19Jul 2012 by Marjorie 3 Comments

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

interactions
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…
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05Jul 2011 by Marjorie 10 Comments

Rx, OTC, diet-, and needle-based ways to treat hypothyroidism

symptoms and conditions, treatments
Last updated July 2022. Also see this post on how iron interferes with thyroid meds. It took me two years from the time I first suspected I had thyroid problems to get treated for it. I was very tired, had a weird, periodic hum in my body as if the ship's engine on "Star Trek" was running in the background, was unbelievably cold outside in the winter, and my hair felt like it had an electric current running through it. But my test results from my traditional doctors, who were only looking at TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone), always came back normal. When I read that ideally other markers should be looked at as well (e.g. T3, T4, etc.) I asked for those tests, but they, too, came back normal. (Here's…
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