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The best way for you to find
your safe and effective dose of
Thyro-Gold—or
any other thyroid hormone product.
Aug.6, 2009
Q:
I ordered several bottles of HSF and it came in the mail today.
Before I start taking it, I have a question. I know from what you’ve
written in your books and on you website that I should not let my
family doctor use my TSH level to find my best dose. If I don’t use my TSH
level, how do I decide how much HSF to take?
Dr. Lowe:
The best way for you to find your safe and effective dosage of HSF (or any
other thyroid hormone product) is to systematically monitor
how you respond to
different daily doses. I recommend that you use both physiological measurements and estimates of the
severity of your symptoms. You should use these at least 2
or 3 times on each dose. By
doing so, and comparing the measurements and estimates on different
doses, it will be obvious to you which dose is right for you.
Many alternative clinicians ask their hypothyroid patients to use
their basal armpit temperature and their sense of well-being to
determine if they are on their optimum dosage. For the typical
patient, these are
indeed useful gauges of how his or her tissues are responding to a
particular dose of thyroid hormone. By comparison, the TSH
tells the patient how his or her pituitary gland is responding. But
it tells him or her nothing whatever about how the rest of his or her body is
responding.
I prefer that my patients use at least four physiological measures,
not just the temperature. The other three measures are the
patient’s basal pulse rate, basal blood pressure, and fasting body
weight.
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Thyro-GoldTM Each capsule
of dietary desiccated thyroid contains 300 mg of thyroid powder from
New Zealand pasture-fed cows. Each capsule also contains 25 mg of Coleus forskohlii (10% forskolin).
Thyro-GoldTM
is available in 90 capsule bottles. Compare this with RLC Labs Hypo Support Formula
(HSF). HSF provides 60 capsules per bottle for the same price as 90
capsules of Thyro-GoldTM.
Save even more by purchasing bottles
Thyro-GoldTM
that contain 180 capsules.
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Using these additional measurements is crucial if some patients
are going to find their right daily dose. For example, some patients’ low basal
temperatures increase very little; other patients' temperatures
don't increase at all. These patients' temperatures stay low even after they’ve
fully recovered with
thyroid hormone therapy. For them, seeing the basal heart rate rise
with higher doses denotes improved thyroid hormone regulation. And
some patients’ sense of well-being remains low because of one or
more persisting and troublesome symptoms; only after the patients reach a
high-enough dose of HSF to eliminate their symptoms does their sense
of well-being improve.
For an occasional patient, then, the temperature and sense of
well-being may not be good barometers of thyroid hormone-induced
change. Because of this, if you were a patient of mine,
I'd prefer that you watch two types of gauges as you move up
toward your optimal dose of HSF.
First, I'd ask you to use your basal armpit temperature, but I'd
also ask you to use three other
physiological measurements: your basal
heart
rate, basal blood pressure, and your fasting weight. Second, I'd
ask that you record estimates of your sense of well-being, but I'd
also ask you to estimate how
severe your predominant hypothyroid symptoms are.
With these two
sets of measurements you can quickly and easily monitor your
responses to different daily doses of HSF. When you reach the dose
that’s right for you, you'll subjectively feel good, but you'll also
have your monitoring record to verify in objective terms how much
you've improved.
Recovering your health by using these gauges is like a pilot flying
through the fog. With the help of gauges on the dashboard of his
plane, he can safely land right in the middle of a runway. If he doesn’t
use the gauges, he
and his plane may “land” perilously far from his intended target.
Hypothyroid
patients who wants to recover their health are in much the same
predicament: whether they do or don’t reach their therapeutic goal may well
depend on whether they avail themselves of relevant gauges that are
readily available to them.
A
Monitoring Form for
Recording Your Measurements |