Given that it’s my job to investigate how to be healthy, you might think that I’ve come across a single magical key to finding balance, harmony, health, and longevity. And I’d love to tell you that after a blissful nine-hour sleep each and every night, I rise with the morning chorus of birds to perform an hour of yoga, followed by an hour of meditation.

While the answers to your woes may not come from your doctor or your thyroid hormone medication, you can still liberate yourself from the confines of standard prescription and regain influence on your Hashimoto's health care.

Nakazawa, an award-winning science journalist, was fascinated when her doctor went on to describe adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), a scientific breakthrough that demonstrates that kids who had experienced traumatic events in childhood often have lifelong recriminations from those traumas, including serious and chronic health disorders that can surface many years later.

I believe that my son and daughter saved my life. During this difficult period of my life, all I wanted to do was go home and be a mother to my children. Knowing how much they needed me, strengthened my resolve to claw my way back to them.

Back in what seems like another life, I was a busy single chick immersed in Manhattan's social scene. It was such a hectic lifestyle that when I woke up one morning with weakness in my legs and tingling in my hands, I initially figured it was a result of all the the long days and late nights and not MS.

Sure, Lucy doesn't know--at least not yet--that I can't go hiking with her when she's older because of my fibromyalgia. That sometimes holding her is incredibly painful because my hands and wrists hit a new level of pain and muscle spasms around the same time she turned 3 months old.

With my moves across different nations during my lifetime, what has surprised me is how disjointed and poor it can seem in some of the developed countries as well. The narrative that follows highlights my journey with my eventual diagnosis of Hypothyroidism, and various other related maladies. I hope that women from across the globe will benefit from the nuggets of information embedded in my experiences, and go on to make better, more informed decisions about their personal healthcare.