McCall McPherson explains why levothyroxine alone doesn't work for everyone. Your body has to convert T4 to active T3, and if that conversion fails, you stay symptomatic even with normal TSH numbers. Doctors often miss this and blame something else.
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Why you still have thyroid symptoms despite being on medication in 60 seconds or less. McCall McPherson, thyroid expert, physician assistant and founder of modern Thyroid Clinic here. Let's dig in. Sadly, the number one prescribed medication in America is levothyroxine based meds. These are that Synthroid tiroscent unithroid. These are all inactive hormone. Okay, we're giving you a bunch of thyroid hormone. Unfortunately you're not able to activate it. You have to actually reach free T3, your active hormone, to be able to have a metabolism, mood, libido, energy, clarity of cognition, digestion, healthy skin, healthy hair, eyebrows, right? Something as simple as eyebrows. So because you can't use this medication to make your own active hormone, what's actually happening is all of that inactive medication is just sitting there in an unusable form when what that actually does is it sends a message back to your brain and says, we have so much thyroid hormone, lower this person's tsh. Then what happens? You get labs, you go to your doctor and they say, hey, actually your thyroid hormones are perfect, your TSH looks great, your fatigue is not due to your thyroid, when in fact all you need is a little bit of active hormone and medication that works for your physiology.
