Well I finally managed to have a face to face this morning at my surgery. It was with a new doctor who I have never seen before. She seemed very nice and did seem to be sympathetic to my worries over my hypothyroidism but seemed to want to keep the TSH is king theory and how they can tell eveything they need to know just from that one test!She had heard about Metformin suppressing TSH but was of the not really accepted at the moment camp.I did ask for the full thyroid panel and for the vitamin, folate and ferritin panel as suggested on here and she has order some bloods to be done but I am not 100% sure what I am going to get until I go to the hospital nect Tuesday.
I do feel as I may have a battle on my hands to really get the treatment I am hoping for.
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Dadof5
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Ignore her instruction to take levo before blood tests until you are sure she has read (and understood!) this ( 3rd reply down ) healthunlocked.com/thyroidu....
If she can then give you a good enough reason why she wants to ignore those scientists and still needs to look at the 'high peak' of your fT4 level post dose , rather than the average level , then fine, do as she asks next time ..... but in the absence of any evidence off superior understanding from her at the moment ,i suggest you stick to 24 hrs as recommended by us lot for this blood test, and just smile nicely and keep schtum.
(vets know they have to take the 'time of last dose levo' into account when looking at blood tests from hypo horses .....GP's aren't allowed to treat horses under any circumstances , but Vet's are allowed to treat people in an emergency ... what does that tell you about whose knowledge base to trust ? )
I’ve been struggling with this Metformin and low TSH levels since it was added to my levothyroxin in 2000 when I was diagnosed with diabetes type 2. Until then my endocrinologist had always prescribed my usual dose of levothyroxin and blood test results were stable. Three months after starting Metformin my blood test results started becoming erratic and finally finished down at zero floor level. My doctor just couldn’t control my thyroid results.. gone crazy. I wrote to the head of an endocrinological department in a big university teaching hospital in the U.S.A. who confirmed metformin interference in thyroid testing and the lowering of TSH …(he had written a research paper about it) whereupon doctors mistakenly of course decide to lower the dose of thyroxine. I did an experiment under medical supervision whereby I stopped taking Metformin for 1 month, didn’t change the thyroxine dose of medication and did another blood test .. TSH went all the way back up to 3.8 from 0.018 which was while taking Metformin. I was beginning to feel unwell with a much lower dose of thyroxine ! There’s not enough research going on into this problem of levothyroxin and metformin. Doctors should also always request a full thyroid panel and NOT just base their diagnosis on TSH levels.
3/4 days of changing anything is unlikely to be long enough to have much impact on TSH ... especially if it's been supressed for a while.
obviously not possible to be certain how fast an individuals TSH starts to move in response to doing 'x' ,unless we could test ourselves every day, which sadly isn't happening ( would be very interesting ).
I suspect a supressed TSH might take at least that long to even wake up and notice anything in the system had changed , and ( if it was going to move at all ) it might well take it a week to 10 days to even start getting out of bed ...
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