ThyCa group meeting - February 7, 2012

It has been several months since the last post I did on my local support group meetings. We have had a few speakers (endocrinologist, surgeon) already. This evening we had a pharmacology student speak to us about our meds. It was interesting and of course informative. We had a lot of questions, so his 20 minute presentation was stretched out to 90 mins!

When he was describing the mental effects of being hypothyroid, and he said "mental dullness", which was not on his slide/handout. I had to stop him to make sure I heard him correctly. Gave me a good chuckle because I had never heard of thyroid brain fog described this way. "Mental dullness". Nice.

One of his slides had a table with the different medications. "Liotrix", sold under the brand name 'Thyrolar' was listed by itself. I have never heard of either. Liotrix, he explained, is the synthetic form of desiccated thyroid, or 'Armour Thyroid', which is pretty much pig thyroid. Since it comes from an animal's thyroid, and has both T3 and T4 in it. Armour is marketed as 'natural' thyroid medication because it comes from a pig, not chemicals. For some, Armour works wonders. The controversy is in the fact that it is hard to regulate exactly how much of T3 v T4 is in each Armour pill. What I found interesting is that he said it actually does have chemicals in it, which is necessary to bind it together into a pill form. So it is 'natural' thyroid plus some chemicals to keep it stable. Got it. Anyway, Liotrix is a drug that has both T3 and T4 in it (1:4 ratio). It is not a very common drug prescribed because our bodies automatically convert T4 into T3. Most don't need the extra T3. Others, like myself, need additional T3 to clear up issues, like afternoon fatigue, or thyroid brain fog.

Among the food interactions to avoid right before or after taking our daily T4 dose, he listed 'cottonseed meal'. I asked what that was, and he didn't know. So I Googled it: animal feed. Doubt I will ever eat animal feed for breakfast, so I don't see this as a problem.

We have another speaker at our meeting next month - a radiologist who will go over the finer points of the radio-iodine ablation treatment. We are also hoping to get a pathologist. Mary, one of the other co-facilitators, has done a fantastic job coordinating all of the speakers for our meetings. Me on the other hand, nothing. It is getting to the point where I send out the meeting reminders the Friday before the meetings, so I feel like a bit of a slacker. I guess the most important thing is that we all show up for the meetings.