(Part 2) Top products from r/Hypothyroidism

(I'm going to copy and paste my response to another person who asked similar questions...)

You need to find a doctor that will prescribe an NDT like Armour. Endos can't/won't prescribe NDTs, only synthetics that don't work for the majority of thyroid patients (and studies have already proven this). Usually, primary care doctors or integrative/functional medicine doctors will prescribe NDTs like Armour, but endos won't/can't.

I wasted about a year on levo (and also included Cytomel) until I found a doctor who would prescribe an NDT. I had to leave my endo and then I found a new doctor at an integrative/functional medicine clinic that would prescribe Armour. A little while later, I discovered my primary care doctor was willing to prescribe Armour so now that's how I get it now. I haven't seen an endo in years. My mom had to do the same thing, as have countless people that I know because endos won't prescribe NDTs.

Check out Stop the Thyroid Madness and Hypothyroid Mom if you haven't already. They both also have Facebook (StTM Facebook and HM Facebook) and YouTube pages (StTM YouTube) that you should check out. They're both wonderful sources of information and I believe they will really help you.

If you like to read, definitely read the two STTM books (These books are amazing and I learned a lot from them.):

• Stop the Thyroid Madness: A Patient Revolution Against Decades of Inferior Treatment by Janie A. Bowthorpe
  
  
• Stop the Thyroid Madness II: How Thyroid Experts Are Challenging Ineffective Treatments and Improving the Lives of Patients by Andrew Heyman (Author), James Yang (Author), Janie A. Bowthorpe (Editor)
  
  Here is a clip from a study proving NDTs work better than synthetics...
  
  "Participants were “blinded” during both phases – they did not know the type of pill they received. After each treatment period patients were weighed, had blood tests, underwent psychometric testing and were asked which therapy they preferred. The researchers report that 49% of the patients preferred desiccated thyroid extract, 19% preferred levothyroxine and 23% had no preference. Desiccated thyroid extract use was also associated with more weight loss." - Summaries for Patients from Clinical Thyroidology (from recent articles in Clinical Thyroidology): Desiccated thyroid extract vs Levothyroxine in the treatment of hypothyroidism
  
  Here are a few quick links I found that I believe will help...
  
  Links About NDTs (naturally dissected thyroid) vs Synthetics
  
  
• Thyroid.org: Summaries for Patients from Clinical Thyroidology (from recent articles in Clinical Thyroidology): Desiccated thyroid extract vs Levothyroxine in the treatment of hypothyroidism
  
  
• STTM: T4-only meds like Synthroid do NOT work, exclaim patients!
  
  
• STTM: Natural Thyroid 101
  
  
• Jeffrey Dach MD: Why Natural Thyroid is Better than Synthetic
  
  
• Amy Myers MD: Which Thyroid Medication is Best?
  
  
• Hypothyroid Mom: Which is Better, Synthroid or Armour Thyroid Medication
  
  
• OP-ED News: New Study Shows Natural Thyroid Better than Synthetic
  
  
• STTM: Transitioning from T3-only to natural desiccated thyroid…or vice versa
  
  
• STTM: History of desiccated thyroid as a grandfathered in, yet “unapproved” drug
  
  Links About Doctors
  
  
• STTM: How to Find a Good Doctor
  
  
• STTM: Doctors Need to Rethink
  
  
• Hypothyroid Mom: 5 reasons conventional doctors can’t fix your thyroid
  
  Links About Thyroid-Related Tests
  
  
• STTM: Recommended Labwork
  
  
• STTM: TSH – Why It’s Useless
  
  
• STTM: Optimal Lab Values–how to interpret your results

Do you mean your TSH was 80.56? Or T4 was 80.56?

TSH is Thyroid Stimulating Hormone. It is released by the pituitary gland to tell the thyroid to release more thyroid hormones. If TSH is high, that is like your pituitary glad screaming at your unresponsive thyroid, so no surprise that your thyroid hormone levels were also low. That usually indicates that you need to increase your dose.

I have Hashi's and I take 146 ish mg of NatureThroid along with Hyperbiotics PRO-15 Advanced probiotics, B-complex with coenzymes, Iron, Magnesium, Omega 3-6-9, Selenium and D3-5000IU. I have tried to reduce the number of supplements I take but they all help. I sometimes take Zinc as well. I quit coffee and take caffeine pills instead and I am (not super strictly, but working on it) gluten and soy free.

The first time I took Nature Throid after switching from generic levothyroxine all of my symptoms were about 80% GONE. We increased my dose from 1/4 grain to the current 2+1/4 grain over the course of maybe 6 months.

What really fixed things for me was going gluten and soy free and adding magnesium and selenium. The selenium reduced my antibodies from nearly 500 to 100 in six months. That alone made a huge difference. And going gluten/soy free allowed me to lose 20 lbs in a month and then maintain it pretty easily just logging my calories.

Occasionally, due to poor planning, I eat regular bread or some pizza and I am sapped of energy and achy for a week afterwards. I'm working on getting into the habit of always having gluten free options on hand. But generally speaking, I feel better than I've felt my entire life.

I've never heard of having an immune response to desiccated thyroid. I've done very well on Nature Throid. You may want to get labs done every 6 weeks to check your levels and adjust your dose as needed.

So this is scary but you are no different than you were yesterday. You could have had this building up for years and now finally the test dinged in a positive. Now you have the opportunity to make a difference. The disease is annoying but I find getting good care is the difficult part. Because everyone's body is different care really varies from person to person. You really need to just take one day at a time, read, ask questions. I have a friend who was able to get off medication and there are other people online that discuss what lifestyle changes they have made that have helped.

Everyone has different approaches. Some people just take their pills and do their thing, some people read a bunch of books and incorporate advice, some people seek specialized care, some people change their diets, others their lifestyles. There isn't one way to do it and depending on what is going on with you what you need is going to be different.

My example: When I first eliminated foods like gluten I was pretty bummed out. Time moved on and for me it turned out I have several foods causing me problems. For example both gluten and milk causes my immune system to go off. I was just like "WHY ME?!", "THIS IS STUPID!" ... etc At some point though I tried those foods again after taking them out of my diet for a while and I could feel the headaches, the joint pain, constipations... etc. Once I could associate pain with the foods it became way easier to not eat the things I react to. I found lots of other yummy stuff to eat. Now with only changing my diet (working with my doctor) I actually lost a lot of weight and am in far better health in my 30s than i was in my 20s.

So all Im trying to say is... yes its scary but knowing can be really good because now you can get the tools to feel better (if you want to).

The books that really helped me are:

• Living Well with Hypothyroidism
  
  
• [Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms? when My Lab Tests Are Normal] (http://www.amazon.com/Still-Thyroid-Symptoms-Tests-Normal/dp/0985690402/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458323607&sr=8-1&keywords=why+do+i+still+have+thyroid+symptoms+when+my+lab+tests+are+normal)
  
  
• Why Isn't My Brain Working?

When I first started tracking my heart rate, resting HR was around 75. (I'm mid 30s female, thin, but not really athletic. I just walk for exercise.)


Anyway, I started reading a book on diet called How Not to Die and it inspired me to eat better. I already didn't eat too badly, but I cut out meat and started eating way more veggies. My resting heart rate dropped down to 60 after a couple weeks of eating like this!! It blew my mind.


Another fun heart rate incident: my SO and I had to babysit a friend's kid for a month last year, and going back over my HR statistics, I noticed there was a sharp spike that whole month. I certainly didn't feel like I was more stressed, but my HR showed something else. I find it all very fascinating!


I'm 5 months pregnant now, so my heart rate is back up in the 70s, but a rise in HR is normal during pregnancy, so I'm not too worried about it. As far as I know, having a resting HR in the 60s is nothing to worry about.

No need to appologize! We are all, ah, "a mess." It's the human condition. :) Also these mental health issues doctors love to slap on us are just clouds of symptoms they parcel out for treatment purposes. They are not what makes us, and they certainly aren't as separate from each other as we might think. Well let us look at the things you can change:

• Exercise: You certainly need to move more. It will help your mental health and physical health. I also manage PTSD, depression, anxiety, and ADHD as well as hypothyroidism. Not working out makes everything ten times worse and makes me feel awful. It isn't a cure but it does help me center myself and can be a sort of active meditation. Without it, there is no outlet for my anxiety and my ADHD becomes so intense I cannot concentrate for the life of me. I have found getting a fitbit that reminds me to move every hour helps me get up and stretch during the work day. I have a desk job so I understand. If you are a college student, might your college have a rec center included with your tuition? I would look into it. If not, Planet Fitness is $10 a month, air conditioned, often open 24/7, and totally worth it. I go at night to avoid crowds and because my work schedule is pretty different than most. Even just walking for 30-45 minutes a day you will feel better.
  
  
• Diet: Carbs are fine, they are just calorie dense. A weight loss diet is based on calories in vs calories out, and your body doesn't care too much where they are from. Getting an app that helps you count calories is great. For example, I am 5'2" and without activity my baseline calorie need is about 1400-1500 calories. To lose weight, I have to eat at a deficit and eat about 1100-1200 calories a day. When I work out I can add another 100-150 calories or so. Your doctor can help calculate what deficit you should be eating at. If your thyroid is under treated, it will take a higher deficit. The closer you get to your target weight the harder it will be. I am bout 10 lbs from my target so it's exceptionally hard for me to get there right now >_>.
  
  
• Medication: this takes forever to get right. I am sorry to hear metaformin did this to you. I know a lot of women that it helped with their PCOS and when/if you ever want children it might help you overcome fertility issues and be worth the side effects. Certainly it is not for every day with you if it gives you digestive issues. Also, what is your current thyroid treatment getting your levels to? Are you sure you are in the right range for you?
  
  
• Mindfulness: Just throwing this out here, but there is scientific, practice based evidence that mindfulness meditation helps people suffering from depression, anxiety, and ADHD manage their symptoms. Doing guided meditations may seem frustrating at first, but if you stick with it it could help you. It is certainly a good self care practice. Simply taking time for you and your needs every day is well worth it.
  
  
• Therapy. A good course of CBT or DBT therapy administered by a professional can help you restructure your current thinking pattern into a more productive, less self defeating pattern. If you want to try a work book first, there are many on amazon. It is something you need to be consistent with, however, and decide you want to try. If you are reluctant at all to try therapy it will not work. I found myself in a bad place, and at a breaking point I made the decision to put my ego aside and get help. There is a stigma in this country/society that really should not exist. A lot of depression and anxiety can be managed better by therapy, but people would rather just turn to a pill. However, a pill does nothing to treat our self destructive thinking patterns and medicine is not advanced enough to really have the answers. Good treatment often requires you to do the work (but the drugs can help you while you do that work) and challenge yourself. A good therapist is worth their weight in gold.

Thyroid patients could be divided into three categories:

1. Still have their thyroid, newly diagnosed, and wanting to try natural options, such as diet, to improve thyroid function.
   
2. Diet may or may not have helped. Need information about medication options.
   
3. No thyroid--already had a thyroidectomy or RAI, for whatever reason: Graves', goiter, cancer, etc. Need information about full replacement dose options.
   
   These are radically different scenarios, and the sidebar should be broken into these 3 (or is 2 part of 3?) sections, with books and websites or other links that could help. The sidebar now only pertains to scenario 1.
   
   I am scenario 3: RAI for Graves', which is why I find the Tired Thyroid book and website helpful. It's about trying to find your optimal dose on medication, because dosing by TSH simply doesn't work. The book debunks a lot of other thyroid myths too. Both the book and website reference numerous legitimate medical studies, so it can be shared with your doctor.
   
   You, campassi, are Scenario 1, so you push diet. I would like to see book recommendations, in case I wanted to do more reading on the topic. There are a LOT of thyroid books with words in the title like Healing or Curing or Healthy or Diet, but which ones are good, and which are garbage? There's SO much poorly written garbage out there! Nearly every book has a 4-5 star review, so even reviews aren't helpful, unless I read the 1-star reviews!
   
   Anyway, just some thoughts. Hopefully others will add to this.

I've been eating more vegetables and less meat. Vegetables aren't usually too calorie dense, meaning you can eat more of them. And I pair them with things like rice, polenta, pasta and eggs.

Roasting veggies is an easy and tasty way to prepare them. Just toss them around with some olive oil, salt and pepper, bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes and stir them halfway through.

I got this book at a thrift store and it has so many awesome recipes in it that are pretty simple to make. I've honestly got at least a dozen and a half things bookmarked in it.

Not that meatless always equals healthy, but I find that I can stay within my calorie budget and eat until I'm full when I eat vegetable-based main dishes. And if you like spicy, try Korean or Thai recipes! I thought I could handle spicy until I had tokbokki (rice cakes in a hot pepper sauce) and I thought I was gonna die after my first bite.

But at the end of the day, it comes down to calorie counting. I keep a food journal and weigh out my food portions with a kitchen scale in order to not overeat and it does work, but it'll still be slow.

Hope that helps a bit!

Electrolyte water can help you hydrate more efficiently. This one is fabulous.

I can echo this. Some doctors will tell you that any levels below 2.5-3.0 for TSH is fine. But more recent research points to levels needing to be near 1.0. My TSH was at 2.5 this summer when I got pregnant and I ended up miscarrying at 7 weeks. Was it because of my hypothyroidism (Hashimotos)? We will never know because no doctor thought to test my TSH levels at the time of the miscarriage. Since then, this book was recommended to me: Your Healthy Pregnancy with Thyroid Disease I strongly suggest reading this book for all of the information but also for its ability to empower the reader to be a self-advocate in the doctor's office.

>There is the additional complication of people believing that whatever is newest is best

That belief is carefully nurtured in advertising, in order to maximise profits. As Dr Marcia Angell (former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine) states in her book The Truth About the Drug Companies, new drugs' effect results are tested against control groups taking a placebo. In other words, the new drugs are compared to nothing, and the drug they are intended to replace is ignored. An older drug could potentially have a more substantial effect, but that data is not profitable to the drug companies. Thus in many cases it is simply not gathered in order to avoid inconvenient, non-profitable information being generated.

As for natural therapies which may slower, but more effective and less toxic, the pharmaceutical companies' preference is to not even approve research funding at all. As well as not spending vast amounts on something that can't be patented, there's the added advantage of being able to cast doubt on it by using the weasel-word "unproven".

mmm You could just stay on your medication and in a couple of months try to get out of it, to see if treating your thyroid made any difference. Either way, I made a mistake in my previous comment. If you've been on adderrall for a while (or any other type of psychiatric medication) it's extremely hard to get off of them, because they change the chemistry in your brain. So if you manage to get out of them, it'll be a slow process. Have you heard of dr. Kelly Brogan? If you're interested in getting off your medication, she's an invaluable resource. This interview should give you an idea of what she's about and if that route interests you. She has an excellent book called "A Mind of your Own" on the subject.

Edit: I forgot to say: if you've been on psychiatric medication for a while and you try to cold turkey get off of them, you can't really know if you actually need them. The symptoms you're gonna get from trying to get off are very likely to be withdraw. Remember, these medications are so addictive people have to tapper off by 1/1000 sometimes. So don't judge the experience you've had by the symptoms you got by trying to quit it cold turkey. Kelly Brogan talks a lot about this problem. And traditional psychiatrists very often use this phenomena as trying to tell patients that they really needed the medication, when that might not be the case.

Be careful with supplements in general with Thyroid Disease. I have learned its all about consistency with the workouts, be real careful with supplements like fat burners as they can effect your blood work / etc. Also check out a book about https://www.amazon.com/Thyroid-Diet-Revolution-Metabolism-Lasting/dp/0061987476 your thyroid and eating.

Page 2, he actually says the upper arm but I can feel it inside my elbow too.

http://www.amazon.com/Hypothyroidism-Type-2-The-Epidemic/dp/0975262408

There are illustrations.

situps maybe? Walks?

you may be able to smart small and build it up. regardless you should be able to meditate. Perhaps going off the zoloft then adding in 30 minutes of meditation will offset your hypothyroid symptoms enough that you can work out again.

I had an awful experience with that ssri, and ssris in general. If you're the kind of depressed person who feels super fatigued all the time, I think they can basically make it worse. allegedly zoloft is supposed to be slightly more stimulating than the others but they're all kind of iffy compared to the way I started feeling when I started a daily workout/meditation routine. YMMV

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Connections-Uncovering-Depression-Unexpected/dp/163286830X

Stop, I'm blushing. :)

There is SO MUCH alt-thyroid crap science. I understand why-- the standard medical treatment does not address the autoimmune aspect of thyroid disease at all, which is just stupid given what we know about the effects of autoimmunity. It often doesn't relieve symptoms. Many doctors are misinformed or disagree (several of mine explicitly told me certain things were not thyroid symptoms, even if they were listed on the Mayo Clinic website as such). People who are suffering look for cures and are willing to experiment on themselves. Self-experimentation is subject to confirmation bias, the placebo effect, and all kinds of other problems. But it's all there is for a lot of us. I'm as guilty as the next person of rubbing glutathione cream on the bottoms of my feet and hoping for the best. It just didn't get me anywhere. It helps that I'm married to an evolutionary biologist (little-known fact: skepticism is sexually transmitted)!

If you like the science without the speculation, I recommend the Harvard Medical School Guide to Overcoming Thyroid Problems. It covers autoimmune and non-autoimmune thyroid problems, thyroid cancers and nodules, etc.