Are you exhausted? Do you jump when the phone rings?

[Manifestor_of_Light]

Do you find being around people very stressful?

It could be adrenal fatigue, commonly known as burnout. This often goes along with a dead thyroid (which I have).

Read up on this at www.stopthethyroidmadness.com

I'm finding out that the thyroid and adrenals work together. Doctors ignore fat, tired women. Or give them a scrip for an anti depressant which does not do anything.

[gateley]

1. There's good info on thyroid disease on About.com -- You learn stuff your

doctor may not be aware of. And I found my endocrinologist through them, for which I'm eternally grateful.

http://thyroid.about.com/

And K&R!

[Manifestor_of_Light]

2. There are tons of horror stories at STTM.

And I could be one of them. Ignoring symptoms, telling you it's all in your head, etc. etc.

[gateley]

7. Yeah, I checked it out. I'd had thyroid problems for years but going to

non-specialists, they never diagnosed it.

Are you pursuing this?

[RandomThoughts]

3. Not exhausted, nor stressed. nor burned out.

Just bored.



But I hope you get better, or find a way to help with your thyroid condition.

[kdmorris]

4. Be careful with that site

I have a dead thyroid, too. And I know how you are feeling right now, but they advocate self-medicating with both thyroid meds and hydro-cortisone. I followed their advice several years ago and ended up with high blood pressure and anxiety. I also ended up GAINING weight and wandering around in a fog even more than before. In addition, when I started feeling worse, they NEVER say "Hey, maybe this cookie cutter approach doesn't work on all thyroid patients", making them almost as bad as most doctors.

It IS important to support your adrenal glands as you increase your thyroid meds, but my advice would be to find a reputable doctor you can work with (there's about.com Thyroid group or the Texas Thryoid yahoo group who can give you doctor recommendations) who knows about endocrine issues (and that will most likely not be an endocrinologist!! LOL).

Many of us have gotten desperate enough to self-medicate, given the state of thyroid treatment in America, but you can seriously harm yourself if you don't know what you are doing (and no matter how wonderful that group sounds to you right now, none of them are doctors). I knew what I was doing, did tons of research and STILL ended up worse off than before. In addition, advising people to self-medicate will make the FDA and other entities be that much more likely to try to remove dessicated thyroid products from the market and open the door for the media to call us all crazy. In essence, self-medicating hurts us all (it is one of the reasons that Forest Labs reformulated their thyroid product, Armour. They wanted to stop people from taking it sublingually, as Armour was never meant to be a sublingual tablet).

I did find a wonderful doctor whom I trust that weaned me off the hyrdo-cortisone (you can't just stop taking it or you can suffer extreme consequences from a sudden lack of hydro-cortisone) and slowly increased my dessicated thyroid until I felt better, without the hydro-cortisone. At 41, I feel better than I did during the entire decade that was my 30's, when I was trying to find a doctor who would help me. Please go to Texas_Thyroid_Group at yahoo groups or thyroid.about.com to find a doctor that you can work with.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

5. I've been arguing with doctors for years.

They are pretty useless. I have told several endocrinologists I've had burnout for years and years, hated my jobs, hated the stress, hated people, jumped about a foot in the air when the phone rang at work, and I got IGNORED TOTALLY. This all got really bad about twenty years ago.

And they would be horrified if I was taking cortisone every day. (Which I am NOT).

I've got my thyroid under control and I refuse to take Synthroid even though they repeat the same lies about "well your dosage isn't regulated with Armour" to which I replied "I read the damn label. It says 'biologically assayed, United States Pharmacopoeia'".

To which Dr. Board Certified Endocrinologist Deity SHUT UP. This was probably 35 years ago.

I think a lot of people have exhausted adrenals due to burnout and that some form of supplementation is necessary.

My blood pressure is controlled.

WHen my allergies are bad, cortisone makes the diff between me lying in bed being completely exhausted and useless, and being vertical and functional. I much prefer vertical and functional.

FYI, those people are self medicating because they KNOW they are tired and sick and their doctors refuse to treat them, go strictly by the TSH numbers rather than their symptoms, and LIE to their patients about Armour Thyroid and various other things. And it's either self-medicate or DIE or STAY IN BED YOUR ENTIRE LIFE from lack of treatment. Those are not good options.

I had an idiot doc in San Antonio take me completely OFF thyroid when I was in college. I had brain fog so I didn't know any better. Well, I could barely crawl out of bed after five years, and I went to a D.O. who said I was within a month of going into a coma and dying. He also said I had the worst case of myxedema (swollen face and neck due to fluid retention) he had ever seen.

He also let me titrate my dosage -- start with 1 grain, go up gradually to 8 and back down to what I felt good at, which is four grains.

This guy took a hair sample and they bombard it to get emission spectra, I think, to see what elements you have in your hair. If they are in your hair, your body is not absorbing them. I had bones you could see through on an x ray and I was not thirty years old yet.

Turned out I had TWENTY TIMES more Calcium in my hair than i should have, because without the thyroid hormone I was not assimilating my minerals.

So I'm not gonna stop taking the stuff.

[kdmorris]

6. Whoa, there...

I said I KNOW how you feel. I take 4 grains of dessicated thyroid, too. I went through years of mistreatment, which led me to self-medicate with thyroid and cortisone meds. I've been there.

All I said was "Be careful." Yes, doctors can be idiots. Yes, they are often brainwashed by Abbott Labs to think that we all need Synthroid and should be happy and shut up. Yes, to most of that stuff that you said. But Janie and company can be JUST as rigid in their thinking. Not everyone needs to take Armour (or Nature-throid). Not everyone needs Iron or Cortisone. And sometimes, even when they think you just need more thyroid meds, you actually need less insulin (as was my case). Insulin resistance makes you pretty damned tired and fat, too.

If you want to self medicate, self medicate. But don't Janie medicate. They are not doctors and cannot help you to understand everything that is going on. And while you are being forced to self medicate, try to find a doctor that will work with you. They do exist. It takes A LOT of work, which you can't really do if you are wandering around stupid, fat and tired (which is, of course, why I ended up self-medicating at the time).

If we all self-medicate and don't even try to work with doctors, then dessicated thyroid meds will disappear in the US. They will become a "fringe" med that no one can get and we will all be screwed then (like we've been for the last year with the shortage of dessicated thyroid meds).

I never advocated stopping taking the meds. Just that you try to find a doctor you can work with, as well. Sometimes, thyroid and adrenal issues are not the only issues you are dealing with and you will still feel like crap.

You can take it or leave it. Doesn't matter to me. I'm not going back to Synthroid either, but I'm going to be REALLY pissed if I'm forced to start buying Thyroid-S from Thailand because no one wanted to fight for acceptance of dessicated thyroid meds with the medical establishment and instead just decided to self medicate. It's already costing me a ton of money to get them from Canada while we suffer through the shortage in the US.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

9. I'm tired of fighting doctors.

There's been a serious letter writing campaign to keep Armour being manufactured.
I don't have insurance and they just diss my complaints anyway. The D.O. who got me back on thyroid after being nearly in a coma, is dead now. He got me back on it in 1984.

I live in the middle of nowhere and I am not going to let Janie tell me what to do. I realize everybody is different.

It's too bad that most doctors won't listen and are forcing us to either self-medicate and experiment to see what helps us feel better, or lie around and sleep twelve or fourteen hours a day and do nothing and have no motivation.

I wish I could find the picture that was made about the time I was graduating from law school (and working fulltime at the courthouse) and had myxedema. I never bought a picture of myself in my doctoral robe with purple shawl because I looked so horrible.

I lived on sugar, caffeine and panic (as in "the world will come to an end if I don't get this transcript finished and the lawyers will kill me on the spot"). Did this for a couple of decades. Not to mention unavoidable personal tragedies (severe near fatal pneumonia due to a nagging SOB husband, sister dying of incurable brain cancer, other peoples' deaths, divorce from hell from previously mentioned SOB husband, yada yada).

[gateley]

8. Good advice -- I'm going to check out the Texas Thyroid Group -- I've been

going to About's group for years (and am on her mailing list).

I had my thyroid removed because it was so trashed after many years of going undiagnosed. I exhibited classic symptoms of hypothyroidism, turns out, much to my endo's shock, I was actually hyper. They were going to try to treat it with radiation and see how it went, with the possibility of surgery a real possibility if I didn't respond, but I just said to take it out then. I wanted to start feeling better as soon as possible.

Now that I have no insurance I'm still taking the dose of Levoxyl that I have been for years, but recently have begun to feel like I did in the old days, so I've been paying more attention to Armour info. The doctor I went to to get this prescription told me he thought Synthroid was the best. Hello? Didn't Abbott get sued for making that claim? And he's still believing it. It was a stretch to get him to prescribe Levoxyl (which is essentially the same thing).

Anyway, good advice in your posts -- and thanks for the info on the Texas group. :hi:

[Lorien]

10. I tried two doctors from the thyroid.about.com site

both gave me the same diagnosis (hypothyroid, dead adrenals, low progesterone and mercury poisoning) but totally different treatments-neither of which worked. I'm now going to self medicate out of desperation. I have no insurance and very little $$, so that's all there is left to do!