If iron interferes with your thyroid function or thyroid meds, you might need zinc

After I started taking the Armour Thyroid to treat hypothyroid symptoms — including that lovely one where your hair feels like there’s an electric current going through it — I quickly realized that the 50 mg of iron I was taking every day for my abysmally low ferritin levels was making things worse. (Armour is a prescription medication of desiccated pig thyroid, a type of preparation that has been used since the 1890s.) Even if I separated the doses by the requisite four hours or stopped taking the Armour altogether, I got more hypo-T symptoms — low mood, cold, fatigue, and insomnia.

Taking the Armour only fixed the symptoms to a certain point because of the low ferritin (which was at 6 for several years before any so-called health practitioner bothered to call my attention to it), but I couldn’t take iron to get rid of the rest of the symptoms or it would wipe out all the progress I’d made with the Armour. It was, I remember thinking every other day, like trying to get out of a parking spot in San Francisco on a Friday night — back an inch, hit the bumper, turn the wheel, forward an inch, hit the bumper.

Eventually I figured out that iron lowers zinc and a zinc deficiency can affect thyroid function. I took 50 mg of zinc for several months, then a little less for the rest of the year. After a few months, my mood no longer tanked when I ate dairy (oxalates in dairy will bind to zinc and hinder its absorption). It also solved the iron problem.

Sadly, I still couldn’t take as much Armour as I needed because my adrenals were trashed. Luckily, you can now find much better knowledge and guidance for these sorts of conundrums — see the Stop the Thyroid Madness website to start.

After 18 months on Armour I got sick of the whole thing and started calling acupuncturists all over the Eastern seaboard looking for someone with hardcore-enough training to do medical acupuncture on the thyroid. To my surprise I found someone 30 minutes away. After nine weeks and maybe 14 sessions with him, my test results came back within the newly revised, more accurate normal lab ranges. I stopped the Armour and haven’t felt any hypo-T symptoms since, knock on wood. My low zinc symptoms show up occasionally but they are unmistakably different from the lawdy!-my-thyroid symptoms — mostly low mood and $#@! irritability.