Healing Thyroid Nodules and Goiter

My name is Dr. Tom Rofrano from the Natural Medicine Clinic in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Today, I’m going to talk to you about a patient that came in with a  very, very, very, large thyroid nodule—goiter—and how we were able to help her shrink that by 30% in the first three months— and that’s just for starters.

Thyroid Nodules & Goiter: A Case Study

I’ve been practicing for over 30 years—chiropractic, nutrition, functional medicine—and I’ve seen over one hundred thousand patient visits. Lately it seems like more and more patients are coming in with autoimmune conditions, especially thyroid, a lot of nodules. This is just rampant, and we have a lot of these patients.

We have this one woman in particular, a 60-year-old woman, that came in. She happened to see a YouTube video I did with my wife last year where I was able to help my wife shrink her thyroid nodule by over 50% fairly quickly, and how we did that. She saw this and came in, driving quite a distance to get here.

She had this huge thyroid nodule that was over 9 cm. To give you an idea, my neck is about 13 cm wide, so that’s how big it was. This had been going on for about ten years, and she was just feeling miserable.

You have two ways to go with this. There’s the traditional medical route, which, for some people, that’s fine, they do surgery to remove the thyroid, then you’d be on medication for the rest of your life. She didn’t want to do that. She wanted to see if we could help her treat it naturally.

Whole-Body Analysis

The first thing we do in what we call our Functional & Free Program (a seven step program to identify your underlying root cause and provide long term permanent solutions) is Step 1, a whole-body analysis to determine what tests need to be ordered to figure out what is causing this, because you don’t just get a nodule or goiter for no reason, it’s coming from somewhere. So we do the evaluation to figure out the history and what tests to order to get to some underlying root causes.

As far as this patient’s complaints, besides this goiter, she was completely exhausted, with headaches, brain fog, depression, anxiety, couldn’t lose weight, and she was very bloated and swollen. She had neck, back, and joint pain, insomnia, sinus congestion, the whole gamut of digestive issues, and a lot of skin issues as well. She was just, from head to toe, really struggling.

Determining Root Causes

Basically we look for areas of physical, chemical, and mental stress. Under chemical stress, we test for three things:

1.     Deficiencies

In her case, she had multiple nutrient deficiencies—nine, to be exact. Vitamins and minerals, plus an iodine deficiency.

Iodine is one of those things that can be very controversial because there are so many experts saying that iodine is terrible if you have thyroid issues or the thyroid autoimmune condition Hashimoto’s Disease, which she has. So, a lot of people say you shouldn’t take iodine at all and avoid it like the plague. People try to find iodine-free multiple vitamins because they’re afraid of it.

On the other hand, if you test for iodine, which we did with her, and it’s low, if someone is deficient (and she was really deficient), then it can be really helpful. As a matter of fact, iodine deficiency is and can be a primary cause of goiter.

So, she was deficient in nine nutrients, plus iodine (one of the lowest levels I’ve seen in iodine, by the way). So that’s one area, deficiencies. Two, we look at toxins.

2.     Toxins

In her case, she tested high for five heavy metals, including mercury and led. Whereas many thyroid Hashimoto’s patients are iron deficient and anemic, she was the opposite. She had too much iron in her system. Too much iron is very toxic, like any other metal. Extremely toxic and can damage organs and every other part of your body. So her ferritin level, which represents stored iron in your body, was very high.

The third area we look at besides deficiencies and toxins is infections.

3.     Infections, viruses, bacteria, yeast & parasites

Before she came to me, she’d been to a number of different doctors. She brought in 94 pages of labs and medical records from before she came to see me.

She was positive for many different viruses, including Epstein-Barr, very common with Hashimoto’s and nodules. When I did additional testing, we do comprehensive stool testing, she had bacterial overgrowth in her intestines and she also had yeast overgrowth. I often see yeast overgrowth and Hashimoto’s/nodules together, I mean almost every Hashimoto’s patient we have has yeast overgrowth. That went on with her chronic sinus issues and her skin issues.

Besides deficiencies, toxins, and infections, as if that wasn’t enough—because you don’t want to just find one thing, when someone comes in with an over 9 cm nodule, there’s going to be a lot of things going on—then we look at a fourth category, food sensitivities.

4.     Food sensitivities/allergies

She was sensitive to ten different foods, plus gluten. She had a very significant gluten sensitivity. She also tested positive for leaky gut.

With these gut infections going on and eating gluten, that can cause leaky gut, which then in turn makes you much more sensitive to all foods, and can cause autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto’s.

In addition to that, she was sensitive to a number of chemicals, including one that she was exposed to on a daily basis working in the cosmetics industry. It was over twelve different specific things we found.

Treating Root Causes

So what do we do from there?

1.     The FreeDiet™

Basically, I put her on a diet. We call it the FreeDiet because it’s not only gluten free, but it’s free of gluten, grains, sugar, yeast, corn, dairy, soy, legumes, eggs and GMO’s. It’s a diet to help reduce those foods most commonly responsible for inflammation and gut issues and really allow your body to heal.

If you’d like a complimentary copy of the FreeDiet™ – Phase 1, click here. 

2.     Natural Medicine Formulas

I put her on a number of different supplements to help with these deficiencies she was having. Iodine as well, yes, relatively high doses of iodine. Again, don’t run out and take iodine. You need to test first to figure out if you need it and how much.

So I have her taking that, as well as different herbal remedies to address the yeast overgrowth and very powerful probiotics for bacterial overgrowth. Also, as a supplement to address the elevated heavy metals and iron, I had her start doing infrared sauna to help sweat out these toxins. I also advised she start avoiding exposure to chemicals at work.

She also had adrenal fatigue, adrenal stress, her numbers were really off there, on top of everything there. And her hormones were off—her estrogen and progesterone ratios were way off. I prescribed adrenal adaptogenic herbs to help balance out her adrenals.

3.     Lifestyle Changes

I recommended some stress-relieving lifestyle changes as well.

The Results

So we put all that together, followed her along, and retested to make sure that things were improving. Just this week, I had her 3-month ultrasound report back, since we’d ordered one initially, and I’m happy to say this over 9 cm nodule/goiter shrunk by 30%. She had three other nodules that all shrank an average of 30%. So overall, the size of the goiter and the nodules averaged 30% reduction in three months, so we’re both thrilled about that.

And this is just the start. I’m planning on continuing on this path, and reaching out, and continuing to see it shrink. She’s obviously thrilled, because number one, all of her symptoms have cleared up, you know, fatigue, aches and pains, headaches, and the 50 other things she came in with. Also, this huge mass on her thyroid that changed her voice, made it difficult to swallow, and, understandably, made her very self-conscious was visibly shrinking, so she’s very happy about that, and I am as well, and all of us here at the Natural Medicine Clinic.

So just know that for any chronic health issue, whether you have thyroid nodules or goiter or Hashimoto’s, or other autoimmune conditions or other chronic health condition, you have a choice. You can choose to live with it, or maybe take medications for this and that, or surgeries, and that’s one choice. Or you can choose health, you can choose to really look into what the underlying causes are, address those, and then be provided solutions to have you get better.

Thanks for joining me today and feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want notifications of new videos. And if you click on the link to the FreeDiet™ – Phase 1, we’ll send that right over to you. I look forward to giving you further updates. See you next time. Take care.