Ever thought about Thyroid??

Well, let me tell you, if you have not thought about thyroid, you are missing out!!! This is a truly amazing gland in your body (ok not all of you - some of you may have had it removed...) The thyroid is this gland, in your neck, that makes thyroid hormone - great name!! Now, thyroid hormone is absolutely essential to your well being - it controls how you grow, how you maintain weight and energy, how you use food, how you feel, your mood, and tons of other stuff - in fact, one of the rules of medicine is that if something is wrong and the thyroid is messed up, fix the thyroid first, and the other things may normalize too! It is truly amazing and powerful!

So, the way that thyroid works is remarkable - i have attached a picture for those visual learners, like me - basically, it begins in the brain and a signal is sent to the pituitary gland in the form of a hormone - TRH - this tells the pituitary to make TSH, another hormone, and then that goes to the thyroid gland and tells it to make thyroid hormone! Now this seems complicated and unnecessary until you know the next part. The thyroid hormone then floats around doing its work in the body, but both the TSH maker and the TRH maker have a built in sensor for thyroid hormone - these sensors tell them when there is enough thyroid in the blood and then the signal to make more decreases automatically - so the system is so miraculously made that this vital hormone stays at very consistent levels in your system, because of this delicate feedback mechanism!!!


Now, as if this is not enough already, we have known for a long time that thyroid levels change during pregnancy and it used to be thought that it was because the newborn must have plenty of thyroid hormone to grow and develop (and God designed an automatic system to protect that little one!!), and because there are more proteins in the blood of a pregnant woman, the levels of the labs we use to test are harder to interpret. But there is more than these things - it turns out that the hormone from the placenta that women make during pregnancy - HCG (this is what pregnancy tests measure) also goes straight to the thyroid gland and stimulates production of thyroid hormone (thus giving plenty of supply to this essential hormone to that precious little baby), but there is some unknown automatic adjustment in the pituitary and brain signals that does not allow the level to decrease because of this special extra hormone floating around!!! Do you see, the baby and mom need extra, and the body would not usually allow that because of the balanced system that it has, but because of that system, God put something in place tht we do not understand to protect them!!!!

Now, i went to a conference a couple weeks ago and this big shot guy was talking about this as if he was surprised by this - as if he has everything all figured out - and there i was in the back of the room, wanting to jump up and down and scream that this is God's plan - to provide for that little one!!! Amazing!!

So, the next time you get up, get that cup of coffee (this is what i do) and feel the energy start to surge through you as you wake up - consider thyroid hormone. The next time you see a little baby, or a pregnant lady, consider thyroid hormone, and God's amazing plan to protect that little one, that even the big shots don't understand. Talk to God in those moments and invite Him to join you in your world, in your moment, in your day. It will be a better day for it!

You see, it makes more sense to believe in a loving creator who made all this especially for us, than it is to believe that is was an accident. And that is beautiful - because if He loves us enough to guard our little ones like this, then He is not going to let us go in our lives - You see, He wants to be part of our lives! And when He is part of our lives, we have the chance to escape the crazy, get more, buy more, become more of this world and find the meaning in life - we find MORE than more.

We will be hanging out tomorrow night - May 6th - at McAllister Recreation Center, Lafayette - just off 20th and Schuyler Ave - 6:45-8:00 PM - we would love to have you join us - you will never find a group of people who will accept you for who you are more than these people and theya re all on this same journey - searching for More.

Hope you can make it!