Synthetic vs Desiccated Thyroid Medicine

Hi, I'm McCall McPherson, co founder and PA at Modern Thyroid Clinic. We're going to talk a little bit about various kinds of thyroid medications, synthetic versus natural, desiccated, and then just what all of that means. So in order to do that, I want you to understand a little bit about how your thyroid works. So we're going to go through that. If you've seen it before, good, you can learn some more. So to start, your brain sends a message to your thyroid by way of tsh, right? So thyroid stimulating hormone that stimulates your thyroid and your thyroid secretes a hormone called free. Free T4. Free T4 is an inactive form of thyroid hormone. It does not impact how you feel at all. And it's what I call conversion dependent. It's dependent on your ability to activate it. Right. When it becomes activated, it becomes free T3. And when you're not really set up for efficient conversion, that's usually in times of stress or inflammation, sickness, pregnancy, insomnia, anytime really that you can think that your body would want you to rest and recover, it starts shunting your crude oil, or excuse me, your precursor hormone that I call crude oil over to your inhibitory mechanism called reverse T3. Right. So let's talk a little bit about medications and how they play into this. So first let's talk about obviously the most common, most commonly used and the most popular medication levothyroxine. So brand names of this include Synthroid, Tiroscent, Unithroid, various forms of levothyroxine that are just branded differently. Okay. So with any of those medications, they're synthetic, meaning they're man made. But, but the real problem with them lies in the fact that they're T4. So I want you to think about T4 like crude oil is to gasoline. We can't put crude oil in our car, but we need it to make gasoline to put in our car. Right. So if you are given a bunch of crude oil and you need to travel 200 miles, whatever in your car, you have to be able to convert that crude oil to gasoline. Well, in my practice at Modern Thyroid Clinic, most of my patients who albeit are probably sicker than the vast majority of people walking around with hypothyroidism, they don't convert well. So what ends up happening is they get a ton of free T4 that's accruing in their body. And because they don't convert it very well to free T3, which is really the only thing that makes you feel good or bad, hypothyroid or Hyperthyroid, they end up deficient in T3. So these people, Synthroid people, end up having a lot of T4 which ends up ultimately lowering your TSH, which you can check out in some of our other videos or our courses. And then oftentimes it also increases reverse T3 which inhibits the absorption of your free T3. So that is Synthroid. That is why it's my belief and really my experience with the vast majority of my patients that ultimately people don't get full relief of their symptomology with Synthroid or Levothyroxine or unithroid, whatever T4 medication we're talking about. So then we look at other meds, right? So then there are the, what you see often is ndt, natural Desiccated Thyroid. So these are drugs like Armor, Nature, Throid, NT, Throid, Westeroid, WP Thyroid. All of these are desiccated pig thyroid gland. So obviously they're not man made in the realm that they come from an animal and they're actually supplying us with thyroid gland from someone else. So in that we get part T3 really about a quarter of T3 and about three quarters of T4. So what that does is it supplies us with readily available gasoline and it also gives us enough crude oil that we can convert on our own. For the vast majority of, even my thyroid patients, who are probably sicker than most people, convert well enough to have this kind of a system, they don't end up stockpiling their crude oil or their precursor hormone and they don't end up stockpiling reverse T3 as much as they do on Synthroid. But that being said, there are a subset of patients, probably about 5% of my patients, that can't even convert well enough to do this for whatever reason. And during that time, which, you know, conversion issues are often lifestyle mediated. So obviously we're approaching that from a functional medicine approach. But during that time it's really important to me that I get them feeling better during that process. So for those particular niche of patients, and let me erase this and this, I use T3. So T3 meds are like Leothyrene or the brand name is Cytomel. So this is direct gasoline to the bloodstream really, there's no T4 involved and it is synthetic. But it is still a necessary thing for people who have such poor conversion. They just can't handle even NDT or natural Desiccated thyroid options. That's the gist of various kinds of thyroid medications. If you want more information, if you want to become our patient or sign up to take one of our courses. You can click the link below. Thanks.