Hypothyroidism

Generic levothyroxine and Synthroid are required by FDA ruels to be interchangable, when it was first introduced there were some issues but they were resolved, that was in the 70's. With modern analytical equipment it's highly unlikely that Aynthroid and Levothyroxine are meaningfully differnet. Neither are made in the USA, virtually none of the small molecule pharmacuetical are made in teh USA anymore, that's been the case for 20 years. Armour is a mix of T3 and T4 derived from a natural source (porcine thryoid gland) so that's just straight different. Eurthyrox is marketed by Provell Pharmaceuticals, which is based outside of Philadelphia, but probably has is made in India or China as pretty much all generic drugs are made these days. It's also bioequivalent to Synthroid. It cna be purchased from Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs . Some doctors will swear that there is a differnece, but I've found doctors aren't good at drugs, that's why pharmcists exist, because Doctors are absolute shit at the prescription game. More on reddit.com

My main "side-effect" is I feel SO.MUCH.BETTER. I'm not falling asleep all the time (as a night owl that had mild bouts of insomnia doing this after my son was bored was crazy), I'm back to only needing about 6 hours of sleep to feel like a decent person. I was sleeping 10+ hours a day, oversleeping, and waking up tired when that was not me. It took me YEARS to get diagnosed but it was through a PCOS specialist. Typically those two conditions like to pair up with each other. It isn't as difficult to lose weight anymore and I'm no longer gaining a ridiculous amount AND my periods are relatively normal.

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Firstly, you have my sympathies, you really seem to have had an awful time with this! The severity of my problem totally pales in comparison but I'd like to tell you about my experience and hope I can help you firstly manage, then overcome your thyroid problem.

Many of my family on my Mum's side suffer from thyroid problems and I have suffered from hyperthyroidism for the past couple of years. I'll tell you my personal story below but I'm going to list the most relevant advice here before the TL:DR crowd quit reading my probably enormous post.

Thyroid problems are very complicated and are affected by a huge number of factors but the thing your doctor will not tell you (or at least none of my family's doctors have ever told them) is that by controlling your diet and removing as many stimulants as possible you can reduce the severity of your symptoms, sometime minimally, sometimes dramatically.

What I mean by removing stimulants is that you should do your sincere and very best to cut out all smoking, alcohol, caffeine, drugs, sugar and salt/iodine from your diet, for a month to begin with at least. Your thyroid manages the way your body uses energy, and all of these stimulants when consumed shock your system with a sudden injection of something which can cause your thyroid to overproduce or under produce hormone and generally put your system out of whack. The effect of salt is a little different but if you imagine your thyroid as a machine who's job it is to process the energy portion of your food, salt is the fuel that runs the machine so an excess of salt can still shock the machine.

Even if you want to stop reading here and disregard everything I'm saying because you'd prefer a drug based solution or because you think it'll be too hard to cut all that stuff out, just think has anyone ever made their health worse by cutting all this stuff out of their diet? You've really got nothing to lose and if you're 20k in debt already this advice as a treatment is basically free (you may have to start buying better dinners than frozen pizzas [full of salt] but other than that there's really no cost to it).

On top of that you do not necessarily have to cut all of this stuff out of your diet forever but if you cut it out completely for a few weeks and slowly reintroduce each type of a stimulant you can identify the ones that effect your health most severely and make a special effort to avoid them in particular.

I use what I call the 'poop test' when measuring the severity of the effect of a stimulant. That is, when I consume something alcoholic/sugary if I get the sudden urge to poop at any stage over the next half hour then I probably should avoid it in the future. What I found is that I can handle sugar in moderation and can still drink beer (but I've slowed my pace and don't drink more than two days a week) but when I have a cigarette or drink caffeine I'll feel an uncomfortable need to poop almost instantly (caffeine especially). I'm also finding over time that taking a stimulant with food, e.g. having a bowl of ice cream after a full homemade meal, can cancel out most of the negative effect. Also when I have a Coke from the cinema or McDonalds it doesn't seem to effect me at all when compared to Coke from a can or a bottle, possibly because it's made from concentrate.

My point is that you may not have to give up all of this stuff absolutely and for ever, but if you learn what effects you most severely you can get 90% of the benefit of a total stimulant free diet by just cutting out a few key things. Also going for a month without any of this stuff shows you just how easy it is to go without them when you wan to. I'm Irish and my social life revolves around drinking in the pub with other Irish people, but I've learned that I really don't need to drink alcohol to have a good time, and when I do drink now I only have to drink at half the pace as my friends to get just as drunk and the thyroid portion of my hangover is greatly reduced.

But if you're going to do a detox like this, just do it. Do not take shortcuts, do not control your diet all day and then eat half a tub of ice-cream in the evening as a reward for doing so well. You will inevitable lose a shit load of weight very quickly so try and increase your food intake but don't compromise on the no-stimulants rule. I lost about about 8 kilos (.10% of my normal weight) the second month I did it, but at the same time I felt clearer and fitter than I had before so it never got to a stage where I was worried.

Last off the three links below provide great diet tips so take a look for more details advice than I can give you.

http://www.gravesdiseasecure.com/hyperthyroidism_diet.html - Good advice on diet but I've also listed a few 'trap' foods below that you might not think of: White bread and pasta and both full of salt and sugar. Always go whole meal when you have the option. Fruit is good for you but is also very sugary so choose veg over fruit when you have the option. Also you appear to be from North America so watch out for bullshit labels on drinks like 'fruit cocktail', especially that Minute Maid shit, and juicing fresh fruit also lets puts the sugar in your system faster than just eating it as fruit. Avoid anything with caffeine and diet drinks containing aspertain.

Basically, learn to live on water until you get to the stage where you can try out different drinks and assess their effects on your system. This was the hardest thing for my as I loved drinking a can of Coke with my lunch every day. Now my drink of choice is tomato juice with pepper and a bit of Tobasco. Try it if you get a chance.

http://www.k-clements.fsnet.co.uk/thyroid.html - I have not tried any of the 'medicinal herbs' listed here and cannot attest to their effectiveness.

http://www.vitawise.com/hyperthyroid.htm - pay attention to the recommended foods on this site. Kale in particular is a great substitute for pasta that doesn't carry the same negative effects.

Also just a quick note on the medical side. The type of doctor you should be looking to see for diagnosis is an endocrinologist or hormone doctor. This type of doctor is the only type who can properly assess what type of problem you have with your thyroid and recommend the best treatment. The most common type of thyroid problem is Graves disease or a variant of Graves disease which is an autoimmune disease that basically means your thyroid does not 'know' how to function properly, and you ability to handle different stimulants can change month to month depending on your thyroid's 'mood'. If you have Graves disease it will take you much longer to figure out what stimulants effect you most at any specific time.

After that the next most common cause of a problem is a growth, and a growth can either be a cyst (which is removable but whatever caused the cyst can cause others) a nodule/goiter (which is what I have and is easily treatable) or cancer (which is the least likely outcome, especially if you're young) and it's treatability depends on all the shit that normally effects how treatable a cancer is. I'll reitterate though that no doctor has ever given good advice on diet to any of my family, they just seem to ignore it as a factor in treatment, but I can swear to you that after a week on the diet I recommend you will see the positive results are a clear as day and as I said, noone has ever made themselves sick by cutting sugar, caffine, cigarettes and alcahol out of their diet so you've nothing to lose.

Finally the worst case scenario for thyroid treatment is having your thyroid removed. If your thyroid has to be removed you will have to take thyroid hormones in pill form daily for the rest of your life, but the hormones you take in drug form are identical to the ones produced by your body and you can live a totally healthy normal life without a thyroid, provided you take your pills and presumably take care of your diet.

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This goes for hypothyriodism (I think that should be the word) too. Those symptoms are more similar to depression though, but also include the bowel problems. Others symptoms are unexplained weight gain, and if the condition is there somewhere in childhood, it can cause a child to grow slower (faster in case of hyperthyroidism), that also goes for whatever is supposed to grow during puberty. The others include lack of energy, both mental and physical, increased food cravings and being cold, among other things.

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