Fine Tuning of the Body Carburettor, the Thyroid...

The first flush of youth, marriage,family, discovering kids, growing up with them. Very soon they are on their own, irrespective of whether they live with you are not. You are not part of their decision making process anymore. And your overall focus, appears to get a bit hazy, as you look back on the golden anniversary of your birth....

This is the time, the body machine, develops some squeaks. Its not so easy running to catch a train when you are a bit late. Earlier, the train guard , smitten with the vision of a young lady, flying through the platform , her chiffons and stuff trailing behind, would have forgotten to give the driver the departure ring. Today, a mass of stuff, lugging various bags, blubbering through the platform, as if chasing the train, probably frightens the train guard, causing an involuntary ringing of the departure bell.

The knees creak suddenly, and holding the slightly heavy handbag at a weird angle appears to stress the arm muscles in a troublesome way. You sort of "fall" into your seat (we will pretend it was "thudless"), and are suddenly oversome with a sense of fatigue. Its not just the running. Its everything. Why your clothes fit funny, why the food has started digesting with sounds audibke to your neighbor, how you nod of to sleep in the office whenever there is a decent lull in any activity; and why you, who would take the intiative organising weekend dinnes and treks, now have no inclination or energy.....

Our body is like a machine. It needs to be tuned optimally. The carburretor , as such is a small gland called the thyroid. The setting of this gland has to be within a certain range. Just like a car with a faulty setting will accumulate carbon deposits, and give a bad running mileage, if the thyroid setting gets disturbed , health suffers.

Actually, the thyroid hormone is part of an orchestra of hormones, some of which are stress related, some sex related, some fertility related and so on. They all exist in a fine balance with each other. Any disturbance in any one of these, causes compensatory changes in one or more of the others.

Consequently, if you consistently keep getting high cholesterol values, dry skin, weight gain, feelings of depression, puffy eyes or what have you, get your thyroid values checked. Typically, you can have a slow thyroid(hypothyroid) or a fast thyroid. (hyperthyroid) . The sysmptoms enumerated in the previous sentence are typical of a slow thyroid. A person whose carburretor is at a "fast" setting, will typically be jittery, thin, with a tendency towrds bulging eyes, tension palpitations and assorted similar stuff.

So what is the solution?

Doctors typically give you a medicine to make up the shortfall indicated in your thyroid function tests. This is like adding one more violinist to the orchestra, to correct a few other violinists making the same mistakes again and again. It does nothing to improve the original violinist, so to speak.

Experience says that a more holistic approach to this problem is likely to yield great results.

A look at your diet will tell you, that you desperately need to reduce the transfats from your diet. More vegetables, fruits. More Omega-3 fats in your diet, as found in certain fish, and if you vare a vegetarian, in flax seeds. A de-emphasis on fast foods. Green leafy vegetables, complex carbohydrates; and if you are a confirmed carnivore, thn only chicken and seafood, no red meat.

Avoid soy. There are problems for hypothyroid types from consuming soy.

You see, with globalisation and faster communication, we are exposed to wider and wider variety of stuff. Under the guise of "experimenting" we mess around with foods, that are actually native to a caertain region of the world, defined by the geography and soil, water and weather and other parameters there. What works for a japanese accustomed to raw fish, may not work , for say some guy in Texas. Eating, per se, has to be seen as part of a persons environment, where it blends in with his surroundings optimally.

Then in order that we should be able to conduct all this fancy eating, we process food and fool around with additives and preservatives. And this includes milk, whic today contains a lot of undesirable hormones , thanks to those fed to the cows, in our effort to treat them as a food factory.

Mental stress caused by the "why not me" syndrome, high expectations at work, competetive colleagues, disillusionments etc do their bit towards messing around with the hormone called serotonin, which you need for, in short, mental peace.

So its an invitation for hormonal chaos. And continuous fighting , always, everywhere, depletes an army, no matter how strong . And so the body quietly adjusts to a lower setting.

The solution to all this has to be holistic. Besides diet , your mind has to be involved. One has to learn stress busting techniques; whether it is something like meditation, or taking up an interesting hobby, or tai-chi, or yoga. It doesnt have to be anything exotic. It can be as different as doing amateur painting, volunteering somewhere on a regular basis, .

Very recently, someone I know has been trying out a special fermented tea called Kombucha. Mind you , the original medications are continued while we try this out. It is green tea which is carefully fermented by the presence of what is called a mushroom, but is actually a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast; sort of a "plantimal" , if you please. Careful brewing of this tea, and regular intake as prescribed, has energised several folks, where standard thyroid hormone treatment showed no visible results. One finds that this item is nutritionally very complex with various organic acids, amino acids, vitamins etc. What such a food stuff does, is that it treats the body simultaneously on several fronts. Kombucha users often indicate that what this does, is it "rights" the wrong. If sleep is your problem, it is observed that the quality of sleep improves, and we dont ask whether it increases or decreases. People with blood sugar problems, have experienced a balance in their blood sugar readings, without the accompanying sensations of hypo or hyperglycemia. Imbibing of this tea gives you a "feeling: of being energised, in a very natural way, in balance with your body.

Like any non-medical suggestion, this two hs its opponents and proponents. What is important, is that we learn from experiences of others, study the system, start taking everything, first in small quantities, consult family, and occasionally regularly be checked up by our family doctors , to confirm which way we are progressing.

Time has come to give alternative therapies their rightful place. And it needs to be clearly understood that treating something is not a 1/0 binary situation; its a dynamic adjustment of therapies, medications, doses and attitudes, so that a happy complete human can emerge.