Do You Have a Borderline Low Thyroid?

The thyroid gland is extremely important, and your health can improve if your thyroid is treated and supported properly.

When thyroid medication is given in the correct dosage, a patient's energy level, depression level, cravings and patience are improved.

Let me start from the beginning. TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) is the most common thyroid test. The normal scale for a TSH result is .5 to 5 (sometimes .5 to 5.5). This means that when your doctor tests your TSH level, if the result comes back in between those two numbers, they tell you your "results were normal" and that's the end of it.

Don't stop there!

What I would suggest to you is to call your doctor's office, ask the nurse to look up the test results for the TSH level on your chart (assuming you've had your thyroid tested--if not, get it tested) and find out what your number came back as.

Most people do best with a number between 1 and 2. If yours came up as a 3 or 4, you are borderline deficient in your thyroid gland.

This is going to deplete your energy, add to your depression, make losing weight nearly impossible, and increase your irritability.

If you are borderline deficient, you have two options:

1) Go on thyroid medication.

2) Work at rejuvenating your thyroid's ability to function on its own.

The first option may necessitate that you take thyroid medication for the rest of your life. And it can be a long process to find the right dose, because most doctors want you to be on a dose for 2 months before getting retested. Then you have to adjust from there.

There are better methods for finding the right dose for you. If you are on the correct dosage, there are little or no side effects to thyroid medication, so this may be the route you wish to go.

But here's a warning: when you start taking any thyroid medication, your body will shut down its own production of thyroid hormone, so that you will eventually need to take more and more until you've basically replaced most of your body's natural production of thyroid hormone. This is why, once you go on medication, you will most likely need to stay on it for good.

One more note on thyroid medication. If you do take thyroid medication, I recommend that you ask for Armour Thyroid medication. It is a natural thyroid medication from an animal source that has T3 and T4 thyroid in it.

Most synthetic thyroid medications have only T3, which your body needs to convert to T4, in order to utilize it. If your body isn't converting T3 to T4 well, the thyroid medications that provide only T3 will not work well for you, either.

I recommend the book "Thyroid Power: Ten Steps to Total Health" by Richard Shames and Karilee H. Shames. This book will help you and your doctor decide which thyroid tests to conduct and how to interpret test results to find the very best level for you. It also goes into more complicated issues like having high anti-thyroid antibodies.

No matter which direction you take as a result of a thyroid test, be sure to do your research and find the best solution for you.