Thyroid conditions are far too common. Mainstream medicine’s approach is to medicate with thyroid hormones.
From my perspective, I’m always looking for why an incredibly important organ in the human body would just up and get lazy. If this was your heart that stopped working at 28, your doctors would be up in arms trying to find an answer and fix the problem. But for some reason, because we have synthetic thyroid hormone that can be given, the thyroid going bad is no reason for alarm.
Before you follow this philosophy of medicating rather than clarifying, consider that the thyroid gland is generally considered the yellow canary of the human body (for those who don’t remember, canaries were used in the mines because they would up and die when methane levels began to climb; thus when the canary died it was time to run before the mine exploded). Stress, poor quality nutrition/prediabetes, toxic chemical exposures and food allergies top the list of things that negatively affect your thyroid.
Gluten, BPA in plastic water bottles, Teflon, flame retardants and heavy metals are all well documented to affect the thyroid. I don’t know that I have EVER had a patient come in who has a history of autoimmune thyroiditis (like Hashimoto’s or Graves) that were told that gluten sensitivity may be a huge factor in his or her thyroid dysfunction. And this includes patients who have had thyroids deliberately destroyed with radioactive iodine or surgically cut out.
But I digress.
In this particular study, researchers looked at a small group of hypothyroid patients who also had digestive complaints (another topic altogether and one that is beyond the depth of this article) to see whether the addition of 500 mg of vitamin C could have a positive effect. The results were pretty powerful:
- Levels of TSH, free T4 and T3 all improved while on vitamin C.
- TSH dropped an impressive average of 69.2%.
- TSH levels normalized in 54.8% of those in the study.
Given how challenging it can be to manage thyroid medication dosage, anything that can improve the effectiveness of thyroid hormones, especially with something as incredibly cheap and safe as 500 mg of vitamin C, is a very good thing.