McCall McPherson argues that TSH alone misses thyroid problems. Inactive hormone can pile up while active hormone stays low, leaving you fatigued, foggy, and gaining weight. Get a full thyroid panel instead.
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If you are on thyroid medication and your doctor is deciding what to do with it based on your tsh, you have it all wrong. It's actually impossible. Most especially if you're on a medication like levothyroxine, Synthroid, unithroid, tiroscent, those classes of medications. And I want to tell you why. So essentially that is all. An inactive hormone doesn't actually help you until it's activated. If you can't activate that hormone, you know what happens? It stockpiles. I give an analogy of crude oil. It stockpiles a bunch of crude oil. Your body needs gasoline because you're not activating it. That crude oil communicates to your brain that you have so much thyroid hormone that you can lower your tsh. What happens then? You've got all inactive hormone that isn't helping you. Sends a message to your brain, lowers your tsh. Your TSH looks fantastic to your doctor and your doctor says, well, your thyroid looks great. All your fatigue and brain fog and weight gain and hair loss, it can't be your thyroid because your TSH looks great. Meanwhile, your active thyroid hormone, the hormone your body needs to fix all of those symptoms I just mentioned, is low because again, you're not activating your medication to make it usable for your body. So long story short, the worse you are at using your medication, the better your TSH Labs will look to your doctor. So gotta look deeper. You need a full lab panel.
