Posted by Larry Hoover on May 31, 2006, at 10:33:15
In reply to Re: Thyroid Abnormal Test Results, posted by sparky123 on May 31, 2006, at 4:14:46
> how thyroid mimics many of the mental health conditions of today. may be all you need is to add T3 to your thyroid mix to make it run 100%. thats tricky and only limited doctors deal with it.
Sparky's right, except thyroid doesn't mimic mental illness. It can be a mental illness.
Thyroid hormone in the T4 form operates on two distinct levels. It has its own physiological effects, quite separate from those of other thyroid hormone(s). And, it serves as a pro-drug, a pro-hormone, for T3. Your body is much more sensitive to T3, and your liver ought to be doing a good deal of that conversion, T4 --> T3. There ought to be a good balance between T4 and T3 in the blood, both bound (to globbulin proteins designed precisely for that task), and free hormone.
That's just one aspect of thyroid chemistry. There's another one, often completed dismissed or ignored.
Many organs/tissues do their own T3 conversions, from free T4 captured from the blood. The specific organs have their own enzymes to accomplish this. The organ has its own feedback loop, operating within the other grosser systemic feedback loop (the TSH feedback loop). A person can experience the effects of having localized or functional deficiencies of T3, because the deiodinating enzymes (converting T4 to T3) in that tissue are incompetent for some reason. The system looks good on paper, but subsystems are failing. If the subsystem that is failing is in the brain, you get psych effects. One common site of failure is the hypothalamus. It doesn't matter, though, precisely where it happens. It only matters if and when it does happen.
An analogy to this condition is insulin resistance. That is tissue-specific failure to respond to insulin (usually muscle). It eventually leads to systemic failure, if it's not managed effectively, but it begins as a tissue-specific failure to respond to normal levels of insulin in the blood.
Oral T4 (Synthroid) is insufficient to supplement tissue-specific T3 disturbance, because the affected tissue can't use T4 any longer. It needs to get enough T3 (Cytomel) to do its work from *somewhere*, so the blood concentration *has* to be increased artificially.
That leads to suppression of TSH and all kinds of hoohah. But if that's what it takes, that's what it takes. A person then becomes totally dependent on oral hormone supplementation. For some reason, doctors are loathe to take that on. But we do total insulin supplementation all the time, and nobody gives that any thought.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:650613
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060530/msgs/650953.html