Welcome to Natural MD Radio, your place to hear the whole truth on health and medicine for women and children and get the tools you need to take back your health naturally starting now.

I'm Dr. Aviva Rong. Hi everybody and welcome back to Natural MD radio. It's a pleasure to be here

with you and to share with you some insights into a hard

experience that a lot of people have this time of year. It would be so wonderful

if winter was just merry and bright for everyone but so many of my

patients have told me and so many women write into me and say that this is a sad time

of year for them and sad is something I mean a little bit tongue in

cheek it's it's a sad experience but also sad actually stands for seasonal

effective disorder and so many women have asked me how to know if it's

seasonal effective disorder which I call the winter blues or whether it's their

thyroid acting up if they're having a slow functioning

thyroid that may be causing their depression. It's such a huge question that I

even got interviewed by Oprah magazine on this very topic. If you're wondering why you're not feeling

jolly and bright this season, I hope this episode of Natural MD

radio might shed some light on sad and thyroid issues that could be an underlying cause of depression and

help you on the road to feeling like yourself again.

So as the days get shorter and darker, this change in light naturally makes a lot of us

want to hibernate a little more especially if you're like me and you live in a

cold climate as the months get darker as the days get shorter for some people even on sunny days though

You might find yourself feeling down or even downright depressed. It's actually estimated that about 5% of Americans

experienced seasonal effective disorder and it can strike anyone. In one study

people with sad, 60% of the people in the study had never experienced any significant depression or been treated for depression before.

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