Taking Synthroid medication

It's highly possible that what's going on with your thyroid is that your body is making too much of an inactive kind of thyroid called reverse T3. RT3 helps to protect us from famine by basically making us low thyroid...slows down the metabolism, turns down the thermostat, etc. So, in a normal situation, the brain produces TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) which tells the thyroid gland to produce T4, an inactive form of thyroid. It's called T4 because it has 4 iodine molecules on it. When the T4 goes into the cell, enzymes in the cell remove 1 iodine molecule and make T3. T3 is like the gasoline that regulates your temperature, metabolism, runs the engines. When you've been under stress for a long time, and your adrenals have been sending out lots of cortisol to deal with the stress, the cell "flips a switch" and makes Reverse T3 instead of regular T3. Because the RT3 is made during stress and is intended to protect you, the receptors in the cell will take the RT3 first instead of the T3. So, it's like you try to start your car and someone has broken off a Popsicle stick in the ignition; your key won't go in because the "key receptor" is blocked. As time goes on, you build up more and more RT3. Traditional doctors only measure the TSH, maybe T4. These can be perfectly normal and the person may still have large amounts of RT3 and be low thyroid. Treatment with Synthroid (T4) under these circumstances just causes the body to make even more RT3. This is why the more T4 / Synthroid/ Levoxyl you take, the more fatigued you may become and the more weight you may gain. To treat this condition requires taking T3 instead of T4. There is a commercially available kind of T3 called Cytomel, but it works quickly and is gone... you'd have to take it round the clock to really be effective. What we use at the Fibromyalgia & Fatigue Centera is compounded, bio-identical (same molecule as what your body makes), Time Release T3 (TRT3). This does 3 things: 1) gives you more T3 so you have a better chance of getting to use some of it, 2) reduces the amount of RT3 stored in the cells, and 3) stops the manufacture of RT3. (Note: this treatment will often cause the TSH to drop quite low; this can concern your regular physician; ask them to check your free T3). The TR T3 usually helps people feel much better, and sometimes eventually they are able to go off any type of thyroid all together. Sometimes people stay on it indefinitely and sometimes we go to a combination T3/T4. We get compounded T3 from ITC pharmacy. It costs about $40/month and because it comes from a compounding pharmacy, you pay up front and then try to get it reimbursed by your insurance. It's very important not to use just any compounding pharmacy... if not prepared properly, you can get way too much T3 or way too little. We’ve had people getting the TRT3 from other pharmacies wind up hospitalized because they got too much.