Hey everyone, welcome to the root cause medicine podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Carrie Jones. And on this

podcast, we go in depth with leading experts to understand and improve your health and well-being.

Today, I'm talking with Dr. Eric Balcavage all about the myths and misconceptions around your thyroid and thyroid

and thyroid testing from a functional medicine perspective. Thyroid is a hot topic, so be prepared

to raise your eyebrows and get excited for what you're about to learn. Dr. Balcabbage is a

chiropractic doctor and board certified in functional medicine. He runs the

Rejuvagen Center, where he focuses almost exclusively on thyroid health and chronic disease.

In addition to regularly speaking on the topic and with an upcoming thyroid book, he hosts

The Thyroid Answers podcast. He has been a friend of mine for many years. So it was an absolute

pleasure talking with him today as understanding thyroid physiology and thyroid labs can be

really confusing, especially as there are different schools of thought on the matter. So here's a

clip from today's conversation. Yeah, so basically we've got this gland, right,

that's right in the middle of our kind of throat area, neck area.

This is butterfly-shaped gland.

That's why you see like butterflies.

Somebody asked me, why is thyroid associated with butterflies?

So it's right there.

It produces a bunch of hormones,

but the ones that we're really talking about,

we're talking about thyroid physiology, are primarily T4, T3, thyroxin, triode, thyrin.

And these are molecules that once they're produced by the thyroid gland and primarily T4,

they're dumped into the bloodstream, and they essentially get moved into tissues and stimulate the metabolism

...