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Welcome to the functional medicine and natural healing podcast when we share the secrets to upgrade your digestion, improve your hormones, restore your immune system and detoxify your body. I'm your host, Dr. Houston Anderson. Now let's get started. The following discussion is for educational purposes, it is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or disease process. always discuss medical treatments or medical interventions with your personal physician.
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Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Dr. Uz Anderson and today we're gonna talk about your fingernails. Okay, the first thing I want to talk about with your fingernails is if you have ridging, across your nails, and oftentimes it'll actually happen on your toes before it happens on your fingers, then maybe you have an iron deficiency. Okay, the other thing that you might want to think about, if you have longitudinal ridges or ridges that go the long way, you may have other various mineral deficiencies. So there's something to look into that. And just because you have a mineral deficient deficiency doesn't mean you should take a mineral supplement. That's one of my pet peeves, but we'll go over mineral supplements and other time nail bruises, can you like a white mark on the nail, that's all it is. But a zinc deficiency is where you're going to find lots of white marks on your nails. So there's a little bit of a nuance there of what you're really looking for. If you find that your nails are splitting, or they're peeling, oftentimes, you're a fatty acid person, right? Meaning that you have a fatty acid metabolism issue. And that fatty acid metabolism issue really comes down to like, where's your omega six, and Omega three balance, okay, that's the most important two that you're gonna worry about, it's going to have a lot to do with inflammation. If you have splitting nails, and you have inflammation, you can kind of like maybe assume you have some fatty acid metabolism issues or something to investigate, right? We're not going to go and diagnose ourselves just from our fingernails. Okay, let's talk about maybe you're having actually cut nails. And this is a pretty bad problem, because you may have some really bad anemia, you may actually have diabetes or blood sugar issue severe blood sugar, sugar issues, or you may not be having circulation. Okay, so this can happen to a lot of people. Let's say that your nails are red sore or splitting. Okay, I actually want to talk about this one really quick. If you have red sores on your hands or nails, you can assume that that's easy to start with. And treat it as such until you get better a lot of people come in to me with this problem. I'll have to do some pictures or something like that so people can understand. But it's really common for people have a yeast problem of the hands, no one thinks about that. They always think like, oh, I have a specific, you know, yeast infection of my gut, I have small intestine, fungal overgrowth, I have a yeast infection that women get all the time, right. So reproductive yeast infections, that kind of thing. But the hands are actually the most common sign and symptom. You'll also get them in the armpits, you'll also get under the neath the breasts line, you'll find a lot of places that have moisture, if you're someone that responds to, if you take a shower and you get redness, okay, and it seems to persist even for like an hour or two. That's enough to suggest that you probably have a yeast infection actually of your skin. Okay, so that's something there. And last, but not least, of course, is we're going to assess thyroid function. So your nails are a great indication of thyroid function. Obviously, you have your hair you can look at. And a note, you know, if your skin's bad, he's starting to look older than you should be, then that's often a thyroid dysfunction that you can pay attention to. If you have really good thyroid function, you should notice that each one of your nails has a good moon shaped kind of whiteness there that you can see, your nails should be nice and hard, you should be able to use them to open things up, they shouldn't be splitting. And then they shouldn't really like fold over really easy. One of the best ways to indicate maybe on your own obviously, this isn't a lab test, but we don't lab test everyday for thyroid function. If your life you're already taking a thyroid medication, then you want to just double check those moon shapes, right, make sure that over the course of time, if your doctor only runs a thyroid test once a year, maybe midway midway through the year, you can actually look at those and make sure that those aren't changing, make sure that you're able to maintain the shape of your nails. And that would be just another way to check your thyroid function. And hopefully I'll put some more information up on nails we're going to do it on YouTube, we're gonna do on our website. So if you haven't visited my website, Dr. Houston anderson.com or you haven't subscribed to my YouTube channel, I'm trying to get everyone to go to youtube so we can actually provide some more of this information with pictures to optimize your health. Do me a favor go to YouTube. It's actually youtube.com backslash functional medicine to go ahead and subscribe and we will see on the next episode.
