The Importance of Optimal Thyroid Function

April 21, 2020

In this podcast video, Dr. Hotze discusses the importance of optimal thyroid function for good health.

Video Highlights:

3:46: “You’re normal. Everything’s normal. Your blood tests are normal. You don’t have low thyroid.” That’s because the doctor wasn’t listening, wasn’t listening to the patient, and so when the doctor said, “You are normal,” here’s what the patients told me they either said or wanted to say, “But I don’t feel normal.” Okay, why don’t you feel normal?

4:09: Well, one of the reasons people don’t feel normal and don’t feel healthy is because they have low energy production.

5:34: Thyroid does nothing in your blood. Now, it works in the blood cells, but it does nothing for your body in the blood. It has to enter every cell. In every cell, the thyroid hormone is the spark plug that catalyzes your power plants, your mitochondria, inside your cell where you produce energy.

8:07: Most doctors are going to look at your blood work. They’re not going to listen. They only have seven minutes to meet with you. They don’t have time to sit down and have you list your whole host of problems.

8:17: As a matter of fact, I was told at medical school, if you talked to a woman in midlife and she listed a whole host of problems, she was a hypochondriac, and you needed to put her on antidepressants.

8:59: “You’re in the normal range.” Well, guess what? 95% of the people fall in the normal range.

10:28:  So that’s what happens with these doctors. They won’t treat you until your blood tests are out of the range, even though you have all the classical features and signs of hypothyroidism or low thyroid.

10:44: If you have the classical features of hypothyroidism, then for crying out loud, you deserve a therapeutic trial of natural thyroid that contains both T4 and T3. If a doctor treats you for thyroid because your blood is out of the range, they’re going to give you a synthetic thyroid, Synthroid, Levothroid, or Levoxyl, which are T4. It’s the inactive thyroid hormone. It has to be converted to T3.

11:37: It’s not how much thyroid you have in your blood, it’s how much you have in your cells, and the only way you can determine that is by getting a clinical history, because there are no tests that tell you how you’re doing. I mean, there’s nothing to tell you what you’ve got in a cell. So we have to go by the clinical symptoms.

13:04: And I’ve learned this, if you ask your patients, if a doctor will ask the patient or listen to the patient, the patient will tell you that…our guests tell us what their problem is.

14:43: Now, there’s a number of different hormone disruptors in our society, the petrochemicals in the environment, drinking out of plastic bottles, we get all these petrochemical products from the plastic, and it’s in all the foods, we breathe it in the air, we slather it on our body.

14:58: Those petrochemical products are hormone disrupters. They disrupt the body’s ability to produce the proper…they’re xenoestrogens, which means they function as estrogen in the body and go to receptors that are made for estrogen, and they bind them up, and the body thinks it’s got estrogen, and they become estrogen dominant.

16:35: We need a change, and so few doctors are willing to make that change. Why? Because they’re getting paid by the insurance companies, not by you. The insurance companies pay their bill, and they have protocols that they make the doctors do for you, and the doctors don’t know how to make a living outside that business model and therefore, they’re wed to that business model.

17:19: So what I encourage you to do, is to look at your clinical symptoms. Go to Hotze Health & Wellness Center.

20:18:  You’re in charge of your health. Nobody’s in charge of your health but you, you can make the decision to be healthy or not. I believe that most diseases are preventable, and God’s given the body amazing restorative power to heal itself, and we can help you do that.

21:09: I think one of the most important things you can do is be evaluated for your thyroid. Thyroid governs every cell in your body, everything that happens in your body, from the way you think, to your sight, to your heart function, cardiovascular, to your lungs, to your bowel functions, your red cell production, your hormone production are all directly related to your thyroid hormone function at the cellular level.

Podcast Transcription:

Stacey Bandfield: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I’m Stacey Bandfield here with Dr. Steven Hotze, founder and CEO of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. He’s very enthusiastic today, because we are talking about thyroid, which is something that Dr. Hotze has been talking about for years, and still there’s a lot of misinformation about thyroid. Some people don’t even know where the thyroid is or what some of the symptoms of low thyroid are. Even worse, they’ve gone to the doctor who said their blood tests are normal, so it can’t possibly be their thyroid. So Dr. Hotze, please enlighten our audience, and give us some good information on the thyroid.

Dr. Hotze: Thank you so very much, Stacey, and thank you each one of you for joining us here on Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution, and we are leading a wellness revolution, because we’re thinking out of the box. We do maverick thinking. We don’t run with the herd here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, we run away from the herd and get the herd to follow us, because we have found out how people can get healthy and well naturally, without using pharmaceutical drugs. That cuts against the grain of conventional medicine, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, the government, they want you to become the cash cow. They want to create diseases. They don’t want to help cure problems. They want to, basically, they want to create customers by creating all these diseases for which they give pharmaceutical drugs.

At the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, I believe that you and everybody needs to have a doctor and staff of professionals who can coach you on a path of health and wellness naturally, so as you mature, you have energy, you have vitality, and you’re enthusiastic about life. Let me just ask you this. Are you alive? Are you awake? Are you alert? Are you enthusiastic about life? If you can’t answer yes to each one of those questions, then I encourage you to get alive, to get awake, to be alert, and to be enthusiastic. And if you’re not enthusiastic, why don’t you just act enthusiastic? By the way, let me just mention this to you before we get on to the thyroid. Enthusiasm means literally, from the Greek, “To be filled with God.” Theosis is God, theology, remember? Theosis is the word for God in Greek. So if a person’s enthusiastic, they’re filled with God, they’re filled with the spirit, and Christ said, “I came to live in you, to be born again.”

Stacey Bandfield: “And that you may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Dr. Hotze: “Have it abundantly.” So it’s Christ and it’s the hope of glory. So as Christians, we can be enthusiastic, because Christ lives in us.

Stacey Bandfield: That’s right.

Dr. Hotze: The hope of glory. So anyway, I’m enthusiastic. Besides that, I take thyroid hormone, and thyroid hormone increases your energy level. So you’ve got to be energetic, I think really to be enthusiastic. People with low energy, it’s hard  being enthusiastic.

Stacey Bandfield: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Hotze: So the thyroid gland, we’re going to talk about hypothyroidism. I built this practice, the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, was first started as an allergy center, and then we began to use thyroid three years after we started here, and it dramatically grew our practice, because there were so many individuals who had read about low thyroid condition and thought they had it, and had been to see their doctors and other doctors, and the doctors took their blood tests and they raised their hands and said, “You’re normal. Everything’s normal. Your blood tests are normal. You don’t have low thyroid.” That’s because the doctor wasn’t listening, wasn’t listening to the patient, and so when the doctor said, “You are normal,” here’s what the patients told me they either said or wanted to say, “But I don’t feel normal.”

Okay, why don’t you feel normal? Well, one of the reasons people don’t feel normal and don’t feel healthy is because they have low energy production. They are low voltage individuals. What do they have? They have fatigue, they’re tired all the time. They have difficulty with weight. Their bodies are cold, their body temperature is low. It should be 98.6, or be in the 97s or 96s. They can’t think clearly, they don’t sleep well, they get joint and muscle aches and pains, they get sluggish bowels. I just talked to a woman yesterday, who thought, who was describing her symptoms to me. So when I asked her about, “well, tell me about your bowel function.” “Well, I’ll have a bowel movement every three or four days, but the doctor said, that’s normal for me.” Normal? That is not normal. That is unhealthy, and that’s a classical feature of low thyroid. Not only that, women can have menstrual irregularities. This woman happened to have polycystic ovary syndrome, PCOS, PCOD, and that means her ovaries weren’t functioning well.

Thyroid Gland

Well, the thyroid gland in your neck produces thyroid hormones, two thyroid hormones, T4, which is the inactive thyroid hormone. 94% of your thyroid hormone produced by your gland is T4,  inactive. It has to be converted to the active hormone T3, of which your gland makes about 6% of T3. That’s secreted in the blood. Thyroid does nothing in your blood. Now, it works in the blood cells, but it does nothing for your body in the blood. It has to enter every cell. In every cell, the thyroid hormone is the spark plug that catalyzes your power plants, your mitochondria, inside your cell where you produce energy. It catalyzes the production of energy in those cells, and that energy is electrical energy. Now, the thyroid hormone that catalyzes the energy production is not T4, the predominant thyroid hormone is T3, the active thyroid hormone.

So when the thyroid hormone enters the cell, it’s converted from T4 by an enzyme to T3, and that T3 then activates, and when you activate it, then you produce energy, and if you produce enough energy, then you’re a high voltage individual. So what do you have? You’re energetic, you’re an ideal body weight, you think clearly, your body temperature is normal, you don’t have any mood swings or depression. If you’re a woman, you have normal menstrual cycles. Bowel function is good, you’re not puffy and pasty, your hair’s not falling out. You don’t have loss of the lateral third of your eyebrows. Your tongue’s not swollen as you have when you have low thyroid symptoms. You don’t have pasty skin, you’re healthy, and you feel healthy when you’re producing enough thyroid hormone, active thyroid hormone that’s serving as a catalyst, as a spark plug to produce energy within your power plants, the mitochondria.

Now, ask yourself if you have those symptoms. One, some, or all of those symptoms. Now, what causes that, well, there’s a couple of things that cause it. One thing I’ve talked about and written about in my book, I’ve written a book here that I would encourage you to get, Hypothyroidism, Health & Happiness. It’s a chapter of out of my book, Hypothyroidism, Health & Happiness. I have a chapter on thyroid here, but I took that chapter out and expanded it. Hypothyroidism, Health & Happiness. So if you want to know about hypothyroidism and how it can be treated and whether you have it or not, read the book. I don’t know why this book isn’t read by every doctor in the country, and I should’ve sent it to every doctor, and I really should. I need to think about doing that here in, at least in the Greater Houston Area, send it out to several thousands of doctors. Let them read the book and see what they think. We can help scores of people with their thyroid problems, if the doctors would listen and treat based upon the clinical symptoms, and not all the blood work.

And here’s what most doctors do. Most doctors are going to look at your blood work. They’re not going to listen. They only have seven minutes to meet with you. They don’t have time to sit down and have you list your whole host of problems. As a matter of fact, I was told at medical school, if you talked to a woman in midlife and she listed a whole host of problems, she was a hypochondriac, and you needed to put her on antidepressants. That’s what the dean of the medical school taught me when I was taking history and physical diagnosis. Well, that’s terrible, because I have women that have come in and said, “I’ve talked to my doctor and when I tell them all my symptoms, they look at me and make me feel like, or tell me, ‘You just must be a hypochondriac.'” And they know they’re not, they know they have  problems.

Well, so why do the doctors look at blood tests? Well, that’s what they’re taught to do. They’re not taught to be clinicians anymore. They simply want to look at the blood, because then they don’t have to spend any time with you, look at the blood and they go, “You’re in the normal range.” Well, guess what? 95% of the people fall in the normal range. Here’s how the doctors get the normal range. They look at the lab. The lab tells them what the normal range is. They don’t determine the normal range. Doctors don’t know what the normal range is. They look at the lab, and the lab has your value, and then it has a range. And if you fall within that range or within the normal range, well, here’s how the labs decide the range.

They take every day, the last thousand tests, they get a mean. They get an average of what the thyroid test is, and they have two standard deviations, which are statistical terms that incorporate 95% of the population. Two statistical standards from the main encompass 95% of the people, it’s a bell-shaped curve, and that’s where 95% of the people fall. And they say, if you fall within that range, you’re normal. So it’s as wide as the Grand Canyon, tall as the Empire State Building, you can hardly fall out of the range. So here’s your thyroid up when you’re younger, and now it’s fallen 50%, now you’re in the low end of the range, and I have women that tell me, “The doctor told me it’s low, but not low enough to treat. It’s just in the low range.’ It’s kind of like telling somebody who’s drowning, you’re a lifeguard and they’re coming up, “I’m drowning!” “No, you’re not. I just heard you yell and scream, ‘I’m drowning!'” It goes up, and finally, “Not until you go down for good, then I know you’re drowning, and I’m going to go pick you up.”

So that’s what happens with these doctors. They won’t treat you until your blood tests are out of the range, even though you have all the classical features and signs of hypothyroidism or low thyroid. Read about it in my book. Now, this is my philosophy at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. If you have the classical features of hypothyroidism, then for crying out loud, you deserve a therapeutic trial of natural thyroid that contains both T4 and T3. If a doctor treats you for thyroid because your blood is out of the range, they’re going to give you a synthetic thyroid, Synthroid, Levothroid, or Levoxyl, which are T4. It’s the inactive thyroid hormone. It has to be converted to T3.

I can’t tell you the number of guests or patients that we’ve seen here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, numbers in the thousands that have come in on the synthetic thyroid hormones, and have all the signs and symptoms of low thyroid, and they’ve gone back to their doctor and they say, “Well, doctor, I still have all these symptoms.” The doctor draws the blood now and goes, “Well, your blood tests are now normal, so it can’t be your thyroid. You must be depressed.”  Well, T4 the synthetic thyroid, it’ll normalize your blood. It’s not how much thyroid you have in your blood, it’s how much you have in your cells, and the only way you can determine that is by getting a clinical history, because there are no tests that tell you how you’re doing. I mean, there’s nothing to tell you what you’ve got in a cell. So we have to go by the clinical symptoms.

So there was this guest yesterday, I told you, came in who had all the classical symptoms of low thyroid. She had been overweight for years. She was fatigued. The girl’s about 35 years old, she had been unable to get pregnant and finally got pregnant, and had a terrible pregnancy, had postpartum depression, had gained a ton of weight, couldn’t get it off even though she dieted and exercise for two solid years, lost 10 pounds and she was way overweight, well over 240 or 250, and would wake up in the morning at nine and go back to sleep at 11 that day, two hours later. She’s just fatigued, had difficulty with weight, she said, “I’m freezing all the time. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the summer.” She couldn’t think clearly, she had mood swings all the time, she was depressed. Moods would swing. She couldn’t sleep. She had joint muscle aches and pains, couldn’t have good bowel functions, every three to four days is all that she had, abnormal constitution. She was puffy, pale. Her hair was falling out, and the doctor told her, “Your blood tests are normal.”

And I said, “Let me ask you, what do you have? What is your problem? Tell me.” Now, I knew what her problem was, and so did she. And I’ve learned this, if you ask your patients, if a doctor will ask the patient or listen to the patient, the patient will tell you that…Our guests tell us what their problem is. I said, “So tell me what is your problem?” and she said, “I’m low thyroid.” Of course she is. She’s tried to tell other doctors that, but guess what? They’re smarter than she is, because they did a blood test. They won’t listen to the patient, they ignore her, and because of that, she’s had this terrible experience in her life where she’s just fatigued, overweight, and just not doing well, and she’s a bright, bright, bright woman, very bright, and has a very interesting business model she’s doing. I was fascinated with her. She’s really a bright thinker and I’m thinking, “She’s this good and she’s low thyroid? What’s she going to be like when her thyroid’s right?”

And we have treated thousands and thousands of people, tens of thousands of people who have the clinical symptoms of low thyroid, but who don’t have blood tests that are…we also check for autoimmune thyroiditis, to see if people have antibodies against  their thyroid gland. They may be within the normal range on TSH, which measures the thyroid stimulating hormone from the brain. They may be in the range here, but they have antibodies. Those antibodies block the thyroid hormone from getting into the cell. Another thing that happens with women is when women march through their menstrual life from age, let’s say 12, 14, 15 all the way to say 50 years old, and they go through the change, there’s a change in hormones. Their hormones come up during puberty and they grow, and then they begin to go down until they go away.

Hormone Disrupters

Now, there’s a number of different hormone disrupters in our society, the petrochemicals in the environment, drinking out of plastic bottles, we get all these petrochemical products from the plastic, and it’s in all the foods, we breathe it in the air, we slather it on our body. Those petrochemical products are hormone disrupters. They disrupt the body’s ability to produce the proper… they’re xenoestrogens, which means they function as estrogen in the body and go to receptors that are made for estrogen, and they bind them up, and the body thinks it’s got estrogen, and they become estrogen dominant. And then as they move through their menstrual life in their 20 and 30s, they make lower levels of progesterone, and so when they’re estrogen dominant, that causes the body to produce high levels of thyroid-binding globulin from the liver, which binds the thyroid hormone, so it can’t get into the cells.

Do the other doctors know this? They don’t know this. I wrote about it in my book right here Hormones, Health, and Happiness, about estrogen dominance. Tell your doctor he ought to get that, go buy it for him. Go to Amazon, or just call us here and you get a copy of that book, and go give it to your doctor. I’ll give him a signed copy. I really need to send these books out to these doctors. I don’t know what kind of grief I would get, oh that someone would probably just hit the ceiling to think that I’m serious. To think that I would have the gall to write and challenge conventional thinking, but it probably needs to be done, and I’m probably going to end up doing it, and I’m feeling enthusiastic.

Stacey Bandfield: You are, you really are.

Dr. Hotze: And we’re going to go and we’re going to lay down a line, a red line. Here’s a red line, you cross that line, pop! We’re going to pop you. So we need to do that this year. This is why we call it Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. We’re not trying just to encourage people past, we would just consider this. We want to change. I’ve been talking about this for 20, 30 years.

Stacey Bandfield: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Hotze: We need a change, and so few doctors are willing to make that change. Why? Because they’re getting paid by the insurance companies, not by you. The insurance companies pay their bill, and they have protocols that they make the doctors do for you, and the doctors don’t know how to make a living outside that business model and therefore, they’re wed to that business model. If they’re doing things that are totally inexplicable, it’s because they can’t find a way out and they have to justify what they do. That’s the way they make their living. If somebody is making a living, it’s hard to say, “You know what? This isn’t the right way to make a living. I’ve got to change.” Most people won’t do that, and they’ll attack anybody who challenges that paradigm. That’s just what they do. So what I encourage you to do, is to look at your clinical symptoms. Go to Hotze Health & Wellness Center.

Stacey Bandfield: The Hotze, so hotzehwc.com, and we have a symptom checker…

Dr. Hotze: Right.

Stacey Bandfield: …that people can check out and see if they have symptoms of low thyroid, which many, many people do. And you can also request a copy of our book. You can call us at (281) 698-8698. We’d love to give you a copy of Dr. Hotze’s book on thyroid.

Dr. Hotze: Absolutely.

Stacey Bandfield: And his first book, Hormones, Health, and Happiness. It’s got a lot of great information in there.

Dr. Hotze: In my other book, Do a 180.

Stacey Bandfield: Mm-hmm (affirmative) That’s right. Absolutely. And you can talk to a wellness consultant, someone who will listen to you. You may be frustrated out there, because you have been to doctors and they have been ignoring your symptoms. Well, we won’t. So give us a call, and we’ll have a conversation.

Dr. Hotze: And now, let me make it clear with you. We do not do insurance. I’ve never done any HMOs, PPOs. We’ve got a large practice. We have about 85 on staff total. We have the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. We have our vitamin store, our pharmacy that produces the bioidentical hormones, that produces those for you, and we do that to make sure we have the highest quality. We charge cash for our services. It’s just like when you go to the restaurant, or when you go to Macy’s, or to go to Target or somewhere, and when you purchase a product, when you go to the gas station, or you go get your car repaired, or you get a new air conditioner, people ask you for what? They ask you for, “Would you like to pay this by cash, or credit card, or check?” Okay?

Why? Because you pay for the time of services rendered. That’s the way we do it here, because we work for you. If I worked for the insurance companies, guess what? I could only take seven minutes. Our team could only take… our providers could only take seven minutes with you. We’d run you through here like cattle. You ever felt like you’re cattle? “Oh, I’m going to go because they take my insurance,” and then you’re treated like you’re nothing. You get seven minutes and you just, it’s a bad experience at the doctor’s office. We’re here to help you get on a path of health and wellness naturally. And I want to remind you, remember price is a proxy for premium. Okay?

If you go to the Ritz Carlton in New York City, guess what? What do you expect to get? Boy, beautiful accommodations, wonderful furnishings, staff that is dressed and look sharp, and they’re polite. They’re courteous, they have extraordinary hospitality. They have wonderful singing in a bar, and it’s a romantic situation. You have a beautiful room with a huge bathroom. You’re going to pay top dollar for that, right? You know that, because it’s the Ritz Carlton. But if you go to New York, you can decide if you want to stay there and the6 are all kind of… you could stay at a Holiday Inn Express, or you could go all the way down to Motel Six. It’s like, “I just need a bed in New York City,” and that’s all you may need. But if you want to get top, extraordinary hospitality and guest service, and in that context, have medical care provided with you, that will help get you on a path of health and wellness naturally….

You’re in charge of your health. Nobody’s in charge of your health, but you, you can make the decision to be healthy or not. I believe that most diseases are preventable, and God’s given the body amazing restorative power to heal itself, and we can help you do that. We’ll make recommendations. You’re going to be the health athlete, we’re the health coaches. You’re in the health Olympics, and we want you to get a gold medal, but you’re going to have to follow our recommendations like you would any coach. If you went to a speech coach, or you went to an athletic coach, or whether you went to a piano teacher, they’re going to make some recommendations. Piano teachers say, “You have to play your scales every day to learn them. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to be very good piano player.”

We’re going to make some recommendations. We’re not going to tell you what to do, we’re going to recommend what you can do. It’s your choice, and we want to help you along the way to get on a path of health and wellness. I think one of the most important things you can do is be evaluated for your thyroid. Thyroid governs every cell in your body, everything that happens in your body, from the way you think, to your sight, to your heart function, cardiovascular, to your lungs, to your bowel functions, your red cell production, your hormone production are all directly related to your thyroid hormone function at the cellular level. Thyroid is critical and important to your good health, and I highly recommend that you go to our website, hotzehwc.com, take one of the tests, call up our center. What’s the number? Tell them how they can get a book.

Stacey Bandfield: (281) 698-8698.

Dr. Hotze: You can call up, if you’ll call up, tell them you heard me on my podcast. I will give you this book. What does this book sell for?  $27. So I will give you the book. Why? Because I want to help you get on a path of health and wellness naturally, and I want you to read that, and then that’ll help you understand our method of treatment, evaluation and treatment here. And that is what I want for you, because I want you in 2020, I want you to have a great year.

Stacey Bandfield: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Hotze: I want you to be on top of your game. I want you to be alive, I want you to be awake, I want you to be alert, and I want you to be enthusiastic about life. If you’re going to be alive, why aren’t you alive? You don’t want to survive. You want to thrive, right? You don’t want to be sick and tired of being sick and tired, you want to be brimming with energy and vitality, and enthusiastic about life, and we can help you do that, and one of the key ingredients is thyroid supplementation.

Stacey Bandfield: So choose to call us today. (281) 698-8698. That’s (281) 698-8698. We’d love to listen to you, we would love to help. Thank you for joining us here today at Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.

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