed with acid reflux. I had the irritable bowel syndrome, all these things are just confounding on top of one another with allergies, chemical sensitivities, carpal tunnel in both arms, hair loss and it was year after year, I was just getting, I guess, sicker.

I was going to different doctors and I asking the right questions and I was not getting the answers I was looking for. I was told that it was either in my head, that maybe I was depressed, and then the best answer was that I was getting older and I was 25 at that time. Of course, it’s ridiculous now but I really thought like, “Okay, well maybe I’m gaining weight because I’m getting older. Maybe this is what happens when you get tired.” As a result of getting the runaround from 2000 to 2009, almost a decade, I was waking up going to class or work, coming home, eating something and passing out on my couch. This was pretty much my life, that’s all I really had energy for other than, I clean my house on the weekends but that was about it.

When I got diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, I finally felt validated and I felt I wanted to do something about the condition, I wanted to see if I could reverse it or really get myself better. That’s how I became a Hashimoto’s expert/human guinea pig. I’m so passionate about getting the message that recovering your health is possible. I’ve been in … recovered my health and in remission for about four years now. I’ve been able to do so much. I’ve been able to follow my dreams that seemed like distant fantasies. I want the same thing for other people who are struggling with their health and maybe they’re challenged with their weight or with their mood or brain fog or fatigue levels that are preventing them from living the life that they want to live.

Trevor:  Absolutely. I can totally see you passion and compassion for other people with Hashimoto’s. You’ve been really helping so many people with your last book and the one that’s coming out that we’ll talk more about. I know that you’re so dedicated to this. I appreciate the work that you’re doing to help people. For people who aren’t familiar with Hashimoto’s, can you explain a little bit about it? I think a lot of people probably don’t realize how common it really is.

Izabella:                  When I first got diagnosed, you know my husband Michael, I came home and I said, “Hey, I have Hashimoto’s.” He said, “Oh, that sounds like a Japanese sword fighter, right?” Then I’ll talk to other people that I let them that I work with people with Hashimoto’s and that’s pretty much what I do, and I write books on Hashimoto’s and I have a blog. People are like, “That’s so great that somebody is interested in such a really rare condition that just never happens.” I’m like, “Actually, it’s not rare.” Twenty seven percent of our population actually has Hashimoto’s within the United States. If you were to do the right tests for it, if you were to find it in the early stages where you still have symptoms but the conventional medical tests miss it, 27%. Out of the people that take thyroid hormones, most of them are told that they have sluggish thyroids or that their thyroids are lazy or underactive or hypothyroid. In majority of the cases, 97% of the time, they actually have Hashimoto’s.

They’re just not told that they have Hashimoto’s because their doctors are not aware that you can prevent the progression of the condition and that you can even reverse it when you do the right things.

Trevor:  I remember when I was in Naturopathic Medical School. We talk about thyroid disease. The professors at Naturopathic Medical School would say, “Okay, well you need to do a full comprehensive profile for people who you suspect to have thyroid condition including thyroid antibodies.” They said, “You’ll get … other doctors are going to tell you that it’s not necessary. We’re like, “Why wouldn’t they want to do all these other tests too?” They don’t know what to do with it. They don’t what to do. If you have an autoimmune thyroid condition, they don’t really have a lot of solutions. They just don’t add it in to the thyroid panels.

I know this was, I graduated 17 years ago, but I don’t think much has changed since then. Maybe a little bit more awareness about it. I was so surprised that doctors wouldn’t include all of these tests from the get go, including things like not just TSH but also free T3, free T4 thyroid antibodies. That probably doesn’t surprise you to hear that.

Izabella:                  It doesn’t surprise me and it’s very unfortunate because people will be told that they’re crazy, lazy, that they’re just getting fat, that they have forked mouth disease, that they’ll never have children. They’re told all of these things when in fact it’s because they have Hashimoto’s and they have these raging antibodies that are marking their thyroid gland as the foreign invader and their immune system is attacking their thyroid glands.

In the case of people with Hashimoto’s, there are five stages to it. In the second stage is when we start seeing that the immune system begins to recognize the thyroid gland is the foreign invader. This is the stage where we’ll see thyroid antibodies but not always. Some people never have thyroid antibodies and they still have Hashimoto’s. We’ll see all of these symptoms. The symptoms that have been correlated are going to be obsessive compulsive symptoms, anxiety, health seeking behaviors or things that would get them qualified as hypochondriacs. People who generally feel unwell and they know something is going on within them that’s not right, they go to their doctors, they get tested with the TSH test and [inaudible 00:08:52] that nothing’s wrong.

This is because the TSH doesn’t get elevated until stage 4. Between stage 2 and 4 on average, it can take 10 years. By the time somebody reaches stage 4, a significant part of their thyroid gland has been destroyed by their immune system. At that point, they’re going to need thyroid hormone replacement. In stage 2 maybe even stage 3, it’s much easier to prevent the damage and potentially reverse it than it is once you get to stage 4. What’s even more scary is stage 5 is when we start seeing progression into other types of autoimmune conditions.

I’ll see people who get diagnosed with a thyroid condition, they’ll be a good girl, they’ll take their thyroid meds, they’ll do everything the doctor says. They’ll eat less, exercise more. Don’t get any anti-depressant because you’re mood is not related to your thyroid according to the conventional paradigm. But then [inaudible 00:09:48] lupus or rheumatoid arthritis or another type of autoimmune condition.

Trevor:  In my practice, I see, psoriasis is one of the big things I see when it comes to skin because that’s an autoimmune skin condition so I see that combination a lot of times too.

Izabella:                  Yeah, absolutely. I’ve seen people with acne, eczema, psoriasis. When we get their Hashimoto’s under control, you start seeing these conditions resolved as well. It’s because a lot of the autoimmune conditions as you know are rooted in the same types of root causes so what helps one autoimmune condition will help another one. What causes one autoimmune condition may cause a whole host of them too.

Trevor:  Right. It seems that in hypothyroidism, thyroid functions starts becoming low, one of the first signs is dry skin. I always talk to people about how skin is our magic mirror. It gives us great clues about our overall health. Someone has chronically dry skin and some of the other symptoms that you mentioned especially the fatigue that can be a sign that there’s something going on, an early sign that something’s going on with the thyroid. I like to point that out to people. Any other early signs that you would say are particularly important to look out for?

Izabella:                  Definitely looking at your outer markers of health so like you said, the skin. The skin is a really, really important part thing to look at. If you’re breaking out more, that could be a potential sign that your thyroid is underactive or underperforming. If you have, like you said, eczema psoriasis, that’s going to be an autoimmune component. Dry skin and dull grayish skin, pale skin, these are all signs that you might have a thyroid condition. If you have hair that’s straight like ours is, and all of a sudden it’s become more difficult to brush, that’s actually one of the early signs of a person with Hashimoto’s and autoimmune thyroid disease that there’s some alteration of thyroid hormone function. There’s an inflammatory component happening within the body. The body is shunting resources away from those things that are really nice to have like pretty skin and great hair and moving it towards the vital processes of just moving about with our days.

Of course, the nails, whenever we see people who are missing the little round things on their nails, that can be a sign of their little half moons that they are thyroid hormone deficients as well. Then we see these lines across from left to right on their fingernails, fingernails that are more brittle, these are all your outward signs of potentially there’s something going on with your thyroid. I know, for me, it was … I was going to a dermatologist. She was somebody that was helping me and guiding me in the right direction because I was losing hair and my skin was so dry and dull. It was like I had to constantly exfoliate my skin. If you’re going through any of these things, these are potential signs and symptoms and your body’s messages that something is not right.

Trevor:  You talk a lot about the root cause behind Hashimoto’s and why this is happening. Of course, I love that because I talk a lot about root causes too. Can you share some of those root causes that people should be aware of?

Izabella:                  If I were to categorize root cause I would say you put them in six different categories. They’re going to be food sensitivities, nutrient depletion, intestinal permeability, impaired stress response, toxins as well as chronic low grade infections that may be hidden somewhere in the body. Really, the easiest place to start for most people is by starting to clean up their diet and by cleaning up their personal care routine which is why I love your products so much.

This can help a person start to feel better in a pretty quick time if they do the right things, if they start getting these pieces like removing the toxins from their life which I consider any kind of chemicals as well as our foods. Then also, allowing our body’s natural detox process to start working better. This is where I usually recommend for people who have thyroid conditions and are struggling.

Trevor:  How do you help with detoxification? How do you support that?

Izabella:                  When I first started working with people after I got myself well, I was using this approach where we were looking at all the different potential root cause, going through the various foods that could be of various infections, it could be toxins with deficiencies. I found there was a very expensive and labor intensive process because we’re doing all these kinds of tests and we were trying all these various elimination diets. It was pretty intense. Sometimes people didn’t see results for a while. Sometimes they felt defeated. These are trying things and they weren’t getting better.

I started seeing a soft side of people who would have reaction to every kind of supplement they took so you’d give them a B Vitamin. They’d say, “Oh, this made me breakout or I got a rash from this.” It would be things that were pretty benign and pretty, huh. That’s not something that would really cause a reaction. Then is started researching and I started figuring out that people who are sensitive to supplements are usually going to be sensitive to them because they have a congestive liver. The liver helps us clear out toxins and anything we put into our body, it helps us process it. Sometimes that processing means it turns it on or it helps it clear the body.

When a person has a congestive liver, which is very, very common in people with Hashimoto’s, they’re not going to be processing things correctly. What I started doing is putting everybody on this liver support protocol where we go through and give them supportive nutrients and herbs. An [acetylcysteine 00:15:59], milk thistle is a really great one. Turmeric, methylation support. There’s this wonderful powder I like to use where you just put a scoop of it in a smoothie. Also doing foods like hot lemon water, doing things like cilantro and green smoothies, these are all things that can help move things along for people really nicely and helps to clear out some of those toxins.

In addition to cleaning up the food, cleaning up the personal care routine, and also helping to remove some of the everyday toxins like fluoride in our water supply getting a filter to get rid of fluoride, going on a personal care like withdrawal or detox or buying products like herbs that are clean and that are not full of chemicals, and just really allowing yourself that time to get plenty of sleep because that helps to clear out some of those toxins as well.

That’s kind of a bit in a jiffy. I have obviously more information and details and recipes and all of of that in my book. In a nutshell, that’s something you can do and about 65% of people through my testing and research feel better within two weeks, even people that have been sick with multiple chemical sensitivities like really complex people with Hashimoto’s they start feeling better right away.

Trevor:  I’m so glad you said that because I think there’s this misbelief that if you choose more of a natural or integrative path that it’s going to take months or years to improve. I noticed that too with a really good protocol two weeks you start to notice a big difference. It doesn’t have to be a really long time before you start to see some light at the end of the tunnel and some hope that you’re on the right path. Even if it’s two weeks and you noticed some improvement but it’s not 100%, which, 100% is amazing, that’s fantastic after two weeks. But sometimes it’s, you know, you get 25% better in 2 weeks but it gives you some hope of, “Oh wait, this is really working, this helping me, maybe I can be even more strict about it or follow it more even closely, the diet and the different supplements and different things and then really get better. I love that you’re talking about that.

There are a lot of different components here that people want to look at. I love that you’re talking too about the detoxification component and things that you can do that support your body vitamin just taking things out because sometimes it’s just very overwhelming for people. Let’s talk about some of these big root causes like the food sensitivities, what would you say that like percentage of people like that’s the big problem? Is that the number one thing?

Izabella:                  That’s such a huge thing. I just got this article my mom emailed it to me, the ROJ. I was so upset because a person, it was a dietitian that wrote an article about how you don’t need to be off of gluten unless you have celiac disease. She quoted some some doctor who said people were coming into his office gluten-free with a “bogus” diagnosis like Hashimoto’s. It tells people that if the gluten-free diet doesn’t work when they have Hashimoto’s that only helps if you have celiac disease but that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

I’ve done surveys and studies of my clients and my readers. There’s one survey I did about the most helpful interventions. This survey, we had 2,232 people answer it. Eighty eight percent of them reported that they felt better gluten-free. About 80% felt better off of dairy, then we saw soy, grains, seeds, night shades and eggs as other potential root cause trigger foods in the majority of people. Gluten was by far the highest, 88% of people. Get this Trevor, in this survey, I was asking people which of these things these interventions helped the most with specific symptoms you were dealing with? Going gluten-free was actually more helpful for people than in terms of fatigue so getting back their energy levels helping them lose weight and restrain their brain function and brain activity. It was more helpful than thyroid hormones.

People say that it’s not a real thing and that they don’t need to worry about it. But yeah, that’s a really significant thing. About 20% of people. for them, gluten will be their root cause and that’ll be the thing that once they get off of it, they can go into remission from Hashimoto’s. For others, they might have to dig deeper but definitely that’s going to be a starting point for you is get off of the foods that are going to be inflammatory to you and gluten is just such a big one. As my studies say, about 88%, so maybe there’s one person where it’s not an issue for but I recommended going gluten-free for everybody.

Trevor:  Yeah, I agree. I think that [inaudible 00:21:17] intolerances were big. When we eat foods that we’re intolerant to, that our body is reacting to, it increases our immune system our immune response. If you have an autoimmune condition, it makes sense that that would flare it up, that that would completely make you feel worse. I think it’s unfortunate that there are some doctors that believe that if you don’t have celiac disease that this whole idea that you have to go gluten-free is bogus. Obviously, there are so many people now that are going gluten-free and feeling better that we know it’s true. Unfortunately, sometimes the research takes a little while to catch up to what we really know. I’m sure it will come around and we’ll be supported. What about other things? One of the things you mentioned were infections. Maybe people aren’t aware of some of the infections and how those might trigger Hashimoto’s.

Izabella:                  The way that an infection can trigger Hashimoto’s is going to be through a few different  potential mechanisms. One of them is the molecular mimicry pathway. Your immune system will try to attack the infection and it will all at the same time start attacking the immune system. It’s a case of mistaken identity. The second way is through something known as the bystander effect. This is when an infection lives usually inside of your thyroid glands or somewhere else within your body and other kinds of autoimmune conditions. Then the immune system starts to attack the infection and the home where the infection lives which happens to be your organ. This is a case of when the immune system attacks the thyroid gland because there’s an infection inside of it. A lot of times this could be viruses.

The third way is when we have intestinal permeability anywhere within our gut, and our sign is in our mouths, abscess teeth, any kind of tooth infections. This can cause intestinal permeability or leaky gut and this is a known trigger for autoimmune thyroid disease and really for every type of autoimmune condition. The most common infections that I’ve seen in people with Hashimoto’s are going to be epstein barr virus, H. pylori, yeast, SIBO, and then protozoan parasites where you can’t see this through the naked eye known as [inaudible 00:23:34]. The interesting thing is about 80% of my clients who don’t go into remission with diet will have at least one or more of these infections.

Trevor:  Yeah, I think that’s so important to find those infections that those can be addressed. It does seem like a lot of people, a lot of my patients at least my experiences, a lot to times with doing a two-week program like we were talking about, with doing some detoxification support, eliminating food allergens will help a lot of people. But then there are some people that don’t get better with that. Those were usually people that have some infection that’s underlying there that needs to be addressed. Is that what you find as well?

Izabella:                  Yeah, absolutely. The people that I work with are primarily people who don’t get better with just their diet. When you think about it, if you have an infection within your gut, no matter what kind of food you’re eating, you’re going to become sensitive to it. That makes sense because you just keep building up new food sensitivities and those are a trigger of course and so are nutrient deficiencies. If you have an infection within your gut, you’re not going to be absorbing your nutrients as well.

Eighty percent of them that don’t get better have some sort of an infection. Then we also see people have adrenal dysfunction. Low cortisol actually is what I see in about 95% of people who don’t get better. About 97% of them have this toxic backlog. This is across the board. It’s wonderful I think that we’re spreading information and education about things people can do on their own which is the nutrition. I feel the nutrition is fundamental.

In my book, I also talk about the other three fundamentals which are supporting your liver, supporting your adrenals and supporting your gut. These are things that everybody can do. Then there’s the advance things. These are the toxins, the infections and some of these rare root causes, and so my book, I have a second part of it called, “The Advanced Protocols”, where we talk about some of these advance things that you need to test for like the infections. Then, once you find the infection, what do you do? I provide information for people about what tests to get, what kinds of protocols they can do and I always give them choices between if they wanted to go the conventional route, if they wanted to do herbs, if they wanted to do supportive nutrition and we go through what’s the right thing for that particular person. If you can figure out your triggers and work on the fundamentals, you can start seeing improvements in your health really quickly.

Trevor:  That’s fantastic. If people feel like they need to do some testing, do you talk about the specific test in the book and who they should work with? Because it’s not … a lot of those tests aren’t available. You can’t just go and pick that up at the drugstore. These are pretty specialty tests that you’re talking about.

Izabella:                  Yeah, oh my goodness. Yeah, I recommend working with physicians trained in functional medicine naturopathic physicians, functional nutritionists, really, any practitioners that have that deeper knowledge and that go after the root causes of thyroid disease. If you go to your traditional doctor’s office and you say, “Hey, test me for parasites.” They’re going to look at you like you’re crazy, then they’ll roll their eyes and they’ll order a test, they will likely come out negative because they’re not going to be getting a comprehensive enough test.

There are tests like the bio health lab 41h, the GI effects profile, the GI map that actually are really good and they use advanced technology to find these types of infections and the parasites. We always say there’s no such thing as a false positive in this case because you either have it or you don’t have it but there’s a ton of false negatives potentially. If you don’t get the right tests, you might be sent off on a wild goose chase looking for other types of root causes. Just to save yourself time, money, and your health, it’s always best to, I would say, if you have a chronic autoimmune condition like Hashimoto’s or eczema, psoriasis, you want to go to the source and find somebody who’s really trained in reversing this condition for you.

Trevor:  Yeah. One of the things you mentioned was SIBO. Can you explain a little bit about that and how people would know if they have SIBO?

Izabella:                  Right. Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth, this is basically we have bacteria and sometimes they can be bacteria that would normally be beneficial within our bodies, but they overgrow in the small intestine which is supposed to be relatively free of bacteria. When they’re there, what happens is that causes the gut to become leaky to try to clear out these bacteria. Some of the symptoms might be, most obvious one is going to be irritable bowel syndrome, and for some people that might be diarrhea, some people that might be constipation. Not everybody has these symptoms. The other types of things they might see is they might they’re deficient in B12 or ferritin or other kinds of nutrients because instead of the food going to them, the bacteria in the small intestine is eating it up. Bloating, gassiness, those are the symptoms to think about, sometimes acid reflux.

This is something that is actually present in 50% of people with hypothyroidism. This was done in a study a couple of years ago. I’ve seen that to be just about right in my work with people as well, that about half of them are going to have this overgrowth of bacteria in their small intestine. Then it’s about how do we support it? How do we get them to clear it out so then their gut is longer leaky?

Trevor:  Again, this is the thing if you go to a conventional doctor. Most of them are going to no really know what to do if you say you want to be tested for SIBO.

Izabella:                  I think there is and it’s been a few years but when I was looking into it a few years ago in Chicago there was one place in Chicago, one place in Los Angeles that did the test. It was wow. From a conventional medical standpoint, the beautiful thing is from a functional medicine standpoint, you can actually get doctors to order a test, that’s a little kit that’s sent to your home. It’s actually a breath test. You breathe into these tiny little tubes and that tells you if you’re … basically, they’re testing the air to see if the bacteria are fermenting and giving off certain types of gases.

It’s relatively inexpensive. I think it’s maybe $100 to $150 dollars which the big machines that they use at some of those centers are like probably hundreds of thousand of dollars for those types of machines.

Trevor:  Yeah, that’s great that we can send those test kits right out to patients and have them able to just do it and it’s easy. Some of these tests are certainly easy to do. It’s just a matter of finding their practitioner in your area that can help you with that. Let’s talk about supplements. Are there any particular supplements that you think help most people with Hashimoto’s?

Izabella:                  Definitely. One of them is going to be selenium. Selenium has been studies quite a bit in thyroid disease. About 200 micrograms, once a day for three months help pep reduce their thyroid anti bodies by about half. Now we know that thyroid antibodies indicate how regressive your condition is and how progressive it is. The lower you can get those antibodies, the less likely you’re going to progress to other types of autoimmune conditions and your symptoms will also be reduced in many cases., not for everybody but we see that people who get their antibodies down will start having less anxiety, they’ll have better thyroid hormone conversions, so then they have more energy or hair grows better. Also palpitations seem to improve with selenium as well. That’s one easy thing that most people can do.

One that not many people know about is thiamine. This is one of the B Vitamins. When I was in pharmacy school, I was told that the thiamine deficiency was rare unless somebody was like a raging alcoholic and had been an alcoholic for many years. Only at that point would you suspect thiamine deficiency. Lo and behold, thiamine deficiency, a low grade one that won’t come up on lab tests, it’s present in Crohn’s, it’s present in Hashimoto’s, and and it’s present in other types of autoimmune disorders because they’re all linked to the gut. Basically, we’re not absorbing thiamine properly from our foods.

A dose of 600 mg of thiamine can dramatically help a person’s energy levels and their brain function within the course of three days. There have been a few studies that were done on this end. I ended up writing a blog post about it after having success with it myself. I used to have a lot of adrenal issues that just weren’t getting better. I had constantly low blood pressure, blood sugar issues, as well as all kinds of fatigue. As soon as I started taking thiamine, my blood pressure normalized, I no longer had these blood sugar things and my fatigue got better.

I wrote a blog post about it and I still get random people that come up to me at conferences and give me hugs. They’re like, “The thiamine changed my life.” I think I published this post maybe three years ago, four years ago. One woman just recently sent me a message that she was on disability and she ended up started thiamine and she’s now back at work because it gave her her life back. It’s 600 mg a day, it’s a safe and inexpensive supplement that people can start taking and start feeling better as they start searching for some of those root causes. The other things that can really help are going to be Vitamin D, potentially B12 but you want a test for those. Some of the B Vitamins and then the adrenal adaptogens are part of what I recommend as well.

Trevor:  I’m so glad that you mentioned that about the thyroid antibodies going back. When you were talking about selenium , your talk about thyroid antibodies are improving. Because I’ve heard also from conventional doctors that once you see that a patient’s thyroid antibodies are high, there’s no reason to run them again. I’ve actually fought with insurance companies before because they won’t cover patients, maybe they will now but I’ve had instances where they wouldn’t cover patients having the thyroid antibodies test repeated because they felt it wasn’t indicated because once they’re high, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are. I’m so glad that you mentioned that that you do test those thyroid antibodies again and watch those and hopefully see them drop.

Izabella:                  Yeah. You can actually test your interventions to see how your diet is working, how well … if you’ve actually eradicated the infection that you’re looking to. Eradicate by monitoring your thyroid antibodies. When we’re really aggressive with working with a client and getting their antibodies down, I’m measuring them actually once every month. To see the full impact of an intervention, it might take three months to a year in some cases. With H. Pylori eradication in some cases people go into complete remission from Hashimoto’s.

There was a couple of studies that were done where people had antibodies in the 2000 range, 500 range, crazy high numbers. Then they followed them after they treated their H. pylori infection month after month and these antibodies lept declining until eventually some of them got into remission. it’s very, very important to monitor. It’s not the only thing you should be looking at. You should also be looking at how you’re feeling and doing your comprehensive blood panel. Those antibodies can be an important clue into what’s happening with how is your immune system recognizing your thyroid right now. Is it still looking at your thyroid as the enemy or has it backed off a little bit?

Trevor:  Absolutely great. Thank you for pointing that out. I think that’s fantastic for people to know. Then also, before we go away from supplements, one of the concerns of Hashimoto’s is leaky gut or malabsorption issues. If some one has that and they’re taking supplements, are they actually going to absorbing the supplements they’re taking.

Izabella:                  That’s a really good question I get and people will say, “Oh, shouldn’t I get all of my nutrition from foods? Why take supplements?”, and what not. Supplements can actually help. In the case of a person, when they have leaky gut, they can help to get more nutrition into the body compared to a person who is just eating a healthy diet. I absolutely think they can be very, very helpful. There’s various theories about megadosage of supplements that they can actually bypass the cell walls and go through, and do what they’re supposed to do rather than that small doses that are in foods that may not get properly absorbed.

To do a very, very helpful intervention to, for example, supplement with selenium, instead of doing things like brazil nuts. I’ve had client who were on brazil nuts and we’d monitor their antibodies and we didn’t see a big difference and that I have them difference on selenium and then monitor their antibodies and sure enough, we saw a difference and then I put the ones on brazil nuts and selenium supplement and we actually saw that their antibodies declined.

There are things like that. I think selenium is one of the more important ones. Vitamin D, I must say like a lifeguard in Southern California working 48 hours a week on a beautiful beach, there’s a chance you’re going to be deficient. Getting through supplement form is the most efficient and effective way. You’re have to drink of cod liver oil to get enough from your food.

Trevor:                    I used to practice in Santa Barbara, California. I was amazed at how many people that are out in the sun all the time were still deficient in Vitamin D. Even surfers that are out in the sun can still be deficient in Vitamin D. It’s crazy to see that. We process Vitamin D differently so I think it’s still good to get those levels tested. You touched a little bit on the potential for Hashimoto’s going into remission. How common is that? That’s certainly not something that’s talked about very much.

Izabella:                  Going back, as far as the literature goes, I can tell you my experience with it but with a little bit of research behind it. There’s not a ton of research behind it. There was one study that was done with people who had been on thyroid hormones long term. About 20 of them had a spontaneous return of thyroid function within a certain 10, 20 year time period. That was just one tiny little study on this. That’s pretty much it.

There really haven’t been studies done on the rates of remission other than with celiac disease where 20% of people who had celiac and Hashimoto’s once they got off those gluten, wee able to get into remission from Hashimoto’s. What I’ve seen with my clients is getting into remission is, I would say, it’s a step on their journey. One of the first step is obviously to get the person feeling better and getting rid of all of their symptoms which is something that we can do for most people with their current interventions and the current things we have.

The second step is going to be reducing the thyroid antibodies. That’s going to be a measure of trying to identify and resolve those triggers. That can be a process that takes anywhere from three months to two years. Then the third step is going to be getting those antibodies under 100 and then under 35. I have seen people who have gotten them to zero. I have seen plenty of people who have gotten them under 100 and under 35. Statistically speaking, I would say with the interventions that we have now, we can probably get anywhere from 60% to 80% of people just in my experience and my estimates into remission from Hashimoto’s.

Trevor:  What about thyroid tissue regenerating after it’s been damaged? Is that a possibility?

Izabella:                  When I first started researching, when I first started looking into remission and recovery from thyroid disease that wasn’t really any information on that. There are a few case studies here and there. One really exciting thing is that we now have the technology to help along with it. Beck in the day, it was like, for some people it happens, for some people it didn’t and it was like, for some people, you eliminate the triggers and then they can get off of their thyroid medications. H. pylori is the common trigger that I’ve seen when we eliminate that, then we can actually get the person off of thyroid medications but not everybody with H pylori. The thyroid tissue does things on its own time.

One of the things we can do now is use low level laser therapy to help regenerate thyroid tissue. There is a study done, now three studies done in Brazil with using cold laser therapy or low level laser therapy for 10 sessions over the thyroid gland. Half of the people in the study were able to come off of their thyroid medications entirely. The other half showed a reduction and the need for thyroid hormones. I think at a time that we are now, we could say there is no cure for Hashimoto’s but if we can get the person into remission, if we could get rid of all of their symptoms, and if we can regenerate thyroid tissue and return that, I could say we have maybe a functional cure. We have something that’s really, really exciting that hasn’t been there before.

I think it’s a really exciting … this sounds strange but it’s an exciting time to beautiful thyroid patient and as well as somebody that specializes in thyroid because we can really give people their lives back and we can … it’s never been my goal to be anti- medications, but hey if we can help somebody get off of their thyroid hormones, then why not? Now we have the possibilities that are out there.

Trevor:  That’s fantastic. I so appreciate the work that you’re doing. I feel confident that if anybody can figure out a cure for Hashimoto’s, you’re going to be involved in that. Tell us more about your book, your new book, because you’ve got so much information and we’re only able to touch on a little bit but you’ve got a ton more in your new book that’s coming out.

Izabella:                  My new book is called, “Hashimoto’s Protocol.” It’s divided into two sections the first section goes over the fundamental protocols. Things that everybody should do when they have a thyroid condition and regardless of what the root cause is, the fundamental protocols are going to help them feel better. We’re going to start seeing some of that fatigue drop off. We’re going to start seeing some of that blood sugar issues start going away, we’re going to start seeing people with losing some weight, getting rid of their headaches, chemical sensitivities. We’re going to see skin issues start clearing up. That’s going to be two weeks of supporting the liver so my targeted liver support where we go through removing things that don’t serve us, adding foods and supplements that help us along and then cleaning up our space, the homes that we live in and our personal care routine.

Two weeks. Then we have four weeks of supporting the adrenals. We’re going through and we’re removing some of those stresses that may be affecting their adrenals. We’re getting more sleep, we’re doing targeted supplements for the adrenals. We’re doing a targeted nutrition plan for the adrenals. Then the fourth step is a six-week protocol that looks after what do we need to do to address our gut health. We’re looking at increasing digestive enzymes, we’re using all different types of enzymes to help get rid of the backlog of food sensitivity antibodies so that we start tolerating our foods better. We’re using nutrients in the foods that help to rebuild the gut lining.

As people do this, we’ll see a significant amount of people … the reason I know this is I’ve done this in a group program for the last two years with over, 1500 people now have gone through that program. I used to do outcomes research in my past life and so I’m a little bit nerdy and meticulous with that like, “Okay, what outcomes are people getting?” Sixty five percent of people can actually feel better within the first two weeks of that liver support protocol. By the time we get through the rest of the protocols, we’re looking at 85% to 90% of people feeling significantly better. Then 10%, 20% of the advanced cases, I also have the advanced protocols that are the second half of the book where I go through a series of assessments and then we help people identify what might be some of the triggers that they have. These could be things like infections or toxins that are within their bodies and then I give them a list of protocols that they can work on with their doctors or on their own or maybe sometimes educate their doctors on how to do.

Really, my big hope is that this bool will change how thyroid conditions are treated and give people an actionable protocol that they can jump right into and just jump in both feet and start feeling better right away because who’s got time to be sick?

Trevor:  Yeah, absolutely. We’ll have the link up for your book up on the site under the show notes so that people can go and get that. Also, you have a docuseries too that you’ve worked really hard on.

Izabella:                  I do, it’s called “The Thyroid Secret”. Dr. Trevor Cates is one of our featured experts. We have hundred experts and over 50 patients who’ve been able to recover their health and we share the latest and greatest strategies about how to overcome thyroid disease. I wanted to do it in an entertaining format that was like, not everybody likes to read books or not everybody … some people just want to sit and watch TV so we’ve put it together in a way that gives you all of the information you need over nine episodes so that you’re having fun and enjoying a cup of tea and watching a way back to your health and hopefully you’ll be entertained and interested … throughout the process, they’ll actually get help on information and how to recover their health.

We talk more about low level laser therapy in the series. We cover a lot of different things that could be potential triggers and how people can recover their health. My favorite part is the patient’s stories. We have patient’s stories who, patients who were told that they were never going to get better. They’re living, breathing, walking, success stories. It’s been a big passion project of mine and I’m so grateful that you’re a part of it.

Trevor:                    Thank you, Izabella. I know you’ve worked so hard on that and you’ve done such a great job putting all of that together. I’m very excited that we’re able to share that with everybody. Fantastic. We’ll have all of that information and links on all of that in the show notes under the podcast. Is there anything else you want to share with anybody? Last parting words or how, any other additional information you want to share?

Izabella:                  Definitely. I think one of the things that people, especially women, struggle with, Hashimoto’s, it affects men and children but its’ primarily a woman’s condition. For every man that’s affected we have five to eight women. One of the big things I see is that as women, we generally don’t feel safe. Because there are so many different things happening within our lives whether that is unsupportive partners or simply we’re not taught to take care of ourselves first. We’re taught to take care of everybody else that we see this chronic occurrence of thyroid disease. I always want to tell women that I speak with to really think about what you can do to recover your health and being kind to yourself, being compassionate to yourself.

Treat yourself like you would a loved one, a good friend, even a pet if you have one, with that same love and compassion because a lot of us can be very hard on ourselves and have these super high expectations on ourselves. That really doesn’t help when you’re struggling with something. You need to show yourself the love and compassion that you deserve and that will help you get better. This si what I’ve seen with my success stories. The women that really get better are the ones that take the time to invest in themselves and really care for themselves like they would for others.

Trevor:                    Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Izabella, for all your hard work and for the information you provided us today, thank you.

Izabella:                  Thank you so much for having me. I so appreciate the work that you’re doing in the world.

Trevor:  I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Izabella Wentz. To learn more about Dr. Wentz, her new book, or the docuseries, you can go to my website thespadr.com, that’s doctor abbreviated, DR. Go to the podcast page with her interview and you’ll find all the information and links there.

While you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. Community. You can subscribe to my newsletter, take the skin quiz. You’ll also see my new book there. I encourage you to share this podcast with others. If you know anyone that is struggling I think their health, it may have some of the symptoms, the signs that we have talked about today or you know has a thyroid condition, this would be great to share with them. Help spread the love.

Speaking of spreading the love, join me on social media, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and join the conversation there. Thank you and I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. podcast.