Posted by MissThang on January 6, 2011, at 20:09:59
In reply to Re: Thyroid » MissThang, posted by Phillipa on January 6, 2011, at 19:51:47
Phillipa -- I don't actually have to have the armour thyroid compounded -- it's available now in a pill form, though not all pharmacies carry it. I get it from a small pharmacy that does compounding of other drugs, so maybe that's why they carry the armour thyroid.
The adrenal fatigue diagnosis is tricky to detect, but it's mostly based on symptoms as well as some hormone levels, such as DHEA. When you have a cluster of the right symptoms, combined with low DHEA levels, my dr. assumes adrenal fatigue. After I started taking a low dose of bioidentical hydrocortisone -- the hormone the adrenals secrete -- I felt better within a week or so. It's subtle though -- not a big wham, bang and you feel magnficent -- but if you have overwhelming fatigue and you've been through a particularly stressful period in your life from which you didn't seem to recover, those are often signs of adrenal fatigue.
My dr's goal is to restore hormone levels to the levels they were when most of us were in our primes -- say around the age of 25 or 30 -- so we feel our best, rather than just getting your levels barely within the "acceptable" normal range. For example, my thyroid level is just borderline low and many traditional drs would say it's not low enough to supplement, but so were my sisters' levels and they both have hashimotos like you, so it just goes to show you.
I also take natural progesterone creme and it's made a huge difference in my periods -- how regular they are and how painful they are. All in all, I definitely feel better since getting my hormones in balance again, something most women don't even think about until they're in menopause.
There are several books out there that suggest that adrenal fatigue is far more common than we think, based on our very stressful lifestyles and poor diets, so it's likely a lot of people would benefit from treatment for it. And because it's bioidentical, it's pretty benign -- I had absolutely no side effects at all from it...just a gradual increase in alertness and decrease in fatigue over the course of a couple of weeks.
poster:MissThang
thread:973263
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20101231/msgs/976049.html