Dr. Saira Hameed

It might be December and you're wearing a T-shirt.

You can become very agitated, very anxious.

Your heart rate speeds up.

A wealth of symptoms and people feel very, very unwell.

That's one of the more dramatic presentations in endocrinology.

And the second part of that is we always say if there's too much hormone, the treatment is useless.

You suppress it.

And we have ways of doing that.

Situation two is a gland fails for some reason.

So it stops producing the hormone it should produce or can't produce it in sufficient quantities for that hormone to carry the message to the target cells efficiently.

So if we stick with the thyroid, the opposite scenario to the one I just described is hypothyroidism or an underactive thyroid, sometimes called Hashimoto's.

And the thyroid loses its ability to produce thyroid hormone.

And then we see the opposite symptoms to the ones we just went into.

Metabolism slows down.

you put on weight.

You're feeling very, very cold.

You can feel very tired, very depressed, very unmotivated to do anything.

And the second part of that paradigm is we say if there's too little hormone, you give it back.

So too much hormone, you suppress it.

Too little hormone, you give it back.