Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and Graves’ Disease Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (23.4MB) | Embed

In this interview I discuss Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and Graves’ Disease with Linda Lizotte.

Linda: This Linda Lizotte, I’m the co-founder of Designs for Health, nutritionist and I’m happy to interview Dr. Nikolas Hedberg tonight. Let me tell you a little bit more about his background. Dr. Nikolas Hedberg, he’s a D.C., D.A.B.C.I. He’s a board certified chiropractic internist by the American Board of Chiropractic Internist. His practice is in Asheville, North Carolina where he focuses on autoimmune thyroiditis.

Dr. Hedberg is the author of the book ‘The Complete Thyroid Health and Diet Guide‘ which is a comprehensive guide to diagnosing and treating thyroid disorders that’s sitting right here next to me, it’s fantastic. Dr. Hedberg lectures at integrative medicine conferences. Has been published in medical journals and teaches advanced functional medicine courses through Functional Medicine Town and as an adjunct faculty member at Hawthorn University. Health care practitioners of all disciplines consult with Dr. Hedberg on the most difficult cases, his practice philosophy can be summed by this quote by Sir William Osler, “It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease that patient have.” Wow, very good. Okay. Let’s work to getting started. So thank you Dr. Hedberg.

Dr. Hedberg: Thanks for having me again Linda. I really appreciate it.

Linda: Again the book ‘The Thyroid Alternative: Renew your Thyroid naturally’ he’s got some nice write ups in here by some doctors that we know. We have Dr. David Brady foreword. He’s got a really nice write up by Dr. Daniel Taylor, chiropractor, he’s been in clinical rounds. Dr. Ernest Colin and… who’s a clinical director of Holistic Medical Clinic of Carolina. And Dr. Geoffrey Moss from Massachusetts that a lot of you know so well. So fantastic book.

It’s definitely… we’re going to go through a lot of it, what’s in there tonight. Obviously, we’ll… the book is more patient friendly and I know that was difficult for Dr. Hedberg to do as it is for any of your practitioners to try to bring this to patients. That’s where this book might be really useful to you because you’re trying to explain the same stuff. So get the book and if it’s something that you’re trying to explain to your patients on a regular basis you can just hand it to them. You don’t have to explain it all saying it a 100 times.

Dr. Hedberg: Thank you.

Linda: So, all right. So I know that that’s why probably why you wrote the book Dr. Hedberg no?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. There’s some good thyroid books out there but I wanted to give a broad overall picture of functional medicine and all the on causes of thyroid disease because a lot of people seem… the feedback have gotten already is, they [inaudible 00:03:03], ‘Wow, I never even knew that the adrenal is going to affect the thyroid and the Lyme disease can cause thyroid problems. So it’s… I think to me a good job educating people about thyroid disorders.

Linda: Yes. We’re going to learn some new things and learn some things like you just mentioned that I wasn’t really up on before so… I would love for you to start with some of the statics that you state in the book and just some great information about autoimmune thyroid disease. That probably would make a good start to all of this.

Dr. Hedberg: Right. Now is the best time to be a functional medicine practitioner because autoimmune disease is on the rise. We’re really the only ones who can identify why it’s there and really get these patients under control and improve their quality of life. Autoimmune thyroid disease, it’s the number one autoimmune disease in the United States. Actually about 10% of the US population has autoimmune thyroid disease. So if a huge number of people, almost one of every 10 people you brought into is going to have it. Twenty-seven million Americans, mostly women, about 50% of them will go undiagnosed. And 90% of the hypothyroidism you’re going to see in practice is actually due to Hashimoto’s.

So when we see someone and you think that they have a thyroid problem there’s a good chance there’s going to be autoimmunity involved. Conventional treatment it’s the same whether you have autoimmune thyroid disease or not. We have the hypothyroidism it’s not autoimmune. You get medication Synthroid. If you have Hashimoto’s it’s the exact same treatment. That’s why a lot of conventional physicians they don’t run thyroid antibodies because it’s not going to change how they treat it. We know that when someone does have Hashimoto’s, it’s not necessarily an issue with the thyroid gland, it’s really an issue with the immune system.

Linda: Good point. So I do want you to go into that a little bit more, but before you do, you might want to just talk about the diagnosis and how that might… maybe differs from diagnosis of just plain old type of hypothyroidism or any other thyroid condition.

Dr. Hedberg: Right. So usually you’ll pick up on some of the symptoms but usually that’s TH8 thyroid stimulating hormone’s going to be elevated. Looking at total T4, total T3, 3T4, 3T3, many times those are going to be decreased. But the two antibodies you want to run to really make the diagnosis are thyroid peroxidase antibodies and antithyroglobulin antibodies. You’ve got to run both. I see a lot of blood work done from other practitioners and they just do thyroid peroxidase. But you’re going to have antithyroglobulin antibodies positive.

Thyroid peroxidase antibodies could be negative so you really have to run both. If any of those are elevated then you know how to… know to diagnose [inaudible 00:06:19] which is kind of the opposite. You can run what’s called a TSI, thyroid stimulating immunoglobulin and then also TS8 receptor antibodies. If any of those are positive then you also have the diagnosis of graves.

You can also see a mixed Hashimoto’s and graves. You will have thyroid… say thyroid peroxidase as positive and they’ll have the TS8 high positive. So they’ll actually have both.

Hashimoto’s can actually start of as like a grave’s presentation because there’s a lot of information. The thyroid gland is producing a lot of extra hormone so they actually have… they actually has symptoms of too much thyroid hormone. But it’s actually the beginning stages of Hashimoto’s and then they eventually fall into the hypothyroid category overtime as the thyroid gland gets destroyed from the immune system.

Linda: That’s very interesting. I did not know that the thyroid peroxidase can be negative and say really all… absolutely [inaudible 00:07:25] antithyroid antibodies, that’s fascinating.

Dr. Hedberg: Exactly.

Linda: And then I have seen patients where they seem to be over producing but then they go into like a complete hypothyroid. Of course they like to use that as a treatment to kind of bring thyroid out to and then treat them with the thyroid hormone, but I’ve never heard before that that’s the beginning of the Hashimoto’s. That’s very interesting.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. We can certainly present that way.

Linda: All right. So you got this thyroid gland and you’ve got… you were mentioning this is a really an immune system disorder and you also mentioned that autoimmune is on the rise and we’re all seeing that. So we absolutely cannot disagree with that. So the thyroid glands, right in the throat, right in the center [bone 00:08:17] between the head and the rest of the body, why is this gland so prone to autoimmune disease?

Dr. Hedberg: There’s actually a paper I once quoted, it was just published this year in 2011, out of a journal hormonal research. And actually the title was a paper is “Why is the thyroid so prone to autoimmune disease?”

Linda: Really?

Dr. Hedberg: So it’s out there and everyone even in conventional medicine and research they’re trying to figure out why is it so prevalent now, why is it growing? Basically the authors say that these are basically preventable environmental factors like high iodine intake, selenium deficiency, pollutants such as tobacco smoke and industrial smug, as well as infectious diseases and certain drugs. They’ve all been implicated in the development of autoimmune thyroiditis.

So you really have to have three things for autoimmune disease. Number one is a genetic predisposition. There’s not a lot we can do about that at least not yet. The second thing is usually gut permeability, leaky gut. And with our modern day high stress lifestyles, electromagnetic creation, computers, cell phones. We’re all under more stress. We’re working longer hours, there’s more pollution. As you know and our food is hollow. You can pick up an orange off the shelf and it might not even have a single milligram of vitamin C in it. Medications, infections, toxic metals.

So they’re recognizing this in conventional literature that it is the environment and our modern day lifestyles that are triggering this. Now thyroid is just is just… it’s very sensitive to toxins and it’s the largest endocrine gland in the body because of very, very high blood supply right directly from the heart. Over time there’s enough environmental insults and the autoimmunity can be triggered.

Linda: Fascinating. So you remind me of the… Dr. Loyd did a lecture at out Glacierfest this summer, in August and he talked about the perfect storm. He was referring to autism. I think a lot of us came out of that lecture saying, “Wow, the perfect storm is… correlate to fibromyalgia, can relate to Hashimoto’s, can relate to so many other… probably most of the disorders that functional medicine practitioners like yourself deal with. It’s never just one cause not typically. I think that’s far as of our medical doctors as to why they can’t just put everything under a tiny little simple blanket.

Dr. Hedberg: Exactly. The thyroid… they do also mention in the paper that the thyroid hormone production is a very complex hormonal synthesis pathway, and it has these real peculiar requirements that are different from a lot of other endocrine producing glands. So those are other factors that can come into play in autoimmunity.

Linda: Yeah. Also those receptors that have to be working properly that stimulate the production. You talk about that little bit, I don’t know if you want to go into that a little more?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. I mean just the basics of thyroid hormone production. You have iodine entering the thyroid gland, you have L Tyrosine and then there’s a whole host of vitamins and minerals that you need to make it. Vitamin A, magnesium, copper, zinc, B vitamins and there’s a lot that goes into manufacturing thyroid hormone itself. It’s a very complex process.

Linda: So I’m even… those nutrients need to be there and those receptors need to be turned on and working properly. Maybe not even damaged by the chemicals that you mentioned earlier.

Dr. Hedberg: Exactly. Thyroid disrupting chemicals also known as TDCs can give you illusion that the thyroid is working normally because they can disrupt the actual nucleus receptors in the cell. Their TH8 can look good and although 3T4, 3T3 can look good but these chemicals in our environment can really throw things off.

Linda: Do you mind, this is a good time to maybe go into the chemicals in more detail? I know you want to talk about toxic metals maybe a little later but do you want to go into that right now?

Dr. Hedberg: I can go into that a little bit later tie it in with the toxic metals.

Linda: Okay. Very good. I’d love for you to give us more information about something I know that you like to spend a lot of time on like you did in the book. I think that you feel that a lot of people that go to a nutritional medical doctor are not hearing about this and what you call the infection connections.

Dr. Hedberg: Right. Basically it started with a… it was a combination of things it was a paper I read back in 2006 looking at molecular mimicry and borrelia burgdorferi the bacteria that causes Lyme disease and its connection with autoimmune thyroiditis. The authors found that the surface proteins on borrelia burgdorferi can mimic thyroid tissue. So a borrelia burgdorferi infection can trigger autoimmune thyroid disease. I started seeing more and more Lyme disease patients and more and more Hashimoto’s patients and testing the Hashimoto’s patients for Lyme, and looking at their history.

Many times you’d uncover they actually did have Lyme and vice versa. You start testing your Lyme disease patients for Hashimoto’s and many of them are coming back with positive antibodies. That’s just one of the things, one of the major three criteria for autoimmunity. It’s some kind of environmental trigger and many times it’s an infection. For years people have been talking about gluten and vitamin D and that’s definitely a major, major player in some cases of autoimmune thyroiditis but not in all of them. I found that… and there’s actually quite a lot of literature on this, in fact there’s a paper in the Journal of Virology in 2009.

The whole paper has a review of all the viruses that can trigger autoimmune thyroiditis. You look at it and you see Epstein-Barr virus, you see the influenza virus, hepatitis C, parvovirus B19, human foamy virus, the herpes virus. I mean all these viruses can trigger autoimmune thyroiditis. They can cause Hashimoto’s. They can cause graves. They can cause subacute thyroiditis.

So I start seeing the Lyme disease and its co-infections [code reading SP] it and then you start tracking down the viruses. You see those that are causing it and then you’re seeing infections in the gut. Like Dr. Brady has talked about before the yersinia enterocolitica, which is found in the gut and that also has molecular mimicry type presentations. Where the body recognizes the surface proteins on the yersinia eggs and it looks just like thyroid tissue. So you find Yersinia on the stool analysis in some of your patients with Hashimoto’s. The one you eradicate you can get good results. Some of the other…

Linda: When you say… I’m sorry. When you say, didn’t mean to interrupt but when you say looks like the thyroid tissue is that what you and some others refer to as molecular mimicry?

Dr. Hedberg: Exactly. So the body’s immune system… your immune system is basically monitoring amino acids sequences at the cellular level. And if it sees something that looks exactly like something else it doesn’t really know the difference, it just knows that’s it’s going to tag it and its going to attack it. So if these surface proteins look the same as stealth tissue then the immune system will attack both.

Linda: Okay. So keep going. So that’s very interesting. You mentioned all these different viruses that were all very familiar with… that all have such an effect on the immune system. I think what you’re saying is that they can be one of the key players in the causation of several autoimmune disease. Not just being deficient vitamin D, not just having sensitivity to gluten, is that what you’re saying?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Because you can go gluten free and heal the gut and get your vitamin D levels optimal and you can see there’s still something that’s really driving the infection. When you start analyzing your blood chemistries you’re going to see their CBC differential is going to be out of whack. Low white blood cell count or high, you’ll see the pattern of high monocytes and [inaudible 00:17:51] usually indicating parasite or yeast infection in the gut. Then you’ll see elevated lymphocytes and low neutrophils that usually indicates a chronic viral activity. But you also see that with Lyme disease.

So you can pick some of these up just on your basic blood chemistries but even going further than the Lyme disease and the viruses in the gut infections, there are a lot of co-infections out there that takes also [inaudible 00:18:21] and risk some really good research of South Africa on rickettsia species and autoimmune thyroiditis. Rickettsia is a common co-infection in Lyme disease and it just… it wreaks havoc on these adrenals, the thyroid, the heart you name it. A lot of these patients will come and present you with like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune disease, they are just completely wiped out.

Then you test them and you find out they have rickettsia as well as other co-infections like babesia and ehrlichia. Babesiosis it’s the most common co-infection of Lyme disease. But where I’m in North Carolina, we see a lot of rickettsia [inaudible 00:19:13] also carry. But some people will have rickettsia but they don’t have Lyme disease. The rickettsia is bad enough because it’s almost impossible to get rid of. Like Lyme once it gets deep into the system. So you really have to identify these infections and go after them and shut them down if you really want to shut down the autoimmunity.

Linda: Is it… you’re saying rickettsia is really difficult to get rid off? Dr. Hedberg is it difficult to spot it when it’s deep in the system or is it easier to find out that someone has it when it’s an early infection versus it’s been there a long time?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. I mean most people are going to know when they have it. They’re going to get rocky mountains, spotted fever. People will know that right away because some things can be… I mean sometimes they can kill you but I mean that’s how bad they can be. But you are going know if they’ve had it in the beginning. They’ll be really, really sick, really, really ill. They might even be taken to the emergency room. We’re told that they just had a really bad bug but usually they’re going to know. They’re going to have symptoms and no one’s really figuring out what it is. Then I like to do PCR testing for rickettsia. That seems to be the best to identify it.

Linda: Okay.

Dr. Hedberg: It will show up in many cases of these Hashimoto’s patients.

Linda: I live in the woods and I have two dogs and I… I wonder if my dog has babesia and… so they’re susceptible to some of these same things like the Lyme, the different organisms. I always thought it was just one or two of these. There’s a lot.

Dr. Hedberg: Yes. There’s new ones all the time in their new species of borrelia burgdorferi and there’s some new protozoa out there at fl 1953. So there’s all kinds of new bug showing up.

Linda: Well, I don’t know, I guess it makes you either want to sleep, live in a bubble, stay inside or I don’t know. Fortunately I love staying outside. All right. Good thing we have great doctors like you out there and all of you that are listening on the line right now so thank God for that. Okay. So all these different infections, [inaudible 00:21:41] really good job at the viruses and these different organisms that people can get… people and animals can get infected with. So anything else you want to add to the whole infections connections?

Dr. Hedberg: Some people ask well, what came first, is it the gut that broke down and the immune system was weak, is it emotional, is it the toxins? Because not everyone that gets infected actually manifest infection. Some people their bodies they are able to fight it off.

Linda: Right.

Dr. Hedberg: It’s a combination of things. The Lyme diseases on the rise it’s the most common infection in the country, vector borne infection. It’s on the rise. It’s spreading everywhere but we also have a large population of people with very, very weak immune systems, some under all kinds of stress, like we talked about in the beginning. So I don’t know if you can pin point it on one thing which came first, I think it’s a combination of how we live our lives now and what’s going on in our environment.

Linda: Yap. Hard to believe. Well, of course the environment is getting worse and worse every year too, right Dr. Hedberg?

Dr. Hedberg: That’s exactly right.

Linda: I guess when you add all these up it’s not all that surprising that autoimmune diseases are probably the kind of hot thing that’s on the rise right now, and like I said, certainly Lyme disease and that’s unfortunate but that’s [inaudible 00:23:17]. As long as there’s more and more mercury that we’re all being exposed to and other 100 million chemicals, and all of these here, I guess we’re going to be dealing with a lot of Hashimoto’s so… I think what you’re also trying to say is that they could be exposed to these organisms and not necessarily… they might get Lyme, they might not necessarily get Hashimoto’s. It sounds to be like you really noticed a really strong co-relation between the number of patients that had Lyme and Hashimoto’s concurrently?

Dr. Hedberg: Exactly.

Linda: [Inaudible 00:23:48] lot of people. Yeah. That’s really…

Dr. Hedberg: Either Lyme…. yeah, either Lyme or the chronic viral activity or these many common gut infections that you see.

Linda: I know that there’s other things with the gut that relate to thyroiditis. You already did talk about the organisms but then there’s also… You mentioned earlier that so many people are bringing up gluten and vitamin D, but isn’t there more to that?

Dr. Hedberg: Right. I mean you definitely want to go gluten free with these patients and get their vitamin D levels at a good level. But… I mean information is bidirectional in the gut. You could have a leaky gut causing inflammation in the system, but you could also have inflammation due to infections or toxins outside of the gut causing inflammation in the intestine. So it’s not a matter of just patching up the gut that’s part of it, but you also have to identify anything outside of that area of the body. Many of these patients deal… want to do your [4R SP] protocol, digestive enzymes, antimicrobials, macrobiotics and GI repair. And many people with gluten intolerance they also have other food allergies because as you know the more permeable the gut becomes the more food sensitivities are going to develop.

Linda: Sure.

Dr. Hedberg: Really, you know the big five, you have gluten, corn, soya, dairy and eggs those seem to be… these are the most common ones that I see. So you’ve got to get them off of the food that they’re eating and patch up the gut. I like to use the GI index pass, metametrix.

Linda: Right.

Dr. Hedberg: That one’s… that one seems to be the best that I’ve found for actually picking up some of these really stealth… the bugs that are in the gut.

Linda: Sorry. [Inaudible 00:25:51] vitamin. Yeah, absolutely, the GI index is very effective. Then before we leave the gluten thing I also wanted you to talk about the candida, which is extremely common and I know you talk about that in your book too.

Dr. Hedberg: Right. Candida it’s very, very common in our society. People who have high sugar diets, high processed carbohydrates. It can also be a protective infection, some doctors have said, because it does absorb toxins and when you go after it, those toxins are released into the system, and the patients has Alzheimer and sometimes they get sicker. I used to go… I used to be a little bit more aggressive in going after candida but then I kind of backed off and now, I’m just using more of approach where I’m really building up the immune system in the gut with saccharomyces boulardii and everything else for our protocol. It almost seemed to work better when you just cut it out so to speak instead of just going directly at it and eradicating it.

Some of the antimicrobials out there people have bad reactions to them and putting them on some of these herbs that can be very irritating like wormwood as an example. If you already have an inflamed leaky gut and then you start throwing some harsh herbs to eradicate yeast, sometimes that’s just not the best approach and I’m just being a little bit gentle with that, seems to work better.

Linda: I agree with you and a lot of you might not know that the Floramyces product is the saccharomyces boulardii. So we haven’t done anything about letting you know that we have that product. So that makes a lot of sense that if you go in kind of take that bad fruit out, like the gluten or in another food allergy, heal the gut, build up the good [inaudible 00:27:55] I guess you want to call it. Then of course you’re fixing the immune system as you do all these things that you don’t have to be so aggressive in trying to kill off every little thing because they shouldn’t really be thriving there in the first place.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. I mean it’s usually been there because of a weakened immune system.

Linda: Right.

Dr. Hedberg: So if you just wipe it out and their circulatory RGA is still low and their immune system is weak that’s just going to grow back or they are going to get infected with something else.

Linda: Absolutely. What about toxic metals? Sometimes you hear about a connection machine, toxic metals and organisms like candida and I know you talk about that a little bit.

Dr. Hedberg: Right. So really the, I mean the major players with toxic metals and the thyroid are mercury, cadmium and arsenic, not so much, lead, aluminum, nickel. These can get into the gland especially mercury and disrupt enzymes. They’re involved in thyroid hormone production. But then the patient can also have an immunity reaction to the specific metals which can actually trigger the autoimmunity. This really interesting paper out of the Czech republic where they looked at dental amalgams, mercury containing amalgams and patients with Hashimoto’s.

And if the patient actually had an immune sensitivity to mercury and they took the amalgams out than their antibody levels dropped but if the patient did not have an immune reaction to mercury and then change the antibody levels that all. So you don’t necessarily want to go and just have everyone take their amalgams out if they have Hashimoto’s because it may or may not be an issue.

I don’t see how arsenic and cadmium as much as [inaudible 00:29:55] as mercury but again with our leaky modern day busy guts and dental amalgams and more and more co-plans, we’re getting a greater exposure to mercury. It’s a prone, endocrine disruptor. There’s really good paper that I quoted in my book about mercury and its effect on the endocrine system. Somewhat scary when you read it because it’s going to affect not only the glands themselves but it’s also going to affect the pituitary. So it can disrupt there from the pituitary level, the glandular level, the actual hormone production, conversion enzymes like the [inaudible 00:30:41] which activates the T4 and T3.

Then it can also disrupt the cellular level. So you have have T3 going into the cell, binding some nucleus receptors and mercury could be there in the same place. So they can really hit you from many, many different angles. So it’s not just disrupting hormone production but from an immune perspective it can also trigger autoimmune disease. So you have to look at in both ways, one is more – with the immune system and the other one is more mechanical sort to speak.

Linda: That makes sense. I’m sure that that adds to [porosity to the stress] that these people probably already have issues with, especially if they have these viruses and other organisms that they’re infected with whether they know it or not.

Dr. Hedberg: Right. Basically what the literature is showing was porosity to the stress and autoimmune thyroiditis. All immune diseases in general is that, a lot of these patients with autoimmune diseases they’re going to be very, very low in their antioxidant status. A lot of these papers, a lot of these papers look at coenzyme q10, vitamin E and selenium. What they found is that patients with autoimmune thyroiditis, their selenium levels are very low and supplementing, and this is just in the conventional period, the literature actually state that using selenium is a viable treatment option for autoimmune thyroid disease along with thyroid hormone.

So its recognized but conventional physicians aren’t really using it. The study show that just using selenium alone is going to bring their antibody levels down and that can be for a few reasons. Number one, selenium is a prone antioxidant. Number two, you need it for thyroid hormone production. Number three, it binds the mercury. So mercury is causing oxidative stress on the glands, you can hit from a lot of different angles just with selenium.

Linda: Yeah, I believe. Or iodine’s energy product [inaudible 00:33:03] because we added selenium to it, which I don’t see many iodine products out there that have the selenium in it. Thank you for mentioning all the important things that it does. You mentioned earlier how important – how much the thyroid depends on having iodine around to – till you make the hormones.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. The other antioxidant I want to mention was [penicillin 15 SP]. I’ve actually been using a lot more of that than I ever have. The more papers you read on oxidative stress and autoimmune disease the more NAC pops up. It’s really great increasing [glutathione SP] levels. It’s really good for the barrier system like the gut barrier and the lungs and sinuses, increases glutathione levels in the brain. There’s one particular study on NAC and autoimmune thyroiditis. It just really, really brings down the oxidative stress in the glands. So it’s – I think it’s a great supplement. We don’t have many magic pills out there but you can see some pretty rapid results when you use NAC with people.

Linda: Yeah. When you mentioned oxidative stress and immediately I was thinking raise glutathione levels that was first when it came to my mind. I personally use our glutathione pattern and even if it’s just working in the gut or hold it in my throat a long time, maybe it’s able to the thyroid gland, but it makes you feel better very, very quickly. So NAC is a great idea for whatever it takes to get the glutathione levels increase as quickly as possible. I’m not surprised if the research is strong on that. Then also if you look up, we mentioned lung in all that if you look – I did a lecture on COPD in lung disorders and the main nutrients kept coming up in all the literature was NAC, NAC, NAC.

Dr. Hedberg: Yes. Yes.

Linda: All right. So I think that we did a little bit on grave’s disease earlier. I think you – it might be interesting to hear you talk about the causes behind that. Are they any much different and the how different about disorder is that from what we just discussed earlier?

Dr. Hedberg: Right. So with grave’s disease, it can still have all the same causes that we talked about. There are few that are tend to be very specific for grave’s.

Linda: Okay.

Dr. Hedberg: Grave’s, you really have to be careful with. I’m not an endocrinologist. You have to be very careful with grave’s because the patient can have a thyroid storm and end up in the emergency room. So what I found is that this grave’s disease patients, if you catch them relatively early you can work wonders with them. There’s a few things that are really important to know about that. Number one was a paper published in 2010 and they found a co-relation between h pylori infection and grave’s disease. So basically what they’re saying in the paper is that, “Yes, we know that viral and bacterial antigens can mimic the antigen in profile thyroid cell membranes and that can trigger autoimmune disease.

They wanted to look specifically at h pylori because in developed countries about 50% of the population hazard. So they did stool test on patients with grave’s disease and they found that there is definitely an association between h pylori and grave’s disease. It was actually at significant, I mean that’s the words that they use, are significant, increase rate of prevalence despite in the grave’s disease. So what I did is you start – you don’t run stool test on everyone but start running more of them on grave’s disease and the vast majority of them are coming back with active h pylori infections.

Linda: All right.

Dr. Hedberg: That’s what I was talking about before the infection and action. H pylori, the protocol for that is pretty straight forward, the part that you have under the gastromend- HP.

Linda: Yep.

Dr. Hedberg: It’s designed for H-pylori. That’s worked really well for me. You obviously you want to do probiotics and you’re fall out of protocol but throw in the gastromend-HP and re-test the stool two or three months later and its going to be gone. You’re going to find that their symptoms have gotten a lot better when you get rid of the h pylori because it’s just sitting there. Again, like we talked before it’s driving the autoimmunity, so you got to look for h pylori in grave’s disease patients. The other thing is you can use, there’s two herbs that work really well for grave’s, the bugleweed and lemon [bomb]. These work by regulating thyroid stimulating immune-globules, the TSI test which I talked about before. If you use both of those you can really see improvements in their symptoms relatively quickly.

Linda: What’s the other one [inaudible 00:38:36] lemon bomb, lemon bomb -.

Dr. Hedberg: Bugleweed.bugle weed

Linda: … how do you spell it?

Dr. Hedberg: … like a bugleweed, B-U-G-L-E-W-E-E-D.

Linda: Okay. Have you ever seen anything on – what’s it called [venue creek SP], the venue creek [inaudible 00:38:53] good for that? No.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. I haven’t used. I have read some things in the past about that.

Linda: Yeah. I’ve read some things too. You also like [carnitine] for grave’s disease, you’re saying in your book?

Dr. Hedberg: Right. carnitine is – it’s basically a peripheral antagonist for thyroid hormone action. If there’s too much it doesn’t hit it both T3 and T4 entry into the cell nuclei and that’s important, because if they do have grave’s if they’re hypothyroid, it’s going to really help them. There’s a particular study I think this was in Europe Academy of Sciences, this particular trial they looked at two grams versus four grams of oral quarantine. They found the overall of the two doses of quarantine two and four grams were equally effective in reversing hypothyroid symptomatology. It worked relatively quickly. So the symptoms were meliorated in about 1 – 2 weeks after commencement of the quarantine. So I like the quarantine because its – if you get a nice high dose, 1500 milligrams per teaspoon. I like to go right in the middle. They looked at two and they looked at four grams. So I hit them with three grams, 1500 milligrams twice a day.

Linda: That makes sense.

Dr. Hedberg: That works really, really well in their symptoms. You’ve got some research here back that up because sometimes it can be – it’s not the most cost effective supplement and that’s why that liquid works really well for high dosage for these people.

Linda: Now, I know they’re probably like over-stimulated. I also doubt that all of them are like skinny [Minnie]. So if they are little overweight its certainly they’re not too unhappy when you tell them they’re going to burn more fat if they take that three grams of quarantine a day, right?

Dr. Hedberg: Exactly. Some of them, not everyone can tolerate that much it can cause some loose stools. So you might have to go a little bit lower than some three grams.

Linda: Yep. [inaudible 00:41:07] little bit more.

Dr. Hedberg: Right.

Linda: Okay. Very good. I’ll like so you talk about that before [inaudible 00:41:16] the quarantine, the two herbs that you mentioned involved in the bugleweed, healing, dealing with h pylori, with stuff like gastromend, that’s fantastic. Anything else you want to talk about?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. The other thing is goiter-gens.

Linda: Yeah.

Dr. Hedberg: I know you know a lot about that as a nutritionist [inaudible 00:41:40]. Goiter-gens basically won’t habit thyroid function. So they can be actually utilized in grave’s patients when they’re hypothyroid, you don’t have to worry about that you actually want that. So if you look in your [inaudible 00:41:55] of vegetable group, like cauliflower, cabbage -.

Linda: [inaudible 00:42:00].

Dr. Hedberg: … [inaudible 00:42:00], broccoli all that. Usually want to at least steam to those to neutralize some of goitrogenic activity, but in this case you can have them eaten raw. Another goiter-gens are like soya beans, usually I don’t recommend soya unless it’s fermented. Soya beans have goitrogenic activity, pine nuts, peanuts, mullets, strawberries, pears, peaches, spinach, radishes. Not everyone wants to eat those raw.

Linda: They’re nice -.

Dr. Hedberg: I don’t think I can tell anyone to eat raw radishes. Some of the other ones like spinach and millet and those other things that I mentioned, if they increase their intake of those it will help bring down the hypothyroid symptoms.

Linda: Okay. So probably [inaudible 00:42:52] out of the diet piece and I know you still want to talk about the diet piece with hypothyroid, before we do do, anything else you want to talk about back with some thyroiditis like supplements, nutrition guidelines?

Dr. Hedberg: Let’s talks a little bit about iodine in a very controversial topic.

Linda: I agree.

Dr. Hedberg: For the last five or six years and I’ll just give my humble perspective on the whole thing. Basically what we’re looking at is a misinterpretation of a paper that was published in 2010, “A Dietary Intake of Iodine for Japanese mainlands. It was actually misquoted. They said, a particular physician said that they’re taking in about 12 – 13 milligrams of iodine a day and that’s just simply is not true. Like -.

Linda: Like -.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. I mean if you look at the paper that was published in the journal thyroid in 2008 by Nagataki. If you really want to read some really good information about iodine and thyroid, Nagataki has done a lot of the research on that. According to Nagataki the average dietary iodine intake of Japanese mainlands. is 1.2 milligrams per day. I also recommend Dr. Jeff Moses iodine theories. He wrote many, many newsletters on this really getting deep into the science and the literature behind this. There’s some really, really good papers out there out of John Hopkins, published in the journal of autoimmunity and they think that the best established environmental factor in autoimmune thyroiditis is access dietary iodine. Another paper out of autoimmune review in 2002, this was a review when they found that a body of clinical and epidemiology evidence points to access of an injection of iodine …

Hedberg: [00:44:32] There’s some really, really good papers out there out of John Hopkins, published in the journal of auto-immunity. And they speak that the best established environmental factor in autoimmune thyroiditis is access dietary iodine. Another paper out on autoimmune review in 2002, this was a review when they found that a body of clinical and epidemiologic evidence points to excessive injection of iodine as environmental agent, the Hashimoto’s. there’s the few things that are really important to understand about this.

If someone already has Hashimoto’s and you give them iodine, what the literature shows that you will increase lymphocytic infiltration into the thyroid gland. So you are going to increase oxidative stress, you are going to increase information and you really going to disrupt thyroid hormone production if you do that. That’s just what the literature shows. If they are not autoimmune and they are truly iodine deficient, then iodine can work wonders for certain people. But this idea that tendency for all thyroid disorders that’s just simply not supported by the evidence.

So I personally… I don’t use the iodine if they have autoimmunity. If they don’t have autoimmunity then that’s only depends on the patient. If they do have fibrocystic breast disease, do they have signs of hypothyroidism? Do they have issues with estrogen metabolism? Do they have…

Linda: Those people usually do… they do quite well on iodine the people that you are mentioning right now.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. And that’s another good point Linda is that there is a lot of literature out there that says, it’s not everyone can just take it. Even if you don’t have autoimmunity, there’s some good papers out there that giving iodine to individuals is not necessarily going to not cause any problems. Some people will have problems with iodine but I agree with you. There is a lot of people that can take iodine safely and effectively. But again, do they actually need it. That’s really the question that you want to find out.

Linda: Well, I think you know interesting point to all of these, Dr. Hedberg is that you know we are looking at the Japanese intake and you are saying 1.2, obviously somebody decided to move that decimal point to the right and came up with 12mg.

Dr. Hedberg: Right.

Linda: But we are also talking about practitioners that have been trained on 12, 25, 50, 100, I mean really going beyond 12. I would think it would be different for me to give a patient 12mg for a two month. I think it would be a lot different to give that same person 50mg for six months [inaudible 00:47:30].

Dr. Hedberg: Right

Linda: I think that’s where a lot of people are confused, it’s how much of a normal [inaudible 00:47:35] lack because we originally talked about micrograms [mcgs] which is 1000 of a milligram. When you go from an mcg to a mg, of course it’s a different color.

Dr. Hedberg: Right. Again, there are cases where you can go that high and sometimes you can help but you have to be really careful. Example, I have worked with a few Lyme disease patients who did very, very well on high doses of iodine. Because of those [inaudible 00:48:07] antimicrobial I was almost using it more as the whole infection connection thing that I’ve been talking about. Iodine is a proven antimicrobial. When I got a cut when I was a kid that was the first thing that my mum or my grandma grabbed it was iodine to put on because it just killed everything.

Linda: Yes. Exactly. I think in the emergency room it’s sometimes still used to [inaudible 00:48:32] the wounds too. Having them not get infected when they go back to open people up. I think we all remember those days. Of course [inaudible 00:48:40] was the one that spit out the red stuff and the orange stuff right? Iodine was the purple staff? Is that right?

Dr. Hedberg: Exactly. Yeah.

Linda: Okay. Yap. Trying to [inaudible 00:48:52].

Dr. Hedberg: Basically, that’s just my experience on what I’ve read in the literature and some practitioners report having great results with it but all I’m saying is used a lot of caution that the patient has autoimmune disease or the thyroid.

Linda: Yap. I think I’d like to get back to your old idea which is NAC and whatever takes [inaudible 00:49:15] to do that before you even go in with things like iodine. Because they are… like you said, they might be affecting the immune system where you want to first have adequate glutathione to protect against mercury and then you want selenium to get rid of the oxidative of stress before you go in with like iodine so… That makes sense and I would love for you to tell our Hawaiians how they can get your book Dr. Hedberg.

Dr. Hedberg: The best place to get it is on Amazon.com. I expect that you know my name or the thyroid alternative. I see Amazon has already discounted it.

Linda: Really?

Dr. Hedberg: So you can get it for the last [inaudible 00:49:56] the actual cover price now. But [inaudible 00:49:57]

Linda: It makes better [inaudible 00:49:58]

Dr. Hedberg: Well…

Linda: Right. You’ll sell lots of them. So and the spelling everybody is N-I-K-O-L-A-S and last name is H-E-D-B-E-R-G and the title ‘The Thyroid Alternative, Renew Your Thyroid Naturally’

Dr. Hedberg: Mmh.

Linda: All right. Very good. Thank you. Are you ready for questions or any last words?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. I’m ready for questions.

Female: Hi. Quite an interesting talk. But eight months ago I got hyperthyroid and I did a lot of research on this and I just wanted to reiterate some of the things that you mentioned and that would be… I get my TSI was fine, my propagates, antibodies was fine but my anti thyroid globulin was off the charts. That can… that’s one of the things I wanted to just say. The other thing is that I took beautiful weed motherwort lemon balm and I was using cabbage as a goitrogen. That’s as a pain to do the cabbage but it worked quite well because you are getting a lot of goitrogens in your body. So to make the long story short, it took about six months and now the thyroid is normalized, I dare say it is fine. But still I have anti thyroid globulin antibodies.

So it’s… so the immune system is doing something. I’m working now the gut. But… and then the other thing I wanted to mention was I came up with the same conclusion about iodine. I looked at the Japanese studies, and what I found was even in that author that you mention, if you looked at it, there was a considerably and there were two cities in Japan where they did a comparison. One had a little bit less iodine intake than the other city. But when you really look at the literature you still saw there was a considerable number of people who had thyroid autoimmune disease. A higher percentage than you would have in United States. Anyway that’s the way I interpreted it.

And I was taking extra iodine before this happened. I think maybe a year and half, two years I was sprinkling seaweed on my salads. And I realized after looking into it that that gave me about… besides we are common in multi-vitamins about a gram a day. So that was a pretty disposing factor I’m not sure. But basically, that’s what I wanted to mention. But now I’m normalized. But you know, this could be Hashish’s because I never had TSI, you don’t know if it was a spilling of the hormones but I don’t have any Hashish’s type symptoms. Anyway for whatever that was worth.

Dr. Hedberg: Thanks for sharing all that, really appreciate it.

Linda: But what type… what are Hashish’s symptoms would people really notice?

Dr. Hedberg: Well, just… just your basic hypothyroid symptoms. Fatigue, [inaudible 00:53:24] depression, hostile patient, cold hands and feet, things like that.

Linda: All right. Next question. Thank you very much for sharing all of that with us. [Inaudible 00:53:35] experiences are very helpful.

Dr. Solano: Good evening. Dr. Solano here from Wisconsin. Could you please repeat again what journal you found the article why thyroid is so prone to autoimmune disease. What’s the name of the journal again?

Dr. Hedberg: The Journal of Autoimmunity. November-December. Yeah. Journal of Autoimmunity and… also Autoimmune Review. Those are just two of them. If you do a medline search for iodine and thyroiditis you are going to get tons of papers on that.

Dr. Solano: Great. Thank you.

Dr. Hedberg: Thank you.

Linda: Thank you.

Female 2: Hi. Can you talk about the diet for hypothyroid?

Dr. Hedberg: All right. It’s good. It’s kind of a long, long topic but basically you are just talking… you are just asking what is the diet for someone with Hashish’s?

Female 2: Yeah. It was… I thought it was going to be discussed in the lecture and then you started talking about iodine. So I’m just not sure where you were going to go with it.

Dr. Hedberg: So basically, the diet for someone with Hashish’s is not going to be that much different from anybody else. You know, you want to do all the things that you would normally do. But just a few things in mind. Number one, I do like to have them establish an alkaline PH. Eating more alkaline forming foods, getting the PH above 6.4. That would be the first thing. And then the second thing would be a diet that is basically one that’s going to focus on healing the gut. So you want to have them rotate their foods, eliminating gluten of course and other food allergy that you might suspect. The nutritionist that works for me she goes over different broths for people. Bone broths are really good for healing the gut. Vegetable broths, things like that. Those are really the basics for someone with Hashish’s.

Female 2: Thank you.

Female 3: Hi I have a couple of questions, one is that, do you feel comfortable using the naturthroid there’s some consistency about that?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. Those are definitely necessary in some cases and they work really well for someone who actually needs thyroid hormone replacement. I just… they seem to work better than the more synthetic [inaudible 00:56:17] thyroxine. [Naturthroid and Armour] since they have T3 in them. Some people just tend to do better on those. Like you said, they are from natural source. I have no opposition against any of those. I think they work great and… Okay. So some people really do need to be on those.

Female 3: Okay. If someone is hypothyroid would you tell them not to use carnitine or is it still benefit towards fatigue and back burning with these people that have weight issues and are often tired. Is it going to be counterproductive or is it still okay to use it?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. Linda and I talked about this earlier and based on my research on what I’ve read in my clinical experience, giving carotene to someone with a normal thyroid function, or low thyroid function it’s not going to decrease thyroid function. It’s more of a thyroid [adaptogen 00:57:20] so to speak where it’s only going to decrease thyroid hormone entry into the cell if there’s too much in the system.

Female 3: Okay. [Inaudible 00:57:30]

Linda: I agree with that. [Inaudible 00:57:31] I agree.

Female 3: Yeah. I’ve had that issue come up or you know, I think it’s helpful but then I get on the internet they are freaked out and it’s like…

Dr. Hedberg: Yes.

Female 3: I’m not exactly what to say and then you know…

Linda: I think that [inaudible 00:57:45] if you don’t mind me adding in, I think that comes from people just like the sort of the iodine story. Kind of extrapolating that if in the study [carotene 00:57:57] how the suppress have affect on decrease in the production of let’s say T4. That means you should assume that it would be… increase production of T4 with everyone. That’s a huge assumption. For some people really… it doesn’t even really make sense. Like I was saying to Dr. Hedberg if I use 4gms of [Taurine 00:58:19] on someone with hypertension their blood pressure might hopefully decrease. But I take Taurine and I’m hypotensive and mine doesn’t decrease. The body is very regulatory when it comes to using nutrients, very different from drugs.

Dr. Hedberg: Exactly.

Linda: I just wanted to clarify that. Thank you. The last question has to do with people that are not so much Hashish’s but in general with hypothyroid I find that I have a number of patients that have a low or a lowish PHS but their thyroid hormone levels, their T3 and T4-3 are quite low. So then I’m a little stunned as to how to best treat them. But for [inaudible 00:59:09] the levels of the hormones then you get into issues with really suppressing the TSH. So I’m just curious, what you find that means and what you do if you see that?

Dr. Hedberg: So if you see somewhat normal thyroid hormones and the TSH is low there’s a few things that I’ve found that can cause that. Number one is, they usually have had some kind of extremely stressful event in their life or they are under high amount of stress. Because cortisol will inhibit any interior pituitary and it will lower TSH. So that’s one thing to look at. The other thing is chronic information will halt the TSH to go down. So those are the two things that I see the most as stress related physiology and chronic inflammation.

Female 3: And the T3 and T4 are low and the TSH is low. Do you feel like it was [inaudible 01:00:11] helpful to give a little support whether it’s or whatever. [Inaudible 01:00:20] TSH is on the normal or low side?

Dr. Hedberg: You know it’s just… each case is so individual.

Female 3: Right. Right.

Linda: It’s hard to say what each person… you can certainly see mixed presentations where their TSH was very low because of anterior pituitary suppression and then the actual hormones are very low because they are iodine deficient or they have mercury toxicity or… you know, I’m just seeing more and more of these mixed presentations and they could show up with almost anything. But if you feel like, you have to look at it from a few different ways. You have to say, what do I want to do to really get these people feeling better as quickly as they can. And if you feel like they need thyroid hormone so that they can start detoxing better and feeling better and all those kinds of things, then by all means go ahead and use it.

Female 3: Okay. So you’ve seen that [inaudible 01:01:21].

Dr. Hedberg: Right.

Linda: Okay. That’s very helpful for me.

Dr. Hedberg: All right. Thanks.

Female 4: Oh yes. Doctor thank you for this talk. My question is about NAC. What dosage are you finding to be useful and do you… have you come to any conclusion that NAC should be with food or without food on an empty stomach. I’ve heard both.

Dr. Hedberg: NAC can be dosed with food at 1000mg twice a day. I give it 1000 with breakfast and 1000 with dinner. You really don’t need much more than that. Yeah. I give it with food.

Linda: No. You know what it is. Probably Dr. Hedberg they are getting hang up on the fact that, L15 amino acid and they tend to… with carnitine too but you correctly said in your book that carnitine and dipeptides is actually not… doesn’t have amino group and an acid group. L16 does and also L16 is like slightly different in structure. But I just think people get way to worried about how quickly it’s going to get absorbed. It’s going to get into your system whether they eat it with chicken, steak or coffee or water. It’s going to get there.

Dr. Hedberg: Right.

Linda: Whether it’s 10 minutes late or who cares. Whatever is easiest probably for the patient you know, unless it has to… it’s something that has to be taken with food. Like EGCG green tea, we give with food not because of it’s [inaudible 01:02:49] just because it will upset your stomach if you don’t. like that, things like that. I think you should do it the easiest unless there’s a really big reason to take it empty or a full stomach. That’s my opinion.

Dr. Hedberg: Right.

Female 4: Thank you. Very helpful.

Female 5: Hi Doctor. I have a question about Yersinia and [inaudible 01:03:10]that you mentioned in the comprehensive two analysis. Hello?

Dr. Hedberg: Yes.

Linda: We are here.

Female 5: Yes. Available eradication prevent autoimmune disease if you treat it right away. Like I had this patient recently with this [inaudible 01:03:27] analysis it was 4+. She’s teenager and she has no symptoms at all. CDC was normal. The only thing that susceptible it was the [cyproentetrata] which is not good for teenagers [inaudible 01:03:45]. So the first question, would you suggest an antibiotic treatment or any other treatment? Would this treatment eradicate, I mean prevent the autoimmune disease?

Dr. Hedberg: Right. I’d like to use the herbal compounds that I recommended on the sensitivity to eradicate the Yersinia. And second part of the question is, if in fact Yersinia triggered the autoimmunity, see once auto the gene has turned on on the X-chromosome, it can’t be turned off. We can’t really say that if you get rid of the Yersinia that the autoimmune disease is cured but if you do eradicate Yersinia, most of the time you will see the antibody levels come way down or the levels where they are not detectable. But it doesn’t mean that the autoimmune disease is gone.

Female 5: I see. What edible treatment do you usually treat in your practice for that?

Dr. Hedberg: It really depends, well what comes back on the sensitivity. But the garlic works really well, [oil of oregano, cephalic acid, time cats claw] there’s a whole list of them. Berberine works really well. Any of those.

Female 5: Probiotic to grow of course.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. And the probiotic, black walnut I believe that we are testing now as well. But all of those will work well.

Female 5: I see.

Dr. Hedberg: And I’m glad you asked that because I had planned on mentioning the new silvercillin product that I was really excited about when I was going to talk about the infection connection thing. Because I’ve been using colloidal silver for years and bought the silvercillin. It [inaudible 01:05:31] coming out was… excited about because I’m going to start using it for all these stealth infections that I talk about. Because it works really, really well for viruses and rickettsia and Lyme and yeast, bad fungi and just a whole host of things.

Female 5: Thank you so much. One more question. Question is, for how long you can use it and if you discontinued it abruptly would it cause any symptoms where you have to pay for it?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. That’s a really good question. After you feel like you have the patient stabilized and everything looks good on her lab work and they are feeling good, then you can start to wean them off of the carnitine. The nice thing about the liquid carnitine is that you can titrate it. So if you have them on 3000mg, then you can go down 2500, 2000, 1500 and just slowly back them down. If you back them all the way down and they are completely off of it, and they are maintaining then they don’t… they probably don’t need it anymore. But if you start to titrate them down and symptoms start to come back then you just have to keep them on it.

Female 5: Thank you very much. Thank you.

Linda: Thank you.

Female 6: Hello, my question is about the lab. What have you found are the best labs for looking for those colon infections and the Lyme like when you’re… when you are saying that you’ve already treated the GI, you’ve had someone on the cleanse and yet their CDC is still all over the map and you are figuring this is probably an infection that’s not going to be picked up by a GI test or anything. Are you using like the… I’m forgetting what it’s called the Western blot?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. That’s a really good question. Basically all the lab testing for Lyme sucks. I mean I was there flat out, and a couple of infections. I mean, the western blot that you can do through Labcorp or Quest is not going to be that sensitive. The [Elisa test] is really not that sensitive. Then you have all your specialty labs like [Igenex and Fry labs] there’s a bunch of them. I’ve used all of them with varying results. Sometimes you know a patient has the infection and you do the testing through your specialty lab and nothing comes back but you know they have. So one of the things I do is like run on a CD57 test through labcorp which tends to be suppressed by borrelia burgdorferi so if you see that low then you can get a good idea that they do have some kind of chronic infection and then from there, just regular blood works, you can tell that. But I mean, I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes it’s just not going to show up anywhere. I mean some of these bugs are so stealth no matter what kind of testing you do it’s just not going to show up.

Female 6: Okay. Thank you very much. Linda: Stealth [Inaudible] huh?

Female 7: Hi. I’d like to ask if a person does not show the anti thyroid antibodies but they’ve been… the co-dependent or replacement hormone, they’ve been on thyroid, hormone products for a number of years. Do you have success in weaning them off?

Dr. Hedberg: I mean I’d never try and wean someone off of their medication. Number one I’m not a prescribing physician so I can’t tell someone to stop taking their medication. That’s a discussion that I have with their prescribing physician. And it really depends on how long they’ve been on thyroid hormones and how long they’ve had Hashish’s. Obviously the longer they’ve had Hashish’s the more the destruction of the gland there is and the more likely they are going to have to be on thyroid hormones.

Female 7: [Inaudible 01:09:49] my question was if they are not showing autoimmune antibodies?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. And if they are not, if they don’t have Hashish’s then they may or may not have to continue to take the medication. That’s really an individual case and it also depends on how long they’ve been on it.

Linda: I find this an interesting question because Dr. Hedberg I find that a lot people think that it’s a bad thing to be on thyroid hormone or they look at it as just a drugs that they wish they didn’t have to take it. And I just look at it more like… like progesterone or something like… you don’t want to not have it in your body. A man wouldn’t want to walk around with no testosterone. And I wouldn’t want to walk around with my… you know, not enough thyroxine in my body. So… I mean, I know now, I feel a great [inaudible 01:10:41] I’ve had like when I went out to Montana I forgot to take it and within three or four days I was not myself and everybody that hang out with me knew that. Play with my hair, my hair is falling out and I’m irritable and all that stuff. It’s like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to get back on my thyroid.’ But I don’t look at it that as I’m addicted to it, I look at it as my body does really well on it and it’s probably not a great idea for me not to be on it. I’m I right?

Dr. Hedberg: Right. Yeah. No. That’s a… yeah. That’s clarified a few things. Number one, if someone needs thyroid hormones, they may need to be on it. Like Linda said, people really can be anti thyroid hormone. You know when your eyes go, then you have to wear glasses or you have to wear contacts. When the thyroid starts to go, you have to take hormones. You don’t want to walk around blind and tired all the time.

Linda: That’s a really good analogy.

Female 7: Absolutely.

Dr. Hedberg: If… if you…

Female 7: You come to not require it.

Linda: Then you are lucky.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. I mean…

Female 7: [Inaudible 01:11:48]

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. I’ll give you another example. If someone develops just hypothyroidism and it’s not autoimmune and they developed it strictly because they were exposed to mega doses of mercury and you get the mercury out of the body, then they thyroid may be able to return to normal and produce normal levels. Or someone has a true iodine deficiency and they develop hypothyroidism and you replenish the iodine and the thyroid comes back to normal reproducing hormone. Those are just some examples of where, yes they might not have to take hormones everyday for the rest of their lives. But not every case is that easy and that straightforward.

Linda: Yep. I agree.

Female 7: Do you see cases like that?

Dr. Hedberg: Occasionally yes.

Female 7: Okay.

Linda: Okay. Thanks. There is hope for you. I don’t know why you hate taking it so much.

Female 7: Oh I don’t [inaudible 01:12:48], it costs money. I don’t [inaudible 01:12:51]. It’s question that occurred to me.

Linda: I used to [inaudible 01:12:57] I’m glad you brought that up. Okay. Thanks.

Dr. Hedberg: So, the next question.

Male: I have a question further about these stealth infections because they don’t have good testing for sensibility, too many of them. How do you determine what your treatment is going to be and what have you found effective? Do you do any vitamin C or any other IV therapies and what do you do for these?

Dr. Hedberg: Right. So for the infections, I’m basically using different antimicrobials. Like I mentioned before colloidal silver works really well for this and then I just have a long list of herbs that I used. Probably 25, 30 different herbs that work really well for different infections. I’ll tell you some of the big guns for viruses are [monolauric acid also called monolingual] that works really well for [inaudible 01:13:52] viruses. Olive leaf extract is really good and then colloidal silver also have the big three IV for viruses. The parasites, any of your general antimicrobials designed for the gut work really well. Like the GI Microbe-X, by Designs for Health and there are some other ones out there. You know you could always email me and I could send you a list of all the ones that I use because they are so many. Like Noni and Sarsaparilla I mean there’s just… Again [inaudible 01:14:33]

Male: That will be great. Thank you. How quickly do you use it to see a response?

Dr. Hedberg: Usually relatively quickly. You know, if there’s bio in all the formations then you also want to use enzymes for the bio film. Like lumbrokinase and things like that. But if you get it right and you use one that’s… [inaudible 01:14:57] really doesn’t like, then you really see a response pretty quickly.

Male: Okay. Great. And then, just one more question. Do you do much with… when [inaudible 01:15:10] on the TH1 and TH2. Do you do much time to balance those to stimulate the TH2 versus TH1?

Dr. Hedberg: Right. I have… I’ve learned all about that and did a little bit with it but I’m just… you know you just find your own way of doing things and that’s certainly one way to do it. But as you know, there is more than one way to get someone better and you know, there’s some people out there saying that their way is the best or their way is the only way. But I just… I don’t go into that and quite frankly I just haven’t needed to get a good result. You could certainly do it and get good at it and probably get good results as well.

Male: Okay. Great. Thank you. Will your email I guess be announced, then I’m going to publish it at the site Linda?

Linda: I’m sorry. Repeat? Oh my email?

Male: Great. Thank you very much.

Dr. Hedberg: Sure.

Linda: And that reminds me if anybody just has a comment or you want him to come and speak or you want… just that, anything [inaudible 01:16:24] help or positive, negative anything. It doesn’t matter. We are open to listening to all of you, we love you all. You can send an email to info@designsforhealth.com so that’s a basic information at designsforhealth.com. That person knows to where who to send it to, like a spider send it out to whoever it should go to. Okay?

Dr. Hedberg: Mmh.

Linda: All right. Great audience tonight. And you had a record breaking number of people on tonight Dr. Hedberg. Close 150, I’m very impressed. So I think we are 30, 10, 24 so I think we should quit. I’d like to let you go get some rest so thank you so much. I don’t know if you… you picked the next question already? I’m sorry Sam.

Sam: No. I had not Linda.

Linda: Oh, okay. I thought I had someone talking. All right, well thank you so much everybody for you participation and get Dr. Hedberg’s book and patients should read it. It will help them understand what’s going on with their conditions which so many of us have and including me. So thank you. I appreciate you being on tonight. You were great.

Dr. Hedberg: Thank you for having me Linda. I really appreciate it.

Linda: Great. No problem. And Sam thanks for your help and all the listeners, you guys are great and thanks for all those awesome questions. So join us next week, we should have Dr. [inaudible 01:17:41] next week. He is Colombia University Director of Urology. Extremely well known. We’ll be talking about a lot of different men’s conditions which we never get to talk about enough on Clinical Round. So urology, prostate, prostrate cancer and all that, all that good stuff. And nutrition. So join us next week, thank you everybody.