Addressing The Adrenal and Thyroid Dance Naturally

If your adrenals are stressed and you push fixing the thyroid it puts added stress on the adrenals says Dr. Jonathan Wright, MD, from Harvard and The University of Michigan, and author of Natural Medicine, Optimal Wellness: The Patient’s Guide to Health and Healing.

{We are taking a leap of faith and have added a donate button instead of using advertisers. Advertisements have been removed from this page to make your reading uninterrupted. If you learn something here, please donate so we can keep offering these posts. This post contains affiliate links, which sometimes pay for this site}.

Dr. Wright says, “If the adrenals have gotten weak, for whatever reason, then we push that thyroid up to a full energy burning amount that person isn’t going to feel any better, they might even feel worse from the point of view of energy at least.”

Signs of potential adrenal issues are low blood pressure, usually a little bit underweight for height, you don’t feel good after exercise or you have a difficult time recovering after a good workout to the point of exhaustion that lasts a few days.

Females get low adrenals on a ratio of six to one in comparison to males.

Dr. Wright says, “You can not test the adrenals by checking the cortisol. You can’t because there are many, many, many other adrenal hormones called natural steroids. There actually are certain adrenal steroids that aren’t directly derived from cortisol they’re derived from aldosterone.”

Aldosterone is a hormone released by the adrenals which assists in regulating sodium and potassium in the body. WebMD says, “This helps control blood pressure and the balance of fluids and electrolytes in the blood.”

“Aldosterone is more sensitive to stress than cortisol and cortisone,” says Dr. Wright. “If I really want to get a picture of how strong the adrenals are and how much stress there is on that person look at a whole panel of adrenal hormones. Cortisol is active in the body. Cortisone is the storage and transportation form for cortisol and it has to be naturally jiggered a bit before it becomes active.”

The recommended test that appears to be most accurate is from urine samples over a 24 hour period of time. The saliva test is a good test as a starter. This test will tell you the degree of stress and how long ago it was for the patient helping them identify a source.

Dr. Wright says, “Medicine isn’t cookie cutter, healthcare isn’t cookie cutter. If a person is really weak you would want to step in with actual cortisol. It’s bioidentical. It’s exactly the same as the body’s own cortisol. It is not dangerous if we use the same amount that’s found in the body. It’s your phoney patentable cortisol that’s dangerous. It’s called prednisone and decadron and so darn strong it’ll eat your bones away, seriously.”

This is the difference between synthetic medicines and natural medicines. Dr. Wright adds, “The normal natural cortisol if we use it in the form that belongs in the body doesn’t hurt anything and it will bail a person out of trouble if the trouble is serious quicker than anything else.”

William Jeffries, author of Safe Uses of Cortisol wrote the manual on adrenal protocol. Click here to learn more.

According to Dr. Wright, if your adrenals are weak but symptoms are mild you could go straight to building your own adrenals through lots of vitamin C and eating a good portion of natural salt, vitamin A, vitamin E, pantothenic acid, a little bit of chromium and B vitamins (the most effective are those from Dr. Ben Lynch at Seeking Health).

Building your thyroid naturally can include support from Thytrophin, a Standard Process supplement. Supplementing  a dessicated adrenal glandular, also from Standard Process provides additional support at the same time, click here to view. Dr. David Brownstein recommends taking iodine to support your thyroid. Click here to learn more. Eric Berg recommends taking trace minerals with iodine for optimal absorption, click here for a clean source of trace minerals. Both Dr. Brownstein and Berg recommend taking selenium to support the thyroid, in fact this is becoming more commonplace in the MD field. Click here for the most absorbable form of selenium. Taking ashwagandha, an adaptogen, has shown positive results for many people with adrenal fatigue. Click here for a clean option. All supplementation should be done through the proper guidance and approval of your own physician. This post is not medical advice and should not take the place of care from your primary physician, it is merely information from others collected into one location.

*If you learned something from this post share it so others can do the same. To support the efforts of this blog shop the affiliate links above like this one. You pay the same shopping through Amazon while the author receives a small referral fee from Amazon. This offsets the costs of this site.

*If you would like to receive further posts from this author go to the Nourishing Plot Facebook page linked by clicking here. Once there, “like” a hand-full of articles so future posts are uploaded into your Facebook newsfeed.

*Nourishing Plot is written by a mom whose son has been delivered from the effects of autism (asperger’s syndrome), ADHD, bipolar disorder, manic depression, hypoglycemia and dyslexia through food. This is not a news article published by a paper trying to make money. This blog is put out by a mom who sees first hand the effects of nourishing food vs food-ish items. No company pays her for writing these blogs, she considers this a form of missionary work. It is her desire to scream it from the rooftops so that others don’t suffer from the damaging effect of today’s “food”.