Undiagnosed Conditions

[livingwith]

Hi There, I am 49 year oldwomen who has suffered with sooooo many symptoms,everything from hair thinning and hair loss,mood swings,always being tired, even when I wasn’t doing. Ther is so much more. I recently was reading everything I could on low thyroid and found out that most lab work is wrong. Doctor have been basing our TSH results on OLD levels. In 2006 I had blood drawn, and my TSH level was 2.80.The OLD level was 0.5-5.0
the NEW level changed after 2003 is 0.3-3.0. So I was told yo...Read the full article

[Circadiabsurdium]

I feel your pain! I have hypothyroidism too, which went undiagnosed for several years because my TSH wasn't within the old levels. Later, a nurse practitioner discovered during a physical exam that my thyroid was enlarged (later they found nodules). So, despite having not high enough TSH, they gave me a low dose of levoxyl which caused the nodules to disappear AND all the tiredness, feeling cold all the time, etc., to go away. A few years later, the tiredness, etc., came back, but again the TSH wasn't high enough to up my dosage, so out of desperation, I self-medicated for 6 weeks (felt 100% better) and had them test my TSH again - and it was exactly the same as what it had been 6 weeks before, i.e. taking a higher dosage did not overmedicate me. So, they finally raised my dosage. Hopefully with the new higher TSH guidelines I won't have to do that any more - self-medicating is potentially very dangerous, and no one should have to play doctor because their own doctor won't do his job.

All you women out there (and not just the 40-plus crowd - I was 20 when the symptoms started, and 25 when finally diagnosed), please scold your doctors for not doing a physicall exam of your thyroid. The nurse practitioner who diagnosed me said a physical thyroid exam (feeling the neck/throat for enlargement) is supposed to be STANDARD for all medical exams. Doctors give way too much weight to lab results and tend to label physical symptoms as depression or hypochondria (or else remain deliberately ignorant as with not doing the physical exam), so if you're on thyroid meds and your symptoms start to return, be persistent about getting a higher dosage.