Chasing Symptoms

Everyone has them, those symptoms that remind you that maybe your meds aren’t optimized and something is off. But symptoms are tricky and sometimes it’s like chasing your tail trying to figure them out. This post is not about specific symptoms because quite honestly thyroid symptoms are crazy and there are so many. I want to explore what happens when we put our symptoms in a category of hyper or hypo, too much or little medication, high TSH or low TSH, however you define your feelings of being off.

In the past I would always have certain symptoms that I would label in my head. For instance if I had anxiety I would think my FT4 must be too high or if I had tinnitus then surely my FT3 was too low. Gaining weight… must be going hypo. Tired… low FT3 for sure. And around and around it went until I thought I had just about every one of my symptoms put neatly in a category that I could address as needed. And remember, my assumptions were based on a lab value that I may have seen or something I read online and correlated to whatever symptom I was experiencing at that time. And that’s where things start to go off the tracks, when we start assuming.

After many years of my symptom matching game, I’ve kind of changed my tune on this strategy. There are so many that are at both ends. Did you know that? I had no idea, until about the last year or so doing research and trying to make sense of my own symptoms. I also kept seeing posts and comments in Facebook thyroid groups from people claiming to be hypo because they still aren’t losing weight, they are still tired and depressed, then they post their labs and they are clearly overmedicated/hyper.

There are many, but here are a few symptoms that are at both ends (both hypo and hyper)

Weight gain

Fatigue

Anxiety

Depression

Body aches and joint pain

Headaches

Nausea/loss of appetite

Don’t get me wrong. Symptoms ARE important and truly it’s all about our symptoms and resolving them so we feel well. But, I think we need to reframe our mind to understand that a symptom is a warning sign that something is off, but as far as which direction or adjusting our medications based on our biased assumptions; that’s just not a smart move. I think we need to re-identify our hypo/hyper symptoms as JUST symptoms, not: “oh, that’s a hypo symptom” or ” I’m gaining weight so I must still be hypo”. When we are bias to where our labs are or what we read online in relation to a specific symptom, we lose clarity and often times end up being wrong.

For example, I spent years trying to increase my T3 dose to assist my weight loss efforts thinking that having a higher FT3 would surely help. But the more T3 I took, the more weight I gained and the more suppressed my TSH became. How could that be? Weight gain is supposed to be a classic hypo symptom yet there I was super suppressed TSH/hyper and high FT3 and I was at my all time heaviest. Mind blown….. I must be missing something because this goes against everything I thought to be true about thyroid symptoms. Since the first of the year, I have significantly decreased my dose of T3 and I have lost some weight. So that totally blew my symptom bias assumption out of the water. I always assumed that I must still be hypo if I was gaining weight.

And yes, sometimes people do gain weight when they are truly hypo and my weight example was just one of many. I myself have found anxiety and depression at both ends also, so I just want you guys to be aware that symptoms can’t always be put reliably in a category.

I listened to an excellent podcast by Dr Alan Christianson the other day that touches on the mixed symptoms subject at about minute 29 but the whole podcast is very informative and worth a listen.