Hello Kibes, Read the many posts about levothyroxin and unacceptable side effects. You’ll get an earful.
Armour, worked pretty well initially. I was able to find a doctor who could help me get the dosage right. When it was a bit high, it caused anxiety. Though I didn’t know this was a side effect of thyroid meds, so I wasn’t looking for it. Armour had some additives that were triggering my immune system, so after about a year, I switched to Naturethroid. It worked fine until about 2013 when the formulations seemed to change. By then I’d moved and went to a new doc who refused to prescribe Armour.
The Levo was a nightmare from the start and seemed to trigger massive water retention, migraines so bad I feared I would have a stroke, I gained massive amounts of weight very rapidly and in three months went from a size XS blouse to an XL. When I went to the urgent care the doc was very concerned. When I followed up with an endo, she was zero help.
I found a gp who had been trained in Eastern Europe who was very good at dosing. But after two years, I couldn’t get the dose stable and was bedridden with broken bones caused by bone deterioration from the high doses of Levo. The Levo didn’t work at any dose and actually caused my previously stable thyroid cyst to more than double in size.
I then switched to an OTC bovine glandular. I was starting to feel better when I realized the formulation had changed and I was having an obvious wheat reaction. I was so ill from the wheat contamination that I quit cold turkey, which was horrible. I subtituted with high doses of essential amino acids and phenylalanine, which helped the worst of the symptoms. But I still gained more weight.
At that point I’d tried a dozed or so different meds. All of them had side effects, all had formulation changes, the prescription dose was less reliable than non prescription. The allowable variation in dosage is +/- 10% so you can get as much as a 20% variation between prescription lots.
All of these meds supress the pituitary’s production of TSH, which lowers your own production of thyroxin. So you have to keep going to higher doses.
I gave up on the meds. I feel they could be useful for short term protocol to help reboot the thyroid gland, or for longterm use only for persons who have no thyroid gland.
I did extensive research and my conclusion, in spite of my clearly advanced thyroid disease with many contributing factors, is that thyroid disease can be curbed substantially by improving nutrition. I found that essential amino acid supplementation is more effective than anything else at treating thyroid disease.
The other major contributing factor I found for myself is chronic pancreatitis, likely caused by sluggish gallbladder/liver. The low body temp from hypothyroid disease causes a huge liver/ gallbladder problem which can lead to pancreatitis. The chronic pancreatitis can result in every gut problem imaginable, resulting in malnutrition.
There are many other things I’ve done to improve my health, but I feel the combination of treating the chronic pancreatitis along with essential amino acids and high dose vitamin and mineral supplements have really helped. It took about 2.5 years since quitting the thyroid meds completely to start getting things on track. I also go regularly to acupuncture, which has been incredibly helpful. Keep in mind, by the time I quit the meds, I was bedridden and extremely sick form the meds, and still had to deal with the thyroid issues.
The good news is that, as I always thought, I just needed the right combo of things and I’d start dropping weight like a bomb. I’d been doing my swim workout for several months and was still gaining weight, so I kept going with the workouts and stopped weighing myself. I was delighted when last night I weighed myself and I’d lost 15 pounds! I feel so relieved and I feel like I’m finally on track to getting my health back! Woohoo!