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Tuesday 19 February 2013

Shoulder pain, your Thyroid and Soya

The food we eat has an enormous effect on our bodies. I see this in virtually every patient that walks into my office. I have recently been treating two clients for chronic shoulder pain. Shoulder problems are, speaking from my own experience, notoriously difficult to treat. The same was true for these two clients. In both cases, their pain had started without any particular reason. Treating them using massage and osteopathic manipulation had seen only minor improvements.

There had to be a deeper root cause.

When problems don't respond to physical treatment then if I am looking deeper the first place I look is the persons diet. There are certain foods that I know from experience have caused clients issues in the past. On questioning both these clients both were eating large amounts of soya. The man was having soya based protein powder shakes every morning and the woman had been consuming soya milk as she was intolerant to cows milk.

There is a lot of misinformation about the health benefits of soya.

The main benefit is that it has a positive effect on the incidence of breast cancer in the far east. It is true that there is less breast cancer in far eastern countries like Japan where they eat large amounts of soya, but they eat soya sauce. This is totally different in nature to the highly processed products that we see in the western world which is made primarily from highly toxic genetically modified soya beans.

So how is soya bad?

Soy contains a number of substances that are harmful to your body and in particular the thyroid. The thyroid is the gland found in the base of your neck that controls the rate at which you burn food. One of these substances is soya gluten which is similar in structure to the gluten we find in wheat. Wheat gluten has been shown in research to be linked to the thyroid autoimmune disease, Hashimoto's. This disease occurs when your body mistakes the proteins in your thyroid for the gluten protein and attacks it. Because soy gluten is similar in structure to wheat gluten so the same problem can arise if you eat too much soya.

With your thyroid under attack so this obviously has a negative effect on how well it works.

The medical term for a reduction in the function of your thyroid is hypothyroidism. The typical symptoms for someone with an under active thyroid include fatigue, weight gain, sensitivity to cold, numbness in the fingers, constipation, depression and muscle and aches and pains. Not all these symptoms need to present but the last one on the list is the most relevant for my two clients.

The exact mechanism as to why a person's shoulder should be effected can not be explained using western science.

However there is a connection when you look at at it from the practice of Chinese Acupuncture and Applied Kinesiology which connects different organs and glands to particular muscles. Your thyroid is associated to the Teres Minor muscle in your shoulder. So when the function of thyroid is reduced to this effects the strength of the muscle and so your shoulder is likely to develop a problem.

A simple answer to a chronic problem.

Suffice to say I duly advised both clients to remove soy and a few weeks later their shoulder pain was gone!

If you have been suffering from chronic pain which has been unresponsive to physical treatment then looking at your diet could be the next best step to finding an answer. Let me know if you have any questions or comments below.


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