Hashimotos Health Tip: The Truth About TSH Hey, people! Todays health tip concerns blood tests. As Im sure many of you have experienced, most doctors and even some alternative care practitioners rely heavily on test results. The most commonly ordered are TSH and T4. Some doctors wont order anything other than TSH. And many labs now do what is called a TSH cascade, which means they only test more than TSH if TSH is out of range. Which it isnt, a lot of the time. Regardless of how lousy you feel. What this practice amounts to is simply managing TSH. Managing TSH is not the same as managing Hashimotos. Also, several people have posted questions regarding their lab values. In most cases, I cant give a good answer. Im not trying to be a jerk, its because lab tests are flawed. They are not the be all and end all. They do not provide answers by themselves. With Hashimotos, what you feel, the symptoms you have, are clinically significant and diagnostically important. And heres why this is especially true of TSH. TSH is thyroid stimulating hormone. It is released by the pituitary gland to signal the thyroid to release thyroid hormone. And research has found that the pituitary does not absorb thyroid hormone in the same way that the rest of the cells in the body do. A study published in the British Medical Journal, Meir et al looked into the question of whether or not TSH and the amount of thyroid hormone in the cells of the body were directly correlated. It was shown that the TSH level had no correlation with tissue thyroid levels and could not be used to determine a proper or optimal thyroid replacement dose. The authors concluded that “TSH is a poor measure for estimating the clinical and metabolic severity of primary overt thyroid failure. … We found no correlations between the different parameters of target tissues and serum TSH.” …no correlations… means TSH is not a good measure of thyroid hormone in the cells of your body. Which is where it is needed to do its job. Do want to know what your test results mean? Look at them in the context of how you feel. A thorough assessment of your signs and symptoms is, by far, the best way to understand how you feel. Trust your body. It will tell you whether or not what you are doing is working. And if you have normal TSH but you feel like crap, then what you are doing is not working. Its time to try something different. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC143526/
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 21:22:04 +0000