Who, Why, HOW to Test for Hormones/Thyroid, etc. per Gary King, RPh

This is very helpful, Gary.  

Typically, patients unfortunately haven't had very thorough labs done, nor do the providers really understand how to get at this type of hormone replacement and supplementation.  Could you talk a little more about testing? I'm really thinking as much for the people who might have gained some weight, aren't feeling as well as they'd like but might not be aware of what that 'means' related to the hormone system; I feel people often make a mistake and think that because something happens to LOTS of people it is 'NORMAL', or if it happened to others in their family it is 'just generic', or 'part of getting older'.  Sadly, what happens to the majority of people in the United States (and beyond) in many regards is not 'normal' for humans who are provided what they need for nutrition, exercise, rest, relaxation and essentially the nourishment of the body, mind and spirit.  

Sometimes people who have not been along for the journey with me very long do not realize why I am so committed to helping them and all others who are in a precarious way; those who have digressed to be in a 'worse way' appreciate it, and they might not always agree or accept the treatment philosophy we present at Lumigrate, but they know the costs, they know the hardship and the devastation.

And while I naturally work to have information to get those people out of the drain, as I have come back up out of it in the past through the things presented here, it makes infinite sense to have everyone who knows the difficulties on the lookout for people they can intervene with where they are and hope to get them on board a new path so they don't end up with the mess that comes from not addressing things earlier rather than later.  

I know, too well, the expenses (direct and indirect) that this costs and how RELATIVELY inexpensively it can be treated IF done effectively and proficiently, and I believe the providers I have here on Lumigrate are able to provide solutions to many.  And I want the best for people.  Thanks for your response, in advance, Gary. 

  ~~ Mardy

 Mardy, 

You can find them by going to the Lumigrate Search bar and typing in 'podcasts ITC', OR clicking on the Forums tab and Podcasts are currently at the top of the list and naturally I'm giving you the links below if you're in the website now and want to go listen.  There are two with ITC, Gary and Allan Jolly, RPh, ND.  Allan's forte is nutrition and the health of the gut, Gary's is thyroid and as he says here 'the hormone symphony'.  Talk about 'complementary medicine'! 

I encourage you to go have a listen via your computer  -- I listened to it when making meals in the kitchen, or find Lumigrate on iTunes.  This is a GRATE way to hear us discuss similar things and get a sense for what ITC is about, via co-Presidents Gary and Allan.  It's a new concept for many to get their prescriptions from a NP located in another state and to consult over the phone when looking at emailed test results from something you do at home, but I'm tellin' ya, it WORKS!  (The podcast where we discuss the way they go about testing and prescribing is at: www.lumigrate.com/forum/itcs-second-podcast-hormone-testing-options-supplementation-hormones-vitamin-d-minerals-and-nu.  Adam Cochran of TalkingDigital in the podcasting studio; Mardy goes in person, then we Skype in those far away! FUN!

This link is for their 'introductory' podcast, where we chatted about how Allan and Gary came to be in business together with ITC and moved from Texas to Colorado and went from being RPh's in more traditional jobs to compounding.  You will see the link also contains my and Yenta's "welcome" to them and their written (and very nice) responses.  www.lumigrate.com/forum/biologically-identical-hormone-replacement-supplements-and-more-la-itc-compounding-and-natural

To use our "Local example", in Grand Junction the independently owned compounding pharmacy ALSO uses ZRT test kits and the pharmacist/owner, Karen Floyd, works with the patient and their providers in getting a prescription in the most efficient, effective way.  You might have someone in your neighborhood where YOU live, and each person will know what is best for them, working with someone they can be face to face with and go pick things up, "the old fashioned way".  BUT at Lumigrate I work to have a provider for each element of the You model, which is available to anyone in the US, so no matter where you live or what your ability to get out and about is, you have access to a 'virtual integrative team' via Lumigrate.  

In this case, with ITC, you can utilize the technologies of telephone/Skype consults and and shipping efficiencies of UPS .. Amazon's an example of how many things now are available on the Internet and it's really the wave of the present and future to have the ability to treat medical issues using these applications as well. It's just another paradigm shift in health care, another option, and I hope this information is helpful to all who read and listen (and watch if it's the video -- there's one on hypothyroidism, (click on the videos tab when you're done here to take a peek about that, a snippet is there to click on and if you want to download that's a very simple process and it's FREE).  

Think of it as spending just an hour of your time to take a whole mini 'class' in hypothyroidism.  The video was produced at the foundational times of Lumigrate and is a good learning tool, and then you can, once again, decide which route to go to take your next step to finding answers and solutions through providers YOU wish to work with).  ~~ Mardy

 As usual, I'm going to provide my personal 'story' about this from the patient/consumer's perspective rolled up with my thinking from being an outpatient occupational therapist in the recent past and now health 'navigator' via Lumigrate.  It is lengthy and so I encourage people to skip over it or skim it for the highlights I'll put in bold if they're not inclined to read an example related to my personal experiences.  We're trying to meet the needs of people who want fast and those that want detail!  

As a medical consumer AND provider I now have experience also related to insurance-based medicine AND private pay, as for a while I was without health insurance and then elected to put $ into things that insurance doesn't pay for instead of insurance for a short time.  I've been at this health 'thing' for a long time and it didn't take long when I had really good insurance coverage with a deductible to realize if you rotated years and did as much insurance-based medicine as you could one year then not for a year (or more), you'd maximize on the deductible piece, essentially.  So these are concepts that are new to many people and so I apologize in advance for the length of my response here.  

As a consultant helping people navigate with their occupation of health care, I've typically reviewed information at the start about where someone is 'at'  now and what they've become aware of and worked on in the past with other providers.  If people are lucky enough to  know they have a hormone issue in the first place (which includes vitamin D and thyroid), they might have been provided a pharmaceutical medication such as Synthroid and others, or if the doctor is more progressive, sometimes they're on Armour thyroid, but that's made from an animal and not biologically identical to a humans and so many are not in favor of Armour either.  Thyroid is a CLASSIC example of how everything in medicine today has SO many approaches, it's mind boggling!  And that, I think, might be why so many people aren't aware they have a thyroid issue let alone having it addressed PROPERLY! I mean, 1 in 8 women have thyroid dysfunction last I heard/read and only 10% are treated!  That's staggering! And 'hammer swings' about obesity and people are focusing on diet, which likely is the cause of the thyroid issues (or contributor) and they look at fats and carbs but not iodine, nor is there a nation-wide visible campaign about making thyroid a subject of focus and treatment in the US (and beyond).  Well, there IS a focus at Lumigrate on it, we launched with a full hour seminar/class video (which comes with a file you can print out of the handouts) and you can take that or email it to your provider and say 'thought you'd be interested in this resource and I'd like to discuss it with you in the future'. (You'll find the video on the Videos tab here at Lumigrate.com).  

Typically, patients unfortunately haven't had very thorough labs done, nor do the providers really understand how to get at this type of hormone replacement and supplementation.  SADLY, like my case for many years and decades, TSH was the only thing done and it came back WNL (normal range) and no further testing was done to dig to the root of the problem. And my health went from bad to worse, from 'tired' to 'trainwreck'.  My weight went from great to good to not good and I'll never forget the day I saw a superbill at a medical appointment that had the box checked 'obese'.  I looked at the box next to it, which was 'morbid obesity' and thought "I wonder if I'm going to end up THERE someday, because I just told the doctor 'this is NOT my metabolism, this is NOT the way I normally am!' and got the response 'Mardy, you know as well as I do that it is 'calories in, calories out'.  I kid you not!  These things, with my more recent solutions that I know exist if people only can have access to the information and provider expertise and services it takes, made me committed to creating change and I'm doing that through this website, created in 2009 (with a year's work prior, so from the beginning of 2008).  

Sometimes people who have not been along for the journey with me very long do not realize why I am so committed to helping them and all others who are in a precarious way; those who have digressed to be in a 'worse way' appreciate it, and they might not always agree or accept the treatment philosophy we present at Lumigrate, but they know the costs, they know the hardship and the devastation. And while I naturally work to have information to get those people out of the drain, as I have come back up out of it in the past through the things presented here, it makes infinite sense to have everyone who knows the difficulties on the lookout for people they can intervene with where they are and hope to get them on board a new path so they don't end up with the mess that comes from not addressing things earlier rather than later.  

To my story related specifically to thyroid: I had, in my 20s, 30s, and 40s had one occurrence each decade where my weight just shot up in an unbelievable way, and each time I did something to change what I was eating and it dropped in an unbelievable way.  Even at age 50 one of my close friends who saw me a lot said 'I've never seen anything like it!'  But 7 summers ago, when I was for several years going to many different doctors due to changes of insurance and location, most of which were doing TSH and it was coming back WNL, one of which was the one I refer to above with the 'calories in/out' 'advise' (eye roll),  my new massage therapist (I'd just moved to Grand Junction) saw the mass on my throat and leveraged me to go BACK to the doctor I'd just been to for my quarterly checkup and say 'what's up with this MASS on my throat my massage therapist saw, doc?'

Ironically, I'd been to that doctor years back and considered it one of the benefits of having moved here about a decade later, as he was progressive and it was a time when I saw the job I had would allow for the money it took to pay out of pocket for things that a progressive provider often recommends.  The way that provider works you have an hour long intake then come in once a month until you're settled in and making progress then every quarter and then once a year minimum.  But he'd not observed it nor had he done a physical exam of any kind to palpate the thyroid; in the years past when I had worked here for 2 months filling a staffing shortage, I had been referred to him by a physician friend in the area, and he had, at the end of an appointment where to my knowledge my diagnosis was 'chronic fatigue syndrome', come over to do a fast hands-on and called all the staff in and said 'this is why you always do a hands on because she had said she didn't have pain, but feel these shoulder muscles!'...

I was underreporting 'pain', just because my idea of what 'pain is' was very different than what everyone else's idea is; I was raised to not complain in a way, and things that I did 'complain about' or 'bring up' were dismissed or not dealt with effectively just because of my parent's own problems and dysfunctions and that is the coping strategy I had developed.  (I'm pleased to now have Judi Larson on Lumigrate.com who addresses brilliantly these adaptations we make in childhood and how it affects the status of our mind/body/spirit and contributes or causes health issues AND then how to reverse/unwind and re-make yourself healthFULLY).      

And fortunately this particular provider I'm referring to knew how to adeptly and thoroughly test thyroid, once you got him thinking in that groove -- we'd been so focused on supplements and sleep and pain that he'd not gotten 'down to the functional reasons' and tested something as fundamental as thyroid.  Which was a HUGE lesson to me in that nobody thinks as much about you and your health or knows as much about You as YOU do, and that each person really has to become that YOU in the center of the health care model on Lumigrate.com which I didn't develop for another year or two after that appointment.  (A rheumatologist mapped out for me what route people with fibromyalgia should go to get results with fibromyalgia and then I brought that up in a meeting with Dr Young (who is on Lumigrate in video, podcasts and forums), and he drew up the model as he can draw and thinks in models, then I had two different graphics artists draw it up to get what you see here -- it's been a process, but it's really a GRATE model, so I encourage YOU to look at it and perhaps PRINT IT and fill it in.  

Once my thyroid was finally diagnosed as low, not Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and the suggestion was to supplement with Armour thyroid as it has T3 and T4, I agreed; it made sense to me to take something that had T3 and T4 in it.  I felt SO much better than I did before but in retrospect that is when I started feeling a lot of anxiety which was very different for me than my baseline.  However, I was literally prescribed about 20 things in that timeframe, I had breathing issues, cardiac issues, pain issues, sleep issues, "tissue issues" -- you name it, I had it!  

So you can imagine my shock one day in the fall of 2009 when I'd gotten my mail order prescriptions from the big pharmacy as the insurance companies route you to now to save money, and went to set up my medications for the week and there was no Armour, and I thought I'd ordred it for sure!  Long story short, they were out of Armour, as was everyone in the country, as there was a manufacturing problem, and so they'd not called me to let me know I needed to get a different prescription...  Fortunately, my prescribing provider at the time was available and suggested/provided a Rx for a compounded T3/T4 and I was back in business.  Everything was fine that first month/batch and then I refilled and it happened to be a really stressful week and thought my feeling hyped up was from stress and busyness, but a friend said 'nope, something's wrong' and I realized it correlated with two days before when I'd started on the new vial of T3/T4.  That is why I now encourage people to really look at the QUALITY ASSURANCE that a compounding pharmacy does and if the pharmacist and facility are supported in the proper way to be doing what they are doing.  On the podcasts with ITC, I asked Gary and Allan to discuss their quality assurance standards as they are really stringent.  That does not mean a pharmacy and laboratory has to be the size of ITC, but there are advantages to their making things in larger batches which are discussed in the podcast and worth a listen to.  

So I'll fast forward to the last year, and trust me, I was having to go over my personal health history related to my thyroid and adrenals yesterday with one of my 'doctors' and it's mind boggling to those who are in the field even, so apologies but at least it's a good opportunity for learning and so I share it with you here in the efforts for educating individuals who are searching for information and might related to the various aspects.  I now have two providers, both of whom are on Lumigrate.com and who are available to you for consultations AND who also provide lots of information on Lumigrate in order for those who have providers or who cannot access them to be able to get information into the hands of the people, clinics, programs/providers who are available to them.  I realize it is VERY frustrating when there's something out there that is not accessible to a person, and we cannot do anything to fix every persons situation and we can't magically fix the whole problem of health care today, but what we ARE DOING is what we ARE DOING and I hope everyone appreciates that and respects that.  

 Since I don't currently have insurance benefits for blood work, I opted to do the ZRT testing via ITC (and our local VERY GOOD pharmacist Karen Floyd also uses ZRT, which is a good indicator of quality) as it is extremely reasonable in price and relatively convenient as you do it at home.  I might recommend that people really study the information about 'how to' and have assistance if needed, as it is really kind of cumbersome and I had to allot an extra hour or so in my day for spitting and blood dropletting and had to shuffle people and appointments to accommodate the time frames for testing and eating and remembering to refuse chewing gum when offered out at lunch, because it's  valid testing when done right but that means the operator/person is a variable .  

I believe effective/valid, and Becca's rate for initial consult and follow along for a year is really reasonable.  I felt Dr Spurlock's rates were as well and look forward to having benefits in the future to cover the types of things he's skilled at teasing out of lab work once I get done with the expenses of things insurance won't pay for and can get back to putting my health care dollars into insurance.  I regret that I don't have the means to have BOTH insurance and be able to pay out of pocket and felt that for me it was the best route to take related to getting where I wanted/ needed to go with my health care, and again offer the story as ideas and what I did, not that I am recommending necessarily that anyone else does things the way I have; everyone has their own reality and will make their own health care decisions.   The times today are challenging for most people and this has opened up opportunities for many new routes, including for me to be able to educate people looking for this type of information on the Internet, so again, I hope this very LONG piece about thyroid as I have experienced it, is of benefit for people's ideas.   

I say this to underscore the concept that you don't have to just have ONE provider, they no longer have to be in your community, the technology and shipping of the United States (and beyond) have opened up new avenues! I actually look for overlap with provider's way of addressing things and then am not concerned when there is a difference of opinion because not everyone has the same outlook on things and this allows thepatient/consumer to figure out for themselves which route to take, and thereby furthering their empowerment and responsibility!  It's simply the paradigm I do best in, and want others to have success with IF they wish to hop onto having this 'reformed health care  paradigm'.  And naturally at Lumigrate, we're wanting YOU to feel empowered by having quality information with options to follow based on what makes sense or 'resonates' for you.  
Thanks for reading IF you were inclined to read my history and perspective from the consumer/patient experience I offer ... but naturally if someone wanted to skip that and just read the experts, that is  too!  ~~ Mardy

In going to get this link on YouTube (where Lumigrate has a 'channel'), I see there are way over 4,000 views of this video snippet, which we hope continued to capture people's attention who research on YouTube and allow them to find Lumigrate and the Forums!  So, in addition to looking at the snippet if you click on the Videos tab, above, you can catch it at YouTube (and naturally, leaving comments is a good thing there as it encourages others to know it's a valid/appreciated piece.  

Naturally, the end objective is hopefully to have you download and watch the video and the handout that comes with it (separate link sent to your email that you then can view on screen or print if you wish).  Live and Learn! Learn and Live Better -- it's an investment in YOU! ~~

 www.youtube.com/watch

It's been almost a year now since I first found out about the efficiency and quality of ITC when my first Rx was sent there by my new fibromyalgia/fatigue specialist who has patients all over the country.  Last week on Thursday morning before Labor Day weekend, I went into the website for ITC and ordered refills on my two Rxs (supplemental estrogen, testosterone, progresterone in topical cream form and T3/T4 compound in capsule/oral form) and then went to the other side of the website and ordered supplements and homeopathics such as arnica, etc to have on hand, etc.  I'd put off ordering to the last minute/day because I had some variables that might have been leading to symptoms of low estrogen and wanted to not ask for more unless I really needed it.  

Almost immediately I was receiving emails related to my orders being confirmed; the next day a package arrived on my door by midafternoon via UPS which had all the non Rx items.  The holiday weekend went by and no UPS with the Rx items and so I waited until early afternoon to look back on the emails and see that perhaps something had gone awry (as they'd indicated getting the order but I'd not seen anything from UPS about it being in transit as the other package had).  No sooner had I  called and left a VM with Pam (x 507) to check to be sure something hadn't gone awry, my doorbell rang and I heard the UPS truck pulling away.  

So in five days, three of which were a holiday weekend, they were able to update/change my Rx with the prescribing authority (Becca Slomiany, NP, who is wonderful and very adept at fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue treatment due to her own experiences personally plus years of specializing in testing/consulting/prescribing in the specialty area she is in), ITC and UPS has something to me across the Continental Divide and for in my opinion, a very reasonable amount of money.  I appreciate everyone's hard work that goes into the effort at ITC and UPS.  I sleep well now because of it, and have the daytime energy I need to get done what I need to get done.  

Even if you don't order something from them, perhaps visit their website and drop them a note through their "contact" setups, or pick up the phone and call them and just let them know you see them at Lumigrate and appreciate their contributing to the free and progressive information at Lumigrate.  That's how they know their efforts are being seen, is if they hear from YOU (and therefore feel Lumigrate's worthy of their attention in light of all the other things they have to do with their busy business.)  Again, www.itcpharmacy.com

~~ Mardy