Please help

Why was your mother's Armour thyroid reduced and not stopped altogether? Of course she is right that being untreated opens her up to the possibility of many diseases, heart problems being well documented. Why is she not rushing to take up your offer of private treatment? If she has had enough of arrogant doctors and haven't we all, you could buy Armour from USA. If you send me a PM I will send you the details. It will take about 2 weeks to arrive and I honestly think it is something you could and should do very quickly for her. Was she perfectly well before Armour was stopped? If so, she must remember those days and try to get them back, before it is too late. Obviously I cannot know how bad her heart problems are but starting again on Armour is her best chance.

She has tried almost every alternative medicine in the book, more than I can name, and she believes that they will make her better but she just keeps getting worse. She has been taking serrapeptase and CoQ10 for sevaral years along with countless others like thryocomplex etc. The doctors had to stop her armour completely because she refused to reduce her dose (she said she felt fine but the doctors said that her levels were so high she was at great risk of a heart attack).

As to why she keeps putting off my offer of private treatment I think it's because she doesn't trust me. She keeps telling me that I'm part of the mainstream and that I 'try to force her' to take regular medicine (I have NEVER done this to her, nor would I ever). The last time I got help for her was just after her 1st heart attack (she is now so ill she can't get help herself because she is so ill, confused and tired) I got a list of doctors from this website and called one of them. I was very upset because she had just discharged herself from hospital without treatment so I told the receptionist what had happened and asked to speak to the doctor immediately. The doctor couldn't have been kinder. He told my Mum that he would be happy to prescribe her armour or erfa but that that right then she had to let the doctors at the hospital treat her to prevent damage to her heart. He might as well have been speaking a foreign language because all she heard was 'let the doctors treat you' and she immediately refused to listen to him. When I asked her the next day if she was sure she wouldn't go back to the hospital even after what he had said she acused me of getting a normal doctor to try to trick her into taking conventional medicine. Consequently when ever I suggest trying to get help she just 'puts it off'. I don't want to buy her armour over the internet because I'm scared that if she has it she will take too much of it like she did last time. I don't want to be responsible for supplying her with drugs that could kill her. I have no idea what to do next.

Your Mum could well be right but it is really hard to know

Do you know what dosage she was taking of Armour because if her doctors were simply going on TSH they are likely to have been very very wrong as on Armout TSH can be undetectable but they mistake this for overtreatment

You could get armour or its equivalent online and monitor her taking them but only with very very low doses and increase very very very gradually ......its hard to know whether it will be good or bad given her current state though

You poor thing - it seems that you are between a rock and a hard place. As RFU said if they were basing their assumptions on TSH levels this may not have shown the true picture. I do not have enough knowledge to suggest anything else, except to send my love and thoughts and hope for a better outcome. XXXXXXXXX

She was ill before the armour from the doctor was stoppped. She stopped taking her insulin for her diabetes because an alternative doctor told her that she could try it and see what happened. This resulted in a stroke (not surprisingly) and she was lucky to recover so well. I know that she is taking some armour that she got over the internet before she became really ill but I'm not sure how much. She won't talk to me about her medication and when I ask her she lies to me sometimes then comes clean later. Since the stroke she gets confused easily and I'm not confident about her ability to take her medication correctly (I'm always picking up tablets that she's dropped without noticing) and she sometimes takes her tablets too often because she forgets that she's already had them. She prepares her tablets herself every morning and I don't touch them because when she has a bad day and has to ask me for help she watches me like a hawk, which is really upsetting because she obviously doesn't trust me at all. All I want is for her to realise that without the conventional medicine along side the armour she will die but she just keeps insisting that there's nothing wrong with her apart from the fact that she hasn't got her thyroid medication right. It's been 4 years and now she is so ill. Is she right? Or is she going to die?

Given the furthur info i suspect your mother has vascular dementia as a result of her stroke

and this creates her paranoia and quite honestly i think its far too late to interfere

i went through similar with my Mother and no amount of talking to her will help the condition varies so much from day to day and they are very clever at covering up etc

you just need to let her get on with it and detach yourself from the situation because otherwise you might get the blame if she overdoses

you have all my sympathy because i know just how difficult the kind of situation your dealing with can be

She's a;ready taking armour that you buy over the internet. I suspect she does have some degree of vascular dementia but she has no diagnosis because she won't let a doctor in the house.

This is really, really difficult. I would not advise buying Armour for her as if something happened you could face a manslaughter charge. I don't like to be so hard or negative but there's no point in risking two people's lives. As for her mistrust of conventional medicine Armour is truly conventional and has been for many decades. A lot of this is due to the bad attitude of many endocrinologists over many years.

It's really difficult to know to what extent your mother's cardiac problems has been due to inappropriate / insufficient thyroid medication or maybe too much. One would need to know her full history and signs and symptoms. In any event what has happened has happened, we now have to deal with the present. In which case there is the difficult task of dealing with her cardiac problems and getting good thyroid care. I'm really not sure how this can be done.

As regards her distress re conventional medicine no doubt previous thyroid care plays a part but also some of it is irrational. Whether this is due to her stroke, just aging or insufficient thyroid treatment is anyones guess.

The problem is that even if untreated hypothyroidism has played a part in her cardiac problem an elderly person or someone who has cardiac problems has to tred carefully with thyroid hormone. The best approach would be to take cardiac medication as advised and have the Armour with the dosage based on close monitoring of her response, signs and symptoms rather than blood tests. The prime problem we patients have is that many doctors just look at the blood tests and not the patient, they don't care about symptoms. I feel this solution would be the best way forward and it is consistent with the view of most of us patients.

I didn't realise it was illegal for me to get her armour if she overdosed herself accidentally. I just didn 't want to buy it because I didn't want to take the chance of making her worse. I am going to try again to get her to see a doctor from here. Hopefully they can get her to understand what she needs because I can't. I don't think her problems are curable anymore but hopefully they can stop her from deteriorating so quickly. (She has gone from an independent woman to someone who needs 24/7 care in under a year). She is moving in with me in a couple of months once we've bought a new house (with a downstairs bathroom) and had it made disabled friendly. Maybe she can be convinced to take the medication and live out her time in comfort instead of the hell that she is going through at the moment.

I believe your Mother is correct. She felt awful on levothyroxine (as I did) and when you find a thyroid hormone replacement which makes you feel well, why would you want to go back to one which does nothing for you.

The problem is that the guidelines of the British Thyroid Association make false statements about natural dessicated thyroid hormones (Armour, etc). Armour contains all the hormones we cannot now produce from our own thyroid and it is more synergystic to the human body than generic levothyroxine. They also state that only levothyroxine can be prescribed.

Levothyroxine also has had many more recalls due to inconsistencies.

I can fully understand your Mother refusing anything other than Armour as I felt worse on levothyroxine than before I was diagnosed and had many more clinical symptoms. I wont take levo again - ever.

I am not sure if your Mother's health can be restored but it is worth a try. If you post another question asking where Armour can be obtained, someone will send you a private message if you want to go down the self-medicating route. Some Endocrinologists might prescribe Armour but they are few and far between.

There is also a list of private doctors who may prescribe and if you email louise.warvill@thyroiduk.org there may be one near you.

This was sent to the British Thyroid Association and the Royal College of Physicians and ignored despite 3 requests from Dr Lowe who has since died.

thyroidscience.com/Criticis...

You have had many replies and your head must be spinning but this is an excerpt from Dr Lowe who was against adjusting medication according to the TSH alone. He said it had a bad effect on our metabolism. I now believe Dr Toft has changed slightly his viewpoint on the TSH.

This is an excerpt:-

A study by Fraser,[44] for example, showed that the TSH and free T4 tests—which Guttler uses—are in fact highly fallible. Fraser studied patients on T4-replacement. Of 108 patients who were free from hypothyroid symptoms—and any signs of overstimulation—53 (49%) had TSH levels below the lower end of the reference range. This was a TSH level that thyroid specialists such as Dr. Anthony Toft have falsely designated a "thyrotoxic" level.[47,p.91]

The endocrinology specialty has intimidated most conventional doctors into accepting without question Toft’s false designation. As a result, most doctors would have had Fraser’s patients—who were free from hypothyroid symptoms but had low TSH levels—reduce their T4 dosages. Of course, this would have raised the patients’ TSH levels. And most likely, it would have caused them to begin suffering again from hypothyroid symptoms.

Most conventional doctors also accept without question dogmatic pronouncements, such as Guttler’s, that patients cannot have hypothyroid symptoms when their TSH levels are "normal." Because of this, conventional doctors would blame the new hypothyroid symptoms of Fraser’s patients on mysterious new diseases, like "fibromyalgia" (see Addendum 1) and "chronic fatigue syndrome."[23][24][25]

web.archive.org/web/2010103...

Refer to answer dated April 5, 2009

web.archive.org/web/2010103...

Maybe if a very low dose of Armour is physically presented to her she may take it (need to start low if off medication). Love xxx