[quote]tcataz wrote:
Bill Roberts
- My doctor mentioned upping my thyroid meds but wanted me to try Androgel to see if that improved any of my symptoms.
- I should look into upping the dose? or will more iodine help with that?
- I am going to a TRT clinic on Wednesday I could have them test T3 and T4. My Dr. just did not test them last time to cut back on cost
4)I don’t use hardly any salt currently, don’t really like it. BUT I will start adding it in. That is a reason I was looking at the tablets. The dosage level was because in the Thyroid Basic sticky it says from IR use 50 mg. Will Potassium Iodide work the same as Iodine?
You mention a current blood test. I had one on 3/18/15 should I take a more currently then that or should I wait for a few week until I have upped my iodine levels? Is TRT something I should look into?[/quote]
I was thinking your posted, older blood test was the latest but indeed you said you had one recently. That’s recent enough to be meaningful, if it’s at least a few weeks after your most recent dosage change.
On iodine, if eggs, saltwater fish, potatoes including skin, turkey, and dairy don’t make up a pretty big part of your diet and you don’t use iodized salt or take a supplement, almost certainly you’ll be iodine deficient and that alone could explain your thyroid problem.
If you increase your levothyroxine dose much, then your thyroid is unlikely to regain natural production as it will be suppressed by the added levothyroxine.
At your present dose, recovery of natural production could occur once correcting your iodine intake. So, because it sounds very likely that you were deficient, I’d want to correct that first and then see if the direction could be discontinuing the levothyroxine, or at least not increasing it.
It is worth testing for free T3; necessary really for a good picture of what’s going on (the closest single measurement you can get to the biological activity.)
Potassium iodide is fine as a supplemental source of iodine. Just be careful on the dosage as there are some extreme high-dose products out there, as with some iodine products also.