She Faced A ‘Misery With No Name’ – And Changed Her Life
(Photo courtesy of Amy Myers, MD)
I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I was lying in bed, clutched in the grip of yet another panic attack. Night after night, I tossed and turned. I couldn’t sleep. My heart was racing, my mind was racing, and I wondered whether this would always be my life.
As happens with most autoimmune disorders, I had no idea what was going on. Early into my second year of medical school, I was seized by panic attacks — I never knew when another one might strike. My heart and mind were in constant overdrive, I was dropping weight, and always in a mild sweat. My hands shook with a noticeable tremor. Then the insomnia kicked in, I felt as though I were living in a prison of anxiety, dizziness, and fatigue. Even worse was the helplessness — the feeling that my life was no longer my own.
My worried friends convinced me to go see a doctor, who brushed aside my concerns.
“I think it’s just stress,” she said. “Medical students often think they have every disease they’re learning about.”
Although I didn’t know what was going on, I knew enough to trust my own instincts. I demanded a full workup and lab testing.
It turned out my instincts were right on the money. I wasn’t just panicking over courses and exams. I had an actual, diagnosable condition: Graves’ disease, a condition in which the thyroid overperforms. Finally, my misery had a name.
Three Terrifying Treatment Choices
Learning its name was just about the last comfort I got, however, because the conventional treatments for Graves’ were pretty terrifying. There were three choices on the menu, and none of them seemed appealing.
The first and least invasive choice was to take a drug known as propylthiouracil (PTU), which was supposed to stop my thyroid from working so hard and keep it from overproducing the hormone.
Related: How Weather Changes Affect Your Thyroid
That sounds good, right? Then I looked at propylthiouracil’s side effects. Okay. What were my other options?
There were two different ways I could have my thyroid gland destroyed. I could have it removed surgically. Or I could have a procedure called thyroid ablation, which involves swallowing a radioactive pill to kill the gland.
The choices were terrifying. Despite my enrollment in a conventional medical school, I believed there were other roads to health. My plan had always been to become an integrative physician who used diet and natural approaches as much as possible. That desire was reinforced when my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Her illness made it clear how resistant most conventional doctors are to any unconventional approach. When I asked Mom’s doctor about some new healing foods I had learned of, he simply scoffed, mocking the very idea that nutrition could play a major role. As I prepared for medical school, I understood that this response would be typical of the mindset I would encounter.
Related: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Thyroid Disorders
Conventional medicine offered my mother nothing except chemotherapy, which could only delay the inevitable. My mother died less than five months after she was diagnosed. I entered medical school the following year — and one year later I was suffering from Graves’.
I now know that besides diet, stress is a big factor in the development of autoimmunity. The stress of my mother’s death had clearly helped to trigger my Graves’ disease. But there were other factors involved.
If I had known then what I know now, I would have understood how many risk factors I had — and I would have known how to use diet, gut healing, detox, and stress relief to prevent my condition. Had I still succumbed to the disorder, I would at least have been able to avoid conventional medicine’s horrific treatment options.
But at the time, my doctors gave me the three unpleasant choices, and as far as I knew, those were the only ones I had.
The Difference Between ‘Not Sick’ and Thriving
Reluctantly, I opted for the PTU. I developed toxic hepatitis a few months later as the prescription drug started destroying my liver. I nearly had to drop out of medical school.
Related: How Too Much Thyroid Hormone Affects Your Heart
It was now surgery or ablation — remove my thyroid or destroy it. I chose ablation and said goodbye to my thyroid, a choice I regret to this day. Looking back, I have to tell myself that I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.
Yet even then, I intuitively knew there was a better way — an approach to health that worked with the body’s natural healing ability instead of attacking it with drugs and surgery. I knew that another type of medicine existed, but nothing I found seemed to get to the root of the problem.
When I graduated from medical school, I went into emergency medicine. Since ER doctors don’t have an established practice, I was free to pursue that other type of medicine — as soon as I found it. Meanwhile, my own health problems continued. I never felt really healthy. The best I could feel was “not sick.”
Related: The Awkward Place of Healing Between Conventional and Alternative Medicine
Then, finally, I found what I had been looking for. I discovered functional medicine. This was the whole body approach I’d always wanted to practice. Instead of diagnosing conditions and medicating symptoms, functional medicine looks at how all the body’s systems interact and seeks to get them all functioning optimally. I based my own approach, The Myers Way, on that incredible idea.
Years later, my practice now includes patients with Graves’ disease and other autoimmune conditions, and it’s not just about managing symptoms. After working with thousands of individuals suffering from a wide range of autoimmune diseases, I now know how to help people reverse their disorder, eliminate their symptoms, and even get off their medication. My program includes a very specific diet as well as a comprehensive approach to all the factors that can lead to autoimmune symptoms and diseases. There is no longer a need to rely on the conventional medical approach that has left so many confused and in constant pain. My own brush with an autoimmune illness gave me both insight and motivation — to find another solution. My reward has been watching patients find relief and thrive again.
By Amy Myers, MD, Special to Everyday Health
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This article originally appeared on EverydayHealth.com: A Young Doctor Faces a ‘Misery With No Name’ – and Changes Her Life
