Optometrist or Therapist?

You know what sucks?! When something as miniscule as peas gives you the Big D. You know what's totally awesome? When something as simple as eating soluble fiber (i.e. bananas, applesauce) and peppermint oil makes it completely better. :) That's all I have to say about that.

I'm also still taking Tirosint, feeling better than I felt those last two weeks on my faulty batch of Thyroxal. I haven't heard any information about what may have been wrong with it (though I'm very curious since it was working fine for me until...recently), but the pills I have, have been sent back to the store they came from for testing. Signed, sealed, delivered.

Today I went to the optometrist. I also brought my DS (my dear, dear son, sarcasm intended) with me because I think he's going to need his eyes checked so I want him to be familiar with the office and procedure.

My optometrist is a wonderful woman with two teenage sons. At first my DS sat quietly in the provided chair. Then, the good doctor started to test my eyes, he started freaking out. First he threw his hat. Then my purse. Then the chair itself was knocked to the floor. My optometrist? These are the things she said to me:

"Just ignore him. He's trying to get your attention. It's best if we don't react."

"It's a cheap chair...don't worry. I don't care!"

"Let me just take it away from him....but we won't feed into it!"

"Ooo, he's stubborn."

But through the whole appointment, she was so nice and calm. She didn't judge me for having a 3 1/2 year old who was basically having a temper tantrum.

When I finally held him and talked to him, he said he was scared of all the machinery. Fair enough.

In any case, in addition to providing an adept therapist, my optomestrist was full of useful information, such as:

*Inflammation has been linked to diabetes and other diseases, she just read an article about it.

*The only things that will help protect me from glaucoma and cataracts are wearing sunglasses religiously and eating right.

*Macular degeneration has been linked to smoking and being overweight.

*That "eye pill" we keep hearing about on TV and in the advertisements isn't all it's cracked up to me. She said at a recent conference the agreement was that taking massive amounts of the stuff in the pill, Zinc, Lutein, and something else that starts with "Z" I can't pronounce, isn't good for a regular ol' person. It might be warranted for someone who always has eye degeneration, but it might do more harm than good for someone who hasn't had problems.

*She recommended the contact cleanse (Clear Care? Is that the one?) stuff that is actually acidic if you don't let the contacts sit in it for more than six hours. Gotta keep that away from the kids...

Anyway, she was very wonderful. Just thought you should know I'm a fan of certain doctors, just not the general 'way' doctors treat these days. My eye doc also has hypothyroidism, so that made for some good conversation too.

Professional Opinion

So in a follow up to my post yesterday...I finally talked to my D.O.

Initially it was a confusing conversation because I told her I had quit taking the Thyoxal because there was something wrong with it and she said, "Well...I'm not sure you need to be on any thyroid medication."

Let's recap. I don't want to be on Thyroxal or any thyroid medicine! But on six pills of Thyroxal, my TSH was 3.1. On five pills, it was 3.88. Ideally, someone would be around 2.0 and you need to be at least under 2.5 when you're pregnant so your baby isn't brain damaged. You get the idea. Even more convincing was that I felt like crap. So, I didn't really understand what she was saying.

She continued on, "...your last blood draws, that's what I'm looking at, were all good."

To which I said, "3.88 is too high. I feel horrible."

"Yeah....I always want to be around two....oh, and you were on Thyroxal when that blood was drawn."

So it took us awhile to get on the same page. In the end she offered to write me a prescription for Armour thyroid (a dessicated thyroid medicine, most endocrinologists won't write a prescription because....well, honestly because I think they're close-minded, but whatever).


The strangest thing about the whole conversation was the fact that she listened and tried to accommodate what I wanted to do with the situation. It's kind of sad that I'm not used to that in doctors, but there you have it.

She let me know what she thought was a good idea or not, but she was ultimately very supportive and encouraging. Something I had been worrying about for days was suddenly reduced to some very simple steps:

1. Take the Tirosint I Have On Hand.
2. Call Her If I Need A New Script or Want to Switch to A Dessicated Med.
3. Call Her If I Start to Feel Hyperthyroid.
4. See Her in April for My Blood Draw.

So....that's that.

Otherwise, I'm still taking herbal stuff to strengthen my Qi from CAG, still avoiding wheat and milk and stuff on that list that screws me up. I'm still taking peppermint oil to calm my tummy down (amazing!) and still avoiding lots of insoluble fiber.

I am debating the switch to a pig dessicated thyroid med because as opposed to just getting one hormone that you're missing (T4) in a Levothyroxine med, a dessicated thyroid med gives you a range of hormones (T1, T2, T3, and T4). The reason that lots of women on long term Levo probably have issues with osteoporosis is because they don't get any T2, which is a bone protector. So you can see why it might be a good treatment option.

BLEGH. Ready to feel better already! From my lips to God's ears.

CSI: Thyroxal

I don't even know where to start. Here are the important things to know for this story:

1. The Thyroxal I had on hand (four bottles) seems to be....funky.
2. Rather than keep taking it, I have started taking Tirosint again.
3. I'm okay with that decision.

Last time I posted I mentioned that DH drove all the way into the city just to get me more Thyroxal. I had two bottles from a wonderful Internet company (who, if you're curious, I have ordered from before without a problem. Trustworthy!) that had funny black flecks everywhere and smelled funky to me. DH went to the CAG's office to get two more bottles that, unfortunately, were from the exact same lot as the ones I already had. In case you're keeping a tally, that's $120.

I called the company that makes Thyroxal directly and was basically told that I needed to talk to the folks who sold it to me and they themselves weren't liable. That's a crock of s***, but okay.

I emailed the Internet company and they promised to contact the company. I called CAG's office and they were incredibly sweet and accommodating. They even opened a bottle of Thyroxal to see what I was talking about. They informed me that herbs come in all shapes, colors, and sizes and that natural variation could account for the difference in the pill appearance.

Okay, check and check.

With this comforting information in hand, I took my Thyroxal as I normally would. Since I was at a TSH of 3.88 last time my blood was drawn and had some annoying symptoms of being hypothyroid, I was anticipating taking six pills again instead of five.

Well, after a few days of taking six pills, I felt worse. I took seven pills, then eight pills one day, just to see if it made a difference! Nothing. I just felt worse and worse.

Then I got some interesting communique back from the Internet folks. They had contacted the manufacturer and they wanted the bottles sent back. Right away I asked if they were aware of any contaminant or missing ingredient. I was told that they wouldn't be able to tell until the bottles were tested.

Fine, but I'd be an idiot if I kept taking something that was potentially, maybe, possibly contaminated with something or was otherwise unsafe.

At this point, Your Human Guinea Pig had a few choices:

1. Keep taking potentially unsafe herbal supplement.
2. Take nothing for a few days (until I could find some untainted Thyroxal) and become more and more hypothyroid and feel worse and worse.
3. Start taking Tirosint again, which I still have on hand, and resign myself to the fact that thus far it seems like my thyroid is not doing what it's supposed to.

Further complicating my decision-making process was the fact that my Doctor was not available to talk with immediately.

In the end, I decided my best option would be to just take Tirosint. I feel about 50% better not taking Thyroxal and taking Tirosint instead. I feel like it's important to point out that any prescription drug or supplement can be screwed up due to human error. My DH's insulin is sometimes defective. His blood sugar gets high, he feels horrible, and it takes him a few days to determine that it's the insulin. It's just life. I've also read that Synthroid (what most folks take for hypothyroidism) isn't as consistently made as it could be; the FDA only recently approved it and even so it seems like it was approved only due to popular demand.

Thyroxal was working really well until it wasn't.

And to bring home why someone who was so adamantly against taking the regular drug, I'm going to gleefully list my symptoms. Like I said, the worse I feel the easier it is to just do whatever it takes to feel normal again. :(

• Headaches
• Ear pressure
• Dizziness
• Lightheaded-ness
• Fatigue
• Muscle Aches & Pains
• Arthritis/Joint Pain
• Insomnia
• Trouble Concentrating
• Irritability (You know this one's not a joke when you get mad at an 18-month-old for distracting you from a cell phone game.)

I didn't feel well. I didn't know what to do. So I just had to make a choice.

Observations & Love Songs

Yesterday I was feeling pretty crappy (I'm starting to wonder if I have a sinus infection) and I wasted no time in telling my husband how frustrated I have been getting with this whole 'journey'. I got a batch of Thyroxal pills that looked different than before and I was wary about taking them.

 DH drove into the big city to get some more. Herbalist experts :) said that it just depended on what sort of herbs they had sourced, what color they were, etc. etc. All of this lead to more conversation about my health. Here are the highlights from our conversation:


**I admitted that, more than ever, I understand why Western doctors are wary of herbal medicines variability. I don't know how much thyroid hormone I'm getting in the pills and so...I don't really know what dose works, if it's less than before or more or...?

**He reminded me that even if I stopped taking Thyroxal and started taking Tirosint again, there would still be a lag time in which I had to figure out the correct dosage.

**He honestly told me he felt like we hadn't exhausted the 'herbal' option yet. When pressed with what this meant, he said giving my thyroid more time to 'recover', if possible. Also giving weaning a good try, as in, more than once.

**He told me to be patient.

Have I mentioned that I love my DH?

I'm discouraged because when I reduced my pill dose, my TSH went up instead of down. Maybe that means I have no hope of having a functioning thyroid. Maybe that means I am impatient, as I have previously posted. ;)

I re-read a study that really encouraged me. Mice were given Iodine-induced Hashimoto's disease over the course of eight weeks. After eight weeks the mice were supplemented with Selenium and it only took EIGHT more weeks for their thyroid (which previously looked dead) to look healthy and normal again. The study was cited in this article on Perfect Health.

The cells on the far left are normal thyroid cells, the middle are Hashimoto's cells, and the far right are the thyroid cells in the same mice AFTER Selenium supplementation.

Here is a bar graph of thyroid antibodies during the experiment:

It just shows that antibodies were higher with increased Iodine intake and no Selenium to balance it out. When mice were given Selenium again, their antibody levels went down to almost normal.

If this holds true for people too (which, let's be honest, no one knows), then I am in the stage where I am supplementing with Selenium and my antibody levels have fallen.

But if takes the same amount of time to 'recover' as it takes to develop Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, then I have another two years to go! That's a long time. That's a lot of Thyroxal. :/ Logic:: I started having arthritis a year before DS was born. That's about 3 1/2 years ago.

Anyway, to sum up, I'm frustrated with how I feel, I want to move past this, I want to grow our family, but I also want to give my thyroid a chance. God is totally teaching me patience (even if I eventually take Tirosint again, this holds true!) and it's kind of irksome. :)

The Juice Lady

I'm devoting this post to The Juice Lady because DH and I really have been juicing every day and we love it. Her blog is here at Juicing for Life. A friend gave me that book to look at initially and I really liked it.

Then I got this book from my Mommy:

Both GREAT books. Cherie starts off this book with stories from her life about how juicing helped her get healthy, REAL healthy.

Really, the dude in Fat, Sick, & Nearly Dead got us started on juicing, but The Juice Lady is the one whose books I have read and loved.

I can't say I do a great job at following her recipes, but I like to know, for example, that cucumber is anti-inflammatory. So, if we are feeling gross and I suspect that my immune system is going haywire, then I can add cucumber to our juice! The book I have by her (The Juice Lady's Guide to Juicing for Health) is organized by ailment. So you can go to arthritis, diarrhea, flu, colds, etc. and find out which veggies and fruits would help relieve your symptoms. I might argue that any fruits and veggies would alleviate symptoms. ;)

There is NO evidence that juicing is any better than eating fresh fruits and vegetables whole. But it is definitely easier and more convenient to juice 2 cups of blueberries, a head of kale, three apples, 1 pear, 1 lime, 1/2 a cucumber, etc. than it is  to sit down and eat them. One article I read about juicing actually condemned it because you wouldn't be getting the insoluble fiber from the fruit, i.e. the apple peel, the orange peel, the blueberry skin...

I, however, LOVE juicing for just this reason. My husband could use a little insoluble fiber, but I...well, I really don't have much use for it right now, if you get my drift. :)

Ultimately, we should all be eating more fruits and vegetables and less processed things and juicing helps our family to do just that. I don't see a downside.

Choices, Choices

I'm a little behind on keeping the masses up to speed with what's going on with my health.

Last week I went to see my Doctor of O, Osteopathy. I still really love her because she is totally down with me also seeing a Chinese Herbalist. I debrief her of everything he says and vice versa, so it's nice that neither of them harbors overt resentment for the other. :) Dr. D.O. said that she thought it was the perfect meeting of Eastern and Western medicine.

I mainly went in to tell her that I had had some success treating myself as an IBS-D patient (recap--less insoluble fiber, more soluble fiber, peppermint oil, fennel seed sometimes) and to get my blood drawn to see how my body liked being on five Thyroxal pills instead of six.

Happily, last time I went to see her a few months ago I weighed about 108 pounds with jeans, a belt, and a sweater on. This time, in just yoga pants (and a shirt, come on people!), I weighed almost 115! So make fun of my skinniness if you will, I give you permission, but I think I've gained about ten pounds. That's reason to celebrate in my book.

I got my blood tests back a few days ago and I'm a little frustrated with the results. My T3 and T4 numbers are fine, those are the amounts of thyroid hormone actively running around in your bloodstream. My TPO (the antibodies that are around attacking my thyroid) are even lower than they were before, which is great news! The highest they have been was 85 after DD was born, then they dropped to 55, then to 22, and now they are at 15. It doesn't even show up on the lab as abnormal anymore.

The number that frustrates me is my TSH, my Thyroid Stimulating Hormone. This is a number that indicates how hard my pituitary has to work to get my thyroid to produce an adequate amount of thyroid hormone. Ideally, it should be under 2.5. Last time I had it checked it was at 3.1 and last week it was at 3.88. Obviously I had hoped it would be lower.

More TMI--I know I need more thyroid hormone around that 'time of the month' and that's when I got checked. I feel fine on five Thyroxal pills until 'that time' and then I start to feel symptoms of being hypothyroid.

I'm not sure what to do about that. Part of me desperately wants to keep taking Thyroxal and see if I can wean off successfully, but part of me also feels like Thyroxal is just becoming a more expensive stand-in for Levothyroxine or Synthroid.

Eventually, I feel like I am going to just want to get on with my life. There are 90 pills in a bottle, I think, so one bottle ($30) lasts 15 days. That's $60 a month, compared to $20 a month for the Tirosint I was taking prior to this whole experiment.

In any case, I'm still wheat and milk free, still juicing as much as possible (another expensive hobby), and I'm taking some other supplements and herbal crap and....we'll just see what happens. Hopefully no one will be too disappointed if I eventually decide we can't afford Thyroxal and go back to the 'Western' drug...hopefully CAG won't give me the silent treatment.

Mediator Release Test

I forgot to mention that CAG also recommends something called an MRT, Mediator Release Test. It's supposed to measure the reaction of your white blood cells to different substances. I'm pretty sure this sort of test falls under 'quackery' by modern medicine's standards, but I like to spend lots of time on discussion boards to see if it's actually helped people or not.

Before I dive in, I should mention that this test is a whopping $400. Now, I have been told that other places charge $900 for such a thing, so I should count myself lucky. But still, I have car repairs, loans to pay off, etc. etc. Doesn't seem like that much of a bargain to me.

One web site says that: "MRT is a patented blood test (US Patent numbers 6, 114, 174 & 6, 200, 815) that quantifies how strongly your immune cells react to the foods and food chemicals tested by measuring  intracellular mediator release indirectly.  When released from immune cells, chemical mediators such as histamine, cytokines, and prostaglandins produce damaging effects on body tissues, leading to the development of symptoms." 


The site Quackwatch, a site which probably supports nothing I've done, has a whole page devoted to crap allergy testing. They list the Mediator Release Test is inaccurate and that the "...correct way to assess a suspected food allergy or intolerance is to begin with a careful record of food intake and symptoms over a period of several weeks. Symptoms such as swollen lips or eyes, hives, or skin rash may be allergy-related, particularly if they occur within a few minutes (up to two hours) after eating. Diarrhea may be related to a food intolerance. Vague symptoms such as dizziness, weakness, or fatigue are unlikely to be food-related."

They go on to say that if you're not having luck this way, then maybe it's advisable to see an allergist and get a RAST test done. I really disagree with the statement that vague symptoms should basically be ignored and also that an allergist will be the ultimate help. I think some allergists are totally awesome (my DH would agree), but I went to see an allergist. After a negative skin-prick test for everything, she was as baffled as I was and told me to *surprise* keep a food diary.


This test seems popular with all the weirdos like me--chiropractors, people who are looking to treat fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, etc. I have found more than a few Registered Dieticians who administer this test, which makes me wonder if it has more credence than some think.


In any case, I don't know if I'll get it done. I'm as confused as anyone about these tests. CAG swears by it and I do trust the CAG. I did appreciate one thing he said--he mentioned that I postpone appointments with him and set aside the money for the test. Not many practitioners would do that!