McCall McPherson explains why switching from levothyroxine to Armour thyroid can feel like doubling your dose. Levothyroxine lasts 7-9 days in your system; Armour's T3 peaks and crashes every 6-8 hours, often needing twice-daily dosing. A slow taper with lab monitoring prevents jitteriness and palpitations.
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You guys asked. We're going to go deep on armor. Thyroid. What is it? What makes it different from Levo? I tried it, I had a bad reaction. Can I switch from Levo to it? All of the things. Okay. Armor is a form of what's called natural desiccated thyroid. It's the same class of medication as np. It is pig thyroid gland ground down, made into medicine. It is part inactive hormone chemical, just like Levos, all inactive hormone. Synthroid's all inactive hormone and it's part active thyroid hormone. That's why a lot of people feel better on it, right? Many of us do not convert inactive hormone efficiently to active. And that means we're on Levo, we're on Synthroid, we're on nothing. But we're feeling a lot of thyroid symptoms because we can't activate our hormones. Armour helps to solve that by providing some short, some active thyroid hormone. ARMOUR is short acting. I dose my patients in the morning and again around 32 to 3pm if you do take it once a day and tell me how you feel at 3 or 4pm, put it in the comments. Because most likely you crash and burn, you feel foggy at 3pm, you hit a wall every day. So that symptomatically isn't good, but also it's not good at regulating your feedback mechanism of your thyroid. Often with once a day dosing of armor, someone's TSH has a hard time coming down, everything doesn't balance in response. So twice a day dosing, what else? What else? Oh yeah, let's talk about the switch from Levo to armor. This is complicated. It's complicated. Levothyroxine, Synthroid, tyrosine, all of these meds have an extremely long half life. What does that mean? That means if you're on Levo and you stop taking it today, don't take it again. Half of it is still in your system in seven to nine days long acting, whereas armor is short acting. That's why you have to take it twice a day again. Especially the active component in it peaks and troughs in about six to eight hours. So what happens when people say, oh my gosh, McCall, I tried armor, I had a really bad reaction. I don't do well with it. No. What honestly happens, 99.9% of the time is their clinician says, okay, we're going to switch you from Levo to armor. Today's Monday. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I want you to stop your Levo and start the equivalent calculated dose of armor according to textbooks. So they stop Levo they put them on the full dose of armor. You know what happens when that happens? They double their dose of thyroid medication, y'. All. So of course it's uncomfortable, you feel jittery, stimulated palpitations, over caffeinated, anxious, just uneasy. Yeah, you just doubled someone's thyroid medication dose. So in fact, if this happened to you, it's not an incompatibility with ARMOUR or np, it's poor knowledge on your clinician's part of how to effectively transition you. At modern thyroid clinic, we transition slowly. So we reduce a little levo, let it leave people's systems over time, slowly add on a little armor, allow that to stabilize, get labs return, we repeat that process, we reduce levo a little bit, slowly add an armor as levo leaves their system and we do that until we successfully transition them off. My preferred method of treating people who are on Levo who want active thyroid hormone is not to transition to armor, actually, it's to layer in cytomel or lyothyrenine, which is pure T3 to their Levo. So instead of having desiccated thyroid of T4 and T3 in active and active hormone, you just make that with levothyroxine or Synthroid and Cyanol T4, T3, they take both and all is well and they don't have to go through that whole transition period. So I know that was a lot. I hope it was super useful. Save this later for later and tag a friend. Comment, y', all, please engage with this content. Love y'. All.
