Something happened to me around October-November of last year.
I usually feel great. Ordinarily, my struggles are sleeping and relaxing. As with most people, I have too many projects on my schedule, though I find my activities stimulating and fascinating.
I blasted through a very demanding November, trying to meet the needs of a book publisher. This involved sleeping only a few hours a night for several days on end, all after a full day of office practice and hospital duties.
But it was getting tougher. My concentration was becoming more fragmented. Getting things done was proving an elusive goal. Exercise became a real chore.
Although I usually force myself to go to sleep, I was starting to fall asleep before my usual bedtime, and I was sleeping longer than usual.
It's been a tough winter in Wisconsin. Let's face it: It's Wisconsin. But it's been tough even for this region, with weeks of temperatures consistently below 10 degrees. Even so, I was having a heck of a time keeping warm. Extra shirts, socks, soaking my hands in hot water--none of it worked and I was freezing.
So I had my thyroid values checked:
Free T3: 2.6 pg/ml (Ref 2.3-4.2)
Free T4: 1.20 ng/dl (Ref 0.89-1.76)
TSH: 1.528 uUI/ml (Ref 0.350-5.500)
Normal by virtually all standards. I measured my first morning oral temperature: 96.1, 96.3, 95.9. Hmmmm.
My experience coincided with the Track Your Plaque and Heart Scan Blog conversations about low thyroid being enormously underappreciated, with the newest data on thyroid disease suggesting that a TSH for ideal health is probably 1.5 mIU or less. (More about that: Is normal TSH too high? and Thyroid perspective update .
Could this simply be a case of medical student-oma in which every beginning medical student believes he has every disease he learns about?
Despite the apparently "normal" thyroid blood tests, I took the leap and started taking Armour thyroid, beginning at 1/2 grain (30 mg), increasing to 1 grain (60 mg) after the first week.
Within 10 days, I experienced:
--Dramatic restoration of the ability to concentrate
--A boost in mood. (In fact, the last few blog posts before I replaced thyroid reflect my deepening crabbiness.)
--Large increase in energy, now restored to old levels
--Need for less sleep
--I'm warm again! (It's still <20 degrees, but I get easily stay warm while indoors.)
I am absolutely, positively convinced of the power of thyroid. I am further convinced from the clinical data, patient experiences, and now my own personal experience, that low levels of hypothyroidism are being dramatically underappreciated and underdiagnosed.
I shudder to think of what my life would have been like 6 months or a year from now without correction of thyroid hormone.
Now, the tough question: Why the heck is this happening to so many people?