Thyroid Problems 75
Testing for Underactive Thyroid
The basal thermometer test is a good way to start measuring your thy-
roid activity. Take your temperature with an old-fashioned mercury
thermometer. It’s the only reliable thermometer device. Place under the
tongue or under your arm for seven to ten minutes three or four times
a day. Upon waking before you get out of bed your temperature should
be around 98 degrees; at midmorning after you’ve had breakfast and
been up and around for a while, it should be normal—98.6 degrees.
This temperature should be maintained until early evening when it
begins to drop to around 98 degrees. Any temperature reading below
these numbers indicates an underactive thyroid. When you’re on thy-
roid medication and your temperature normalizes without causing an
increase in the heart rate or pulse, you know you’re taking enough
medication to maintain normal thyroid function.
You can get an idea of whether foods depress your thyroid function by
taking your temperature a half hour after eating a single food and then one
hour after that. (This shouldn’t be confused with the pulse test.) A below-
normal temperature after eating a single food item is a pretty good indica-
tion of a food allerg y. Drinking three cups of tea caused my temperature to
fall by about one degree; after six cups of tea it dropped an additional degree.
When I drink only one cup of tea, my 98.5 temperature remains steady.
The basal thermometer test may be the best overall test for hypothy-
roidism, because it measures what is most critical—the amount of energy
generated inside the cell. However, there are other factors responsible
for slow thyroid activity that should be measured. Most medical doctors
rely solely on the TSH test to measure thyroid function. But you should
take the following thyroid tests because each one tests something differ-
ent: free T4, free T3, reverse T3, total T4, and total T3, as well as the
thyroglobulin antibodies (TGA) test.
A thyroid test doctors rarely give is the reverse T3, probably because
elevated reverse T3 is not a common cause of hypothyroidism. While
regular T3 tells the energy-producing mitochondria in the cells how
much energy to produce, reverse T3 blocks the regular T3 from enter-
ing the cells, with the result that energy production decreases.
The reverse T3 blocks energy production when there is too little
intake of food. Thus in times of famine when there is not enough glu-