Holiday in Qatar NDT or Levo?

[Congirl]

Visiting relatives in Qatar for a week and wondered if I would be allowed to take my Nature throid. I do not have a prescription. Am thinking maybe I should go back on Levo for the week, although I was not converting. I was on 50mcg levo and now on 2 grains of nature throid. Should I increase the dose of the levo from 50mcg? Any advice appreciated.

[Clutter]

Rosw,

You could check with the Qatari embassy. Alternatively, take 7 days worth of NDT in the original NDT packaging plus Levothyroxine in case the NDT is confiscated.

[helvella Administrator]

Do remember that desiccated thyroid, at least the prescription-quality makes, is porcine. That would be very unpopular with many Muslims. So, make sure that even if customs (or whoever) ferret around, they will not come into personal contact with the tablets.

(There are some Muslims who are perfectly comfortable with desiccated porcine thyroid and even a few who take it themselves. Attitudes do vary.)

[Congirl]

Thank you Clutter and helvella. I think I will go without the NDT for 7 days and return to taking the levo. Don't know whether to up the 50mcg, may up it to 75mcg. Now I have been self medicating on NDT not as worried about upping the dose.

[helvella Administrator in reply to Congirl]

Two grains of desiccated thyroid should be an awful lot more than 50 micrograms of levothyroxine!

Using 38 micrograms of T4 and 9 micrograms of T3 in a single grain we get:

76 T4 + 18 T3

If we use, say, the idea that one microgram of T3 might be something like equivalent to three micrograms of T4, that works out as 76 + ( 3 * 18 ) = 103.

[Have just edited the line above because I made a mistake. Hopefully now corrected!]

But if we use a common suggestion that one grain of desiccated thyroid is equivalent to about 75 micrograms of levothyroxine, we get to 150 micrograms of levothyroxine.

I don't want you to travel and end up very under-dosed.

[Congirl]

Thanks helvella, that makes sense, but I was wondering if I am a poor converter would taking a larger amount of levo make any difference to the uptake of T3?

[Glynisrose]

My sister regularly goes abroad and has never had a problem with her meds, she takes NDT the same as me.

[Congirl in reply to Glynisrose]

Thank you, I may just take enough like Clutter suggested in case it is confiscated.