I always wondered why I needed to be dosed with levothyroxine so my T4 was slightly above range for me even to be able to function. This article explains why:
In a nutshell, the thyroid doesn't secrete 20% T3 and 80% T4, that is an AVERAGE which is meaningless given the wide spread of the individual results making up the data.
In this study (Pilo, 1990), T3 secretion by the thyroid ranged from 6.5% T3 from the thyroid gland to 42%!!
Yet it is the average that is always quoted.
I must be at the 42% T3 produced by the thyroid end of this range. This is borne out by my being homozygous for one of the DI01 gene mutations and heterozygous for another.
There are lots of other articles written by Tania Sona Smith that I find insightful and fascinating.
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BB001
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Thankyou for posting this BB001. It made me feel much more confident about not fitting the 'norm'
Just had a quick look at Pilo's study.
(Wow, a whole 14! people, )
It's so frustrating when partial results are quoted in 'evidence' and then thrown around for years later without anybody else looking at the 'small print'. Especially when the small print is making a different point altogether .
I look forward to reading this properly (when more awake !)
So..... i looked again today with the aid of a working brain ........
Not only is the original Pilo study only looking at 14 subjects........... it gets worse...................
Only 5 ! of them are Female !!!.
"Brilliant" thinks the world of 'evidence based medicine'....... lets use this study (after ignoring the messy FT3 bits we don't understand) to set rules to medicate the entire 1% (min) of the female population of the whole planet who have dodgy thyroids/ no thyroids, and/ or an autoimmune disease we haven't even begun to understand yet ........
Well, what can i say...........
When i found my (5 in 17 yrs -lucky me!) NSH FT3 's of between 4.5 and 5.2 , I did think they rather undermined any strong argument i may have to be given T3/NDT in addition to my LT4 to try and improve my function............ However now i see the strength of evidence that they are using to prove 'normality', and that, out of the 14 'healthy' subjects used here, plenty of them had personal FT3 ranges up toward the 5-6 level,..........i now feel more confident that my argument is better than theirs.
Not yet ., i'm saving that treat for another day. I got sidetracked into watching the link to our friend the lovely John Midgley , at the Scottish parliament hearing !.
that's weird , i just linked your post in a reply to someone else. but its my first time linking anything !... so now i'm confused. + its past my bedtime and i shouldn't be in charge of a keyboard at this hour!
But assuming you mean link to Midgley thing ? it was on tania' s page in your link, sort of top right hand side , video clip........ sorry if thats no help at all .
Thank you. I forgot (lol) that midgeley's video was on there. I thought at the time, that's interesting I'll have a look. You can guess what happened next!
Thyroid therapy is a game of numbers. When medicine tries to replace a flexible gland with a static pill, people’s health and well being are based on precise microgram doses, lab reference ranges, and theoretical concepts like ratios.
This statement is so true ....I've been pretty much saying this since the day they destroyed my health with a thyroidectomy in 2016.
Every Endo I've seen over the years tells me your on the right "dose" the labs say so no consideration for existing health problems, medications or anything only that the lab reference ranges count....infuriates me that the thyroidless person is medicated the same as someone with a thyroid, we are not the same and we will never be the same. This article talked alot about thyroidless people.
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