No one should alter their thyroid
 

doses without a blood test and doctor supervision. This is not a do-it-yourself,
topic.

Diabetics taking R-lipoic should have doctor supervision and test blood sugar more often to see what effects or any it will have on diabetic treatments.

I am at a loss as to the "high dose" of synthroid that wasn't available?
0.3mg has always been available..since this drug came out.

I have only had one man receive it tho, in the 30yrs it has been around...
and he told me his doctor gave it to him to lower extremely high cholesterol.
I assume now with the statins out there, he is doing those, instead of the .3mg Synthroid.

I had one patient who was a DOG...yes a DOG get it, because dogs need higher doses than people for some strange reason.

But patients who have their whole thyroid REMOVED do not typically get more than .15 or .175, and in reality do well on .125 most of the time!

Use of massive doses is confusing, and indicates to me that people are NOT taking the medication on an empty stomach like they are supposed to do (this is fairly new information)...or that they have some extreme deficiency in Selenium and Zinc which are required by the body to convert Synthroid to active T3 in the tissues. One is not going to see massive doses of Synthroid being given because we now know that high thyroid hormone levels cause rapid bone tear down, and hence osteoporosis.

It just occurred to me that -J- may have tried to get .3mg during one of the production interruptions for Synthroid.
This drug has had it's patent sold I think 3 times now. It is now made by Abbott. But it originally was by Flint, then Boots,
then Abbott bought it. I have heard thru the manufacturing grapevine that Abbott is struggling with it still, to standardize
doses. I myself switched to the generic a while ago...and Mylan works just fine for me. I had a patient who HATES Synthroid
and will not take it. She claimed that her RX was no made correctly and conflicted with a surgery she had....her doctor won't let her
use that brand at all!

Mrs D?
 

I am talking about 15-20 years ago... and they only went up to the 130-150 doses...[At least in my insurance plan or something?] I did try the 130 doses for a very short while? But apparently my docs didn't like the ultimate # results. As for the .3mg doses being available? I suspect that my docs would have put me on it even for a short while as my #'s were very low for a while back then. And That was BEFORE all my new thyroid issues! Which now seem to be stable [Knock wood?].

As for osteo and Synthroid? It's a sort of durned if we do, or not kind of thing, isn't it? Hugs - j

.3mg came out with the original patent (this is over 30 yrs ago). What DID come out later in time were the newer doses.
.075 (I think)
.088
.112
.137
.175

What used to be done for those patients needing the inbetween doses is that
skip days were given. Say take .125mg 6 days a week and skip Sunday.
Or .05 daily and 2 on Sunday. Then when the newer in between ones came,
the skip or add on Sunday is not common now at all.

There are a lot of other factors that can influence the hormonal dosage.
 

My wife, who just had her thyroid out Thursday (papillary carcinoma--apparently very well contained microcarcinoma, fortunately), is about to be an interesting guinea pig.

She's been put on 100mcg/day of Synthroid, which I am making sure she takes far apart from everything else, including the large calcium dose she's now on for parthyroid shock (she did start to get hypocalcemic symptoms about 8 hours after surgery, but we had expected them and they were forestalled quickly with intravenous dosing). I suspect, though, that this will prove inadequate--my wife has an extremely frugal metabolic system, and did even before thyroid troubles were diagnosed, due to her decades as an ultramarathon runner. Her body is quite used to maintaining muscle on a 70 mile a week schedule--she's not doing that now, of course (she's been told no running for a week), but her surgeon is well aware that she'll want to start again ASAP. Moreover, for thyroid cancer patients, the aim is to drive TSH down quite low--into the .3-.5 range--as a tumor growth suppresant (at least until one needs to be made hypothyroid for radioiodine scan, tosee if any vestiges of tumor remain). I imagine she's going to put on some weight during the convalescent period, though I think fears of bone density reduction will be lessened by her calcium/Vitamin D intake and by the bone density built up through thirty years of weight bearing exercise (the x-ray people are always impressed by her bone thickness).

Since she needs to be titred up regularly anyway for thyroglobulin and TSH levels, we'll see how this all goes, and how it correlates with mental sharpness, exercise level, weight, fatigue levels, and dietary change.