I was recently interviewed by Diana Bowman on Thyroid Nation in a discussion about Hashimoto's disease and hypothyroidism
Diana : Hi everybody! Welcome to the third week, episode three, of Thyroid Nation Radio Talk Show Live and Podcast. I'm Diana Bowman, founder of thyroidnation.com.
Tiffany: And I'm Tiffany Mladinich [SP] of gratefulgarden.biz.
Diana: Also known as Diana and Tiffany, bringing you the voices of thyroid advocates, clinicians, bloggers and thyroid thrivers everywhere. In just a few minutes, we'll be talking live with Dr. Nikolas Hedberg [SP]. I know that, I for one, am really excited. We've had kind of a working relationship, Dr. Hedberg and I, over the last, I don't know, seven or eight months. I have lots of articles of his on my site, which are fabulous. Tiffany, I'm excited. Are you excited?
Tiffany: Yes, I am. I, for one, appreciate Dr. Hedberg's thorough and very easy to understand approach in his articles, and love the fact that he was drawn to functional medicine model because it leaves no stone upturned. Which so many of us need because there's so many different reasons, problems, and approaches, that no one should be treated as a lab test or in a cookie cutter kind of way. So really, really just so excited to talk to him. I love the fact that he offers his free Thyroid Ear course through his website, drhedberg.com. So it's amazing and I'm just so excited to talk to him. I truly enjoy reading his articles. They're very easy to understand and it doesn't surprise me at all that he's a regular speaker at integrative medicine conferences, and is also a consultant for other practitioners on very difficult cases. I'm excited to hear from him today.
Diana: Yeah, me too. I'm really excited.
Tiffany: I know you've got some exciting news, Diana, that you want to share with everyone first.
Diana: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If you guys tuned in last week, which I hope you did, you know we were talking to the fabulous Isabella Wentz [SP]. If you missed it, though, you can always go back to Blog Talk Radio or the Thyroid Nation Radio page, and scroll down and you can find it there and listen to it, because it was wonderful and she was fabulous. Also, she talked about an anti-inflammatory green smoothie on the show, and I went and I put it back in the notes on the Blog Talk Radio page. So if you feel like it and want to see that, you can log into Blog Talk Radio, find Thyroid Nation, follow us, and in the notes, you'll see the wonderful recipe that I put on there from Isabella.
Also, we celebrated our one year anniversary on the 22nd of February, which we never mentioned on the first show, which is why we chose that day, and we gave away great prizes. We had like $1,700 worth of prizes and we drew the names, 42 lucky winners. We're right in the process of collecting their email addresses and their mailing addresses and things. So they should be getting those and hopefully they'll take pictures and send them in. I think that'd be kind of cool to share, don't you?
Tiffany: I do.
Diana: Yeah?
Tiffany: Yeah, I do. I think that's very cool. We also want to thank our amazing Thyroid Nation Radio team of advisors, without whom this show would not be possible. They do so many amazing things behind the scenes that most people don't know, so very, very special thank you to Raina Kranz, Laura Scheunemann, Melissa Phipps, Blythe Clifford, Penny Jensen, Sarah Downing and Marissa Ravelo. You can read about all these amazing women and their thyroid survivor stories on the Thyroid Nation Radio website. Very cool, and thank you so much to all you ladies.
Diana: Amen. You really don't realize what goes on behind the scenes and even to put on a show like this, so we're really thankful to have them. Plus, they're there for support. As a thyroid patient, you, me, everybody out there listening, that's what all this is about, and the support they offer. They're so positive. They share and they're trying to spread the message.
Kind of like my husband mentioned, you know, posting the links and the pictures and things, it's how we find you guys. It's not like we're doing a TV commercial, so it's how we find you guys. They help post in all the different groups, Facebook and things. The support is just wonderful. So we couldn't do it without them. What's really cool is there's so many of them that if one's busy, or three or four of them are busy, and they can't help us one weekend, then the other ones can. So it's really grand and we thank them all for what they do behind the scenes. Surely, you'll hear from some of them coming up as co-hosts, so that would be cool. Okay. Let's get this Thyroid Nation thriving. Today, our guest, hopefully he's on the phone.
Tiffany: Yes, he is.
Diana: He's a board certified naturopathic physician. His name is Dr. Nikolas Hedberg. Among many of his credentials, he is a board certified nutritionist and chiropractic internist. He is the founder of the Immune Restoration Center in Asheville, Carolina - where some of my great friends live - where he helps people from all around the world suffering with a variety of chronic illness, including autoimmune and thyroid disorders. Welcome!
Tiffany: Hi, Dr. Hedberg. Thank you so much for joining us. Can you hear us all right?
Dr. Hedberg: Hi, Diana. Hi, Tiffany. Thanks for having me.
Tiffany: Hi, how are ya!
Diana: Welcome!
Dr. Hedberg: Great, great. It's a beautiful day in the mountains, mid 60s. It's been pretty cold here lately, so everybody's out and about today.
Diana: I bet they are. Because I have some friends - I think I mentioned to you in an email - that we met here in Costa Rica. We didn't know them before that and they wanted to move back to be closer to family. They chose Asheville for some of the schools that are there. They sent us a little video yesterday, or the day before, of them snowboarding in their backyard! So if it's 60 and sunny, a couple days ago they were snowboarding in their backyard, so I bet everybody is out and enjoying the day. Right?
Dr. Hedberg: Exactly. Yeah, it's really beautiful here in the spring, in the mountains. My wife and I, we're not really big fans of the winter.
Diana: Well, you're not snowboarding.
Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. No, not snowboarding. And you guys [inaudible 00:07:37].
Tiffany: What do you do for fun, Dr. Hedberg? We wanna know. We wanna know the real you. Tell us something.
Dr. Hedberg: I like camping, hiking around here. I'm actually a pretty big computer geek, so I teach myself computer programming. I taught myself how to build computers. So I do a lot of that stuff on the side, a lot of tinkering, a lot of programming and stuff like that. Obviously, I spend a lot of time reading health books, research, and stuff like that.
Diana: Yeah, your articles are really wonderful, and I really appreciate you sharing them and letting me share them with the world on Thyroid Nation.
Tiffany: They're so thorough! Totally!
Diana: Totally thorough articles.
Dr. Hedberg: Yeah, I mean there's so much information out there on the internet. It's kind of hard to wade through it all.
Tiffany: And so much of it is not true, or doesn't apply, or has special circumstances per person, right?
Dr. Hedberg: Right. The other thing that you'll find on the internet is these black-and-white type statements. You know, like, Synthroid is bad. It's bad for everybody, which is clearly not true. So you'll have a lot of [inaudible 00:09:02] out there.
Tiffany: I love this man already!
Diana: Yeah, really, we love you already. That's what Thyroid Nation is about. I know you know, Dr. Hedberg, but really, it is. It's about there's not just one answer. There isn't.
Tiffany: Not one answer.
Diana: No, because everybody's different. We're all made different, right? So you were interested in medicine from a young age. Tell us a little bit about how you got started and just a little bit about you, before we get into all these wonderful questions we have here.
Tiffany: And about your book coming up, so we wanna hear about that too.
Dr. Hedberg: I was about five or six when I really wanted to become a doctor. I was watching Little House On The Prairie. I don't know if you remember that show.
Tiffany: Of course, we do.
Diana: I do, yeah.
Dr. Hedberg: So you guys probably remember Dr. Baker, who was the small town physician who took care of everyone. I remember being five, watching that, and I just thought, "That's really what I want to do," and it just stuck from there. I even started reading health books when I was in elementary school, and did book reports on vitamin books and things like that when I was in middle school and high school. It's a real interest in health and helping people since I was a little kid. I got my undergraduate in exercise science. I was a bodybuilder for years when I was in college. So I studied a lot of nutrition, exercise, and then went down the road that I did, into functional medicine, naturopathic medicine.
Getting involved in thyroid is really just a result of seeing so many people who were on it, had thyroid problems. They were taking thyroid medication and it just wasn't working. I would do these health lectures around Asheville, and whenever I would give one on thyroid disorders, it was always packed. You know, standing room only. Whereas if I did one on, say, allergies or gluten or you name it, the crowds were always somewhat moderate. But thyroid, it was just a packed house because so many people with thyroid problems and they're just not getting the answers they need from conventional medicine.
Diana: It's crazy, isn't it? You know, it's funny that you mention bodybuilding because some of the best, most intricate articles that I've read on the thyroid have actually been on bodybuilding sites. It's where you're like, "that is so intensive.
