Originally Posted by
oscarjones
If the Dr. thinks you honestly have Hashimoto's then "watching" or "waiting" might be worse than taking action sooner than later. By action I mean with thyroid medication. In Hashimoto's even when measuring antibodies (after the administration of medication) the antibodies can be present for years even after you've counter attacked. Sometimes an aggressive course of action is required in order to get your thyroid stable, especially if you have Hashimoto's, and in my experience Dr.s tend to wait until labs stabilize before adjusting the dose of medication, which can take years, like I mentioned, and you'll just continue to suffer. I'd say chose a combination of dessicated thyroid (such as Armour or ERFA [patients with Hashi's are tending to see better results with this {contains both T3/T4 respectively}), and T3 (Cynomel Mexico or Cytomel USA, both are great brands) which will give you more things to play with while adjusting your dose.
I'd recommend checking for Adrenal apathy, through a saliva cortisol test (more accurate than blood), ferritin w/ TIBC, and an iodine loading test.
I'll explain Iron now (ferritin).
Iron deficiency is shown to reduce T4-T3 conversion rates, increase reverse T3, and block the thermogenic properties of thyroid hormones. Symptoms of low iron can be the same as adrenal fatigue (and may be adrenaline induced), anxiety, panic, uneven heart beats etc... These may already be present and be surprising when they worsen when a person is treating their hypothyroid condition.
Iron forms part of the mechanism that transports thyroid hormones into cells (as well as cortisol, but we'll get to adrenals in a minute), and can lead to the pooling of thyroid hormone in your blood while being metabolically hypo, which will skew Free T3 blood results. (This is part of the reason reverse T3 levels should be checked). This is a sort of thyroid resistance, and you can't just add more T3 to overcome it, you need to address the root problem.
You can measure your ferritin (storage iron) and if it's below 70 you may end up with an intolerance issue. It's kind of a "catch-22" because low thyroid makes it hard to hang onto iron and low iron makes it hard to treat thyroid. Now, here's where it gets really confusing, sometimes ferritin can be at a good level, yet there's still low iron in the body, and this is mainly because inflammation can cause false high's in ferritin.
Some notes on iron testing. If you're ferritin is in the 70-90 range, you should also check the saturation %, it should be between 35%-45% and any lower than 35% and you need more iron. (This can be done through a full iron panel, mentioned above). Iron serum should be at least 90. If your TIBC and UIBC are low, don't take too much iron, maybe 27mg daily, and as long as the % saturation and serum are good, you should be ok to treat thyroid.
Now for Adrenals.
Adrenal apathy can cause a decreased production of cortisol, and for many of the same reasons listed above, it's very much needed to treat thryoid properly. Cortisol functions as one of the "keys" for "using up" thyroid hormone and I recommended getting your cortisol levels tested through saliva because it's a more accurate way to testing. If you get it tested through blood you could have skewed results due to having higher levels of cortisol released right at the time of blood drawing (it is a stress hormone after all, and most people get slightly nervous while getting blood taken).
This is about as much as I will share at the time, but if you have any further questions please ask and I'd love to help you out with this.
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