If you Google hypothyroidism, you will find a list of symptoms. This list can go on and on it seems like effecting any and all areas of the body. The reason is that every system and organ in the body uses the thyroid hormones. The effects are fare reaching. In some cases you will find symptoms listed as mild, moderate to severe, other times they are all listed out. The longer hypothyroid is left untreated, the worse your symptoms can become. I found this out personally. Symptoms are not limited too but include:
- Fatigue, moderate to debilitating
- Feeling off, something is wrong but you cannot put your finger on it
- Weight gain and in very few cases, weight lose
- Enlarged thyroid, goiter
- Depression
- Head aches
- Joint and muscle pain
- Very dry flaky skin
- Hair lose
- Prone to illness or always feeling like you are coming down with something
- Foggy brain, inability to think, concentrate and focus, like you are losing your memory
- Feeling cold, inability to deal with the cold and cold basal body temperature
- Constipation
- Sleeping difficulties and wanting to sleep all the time
- Hoarseness, cough
- Slow slurred speech
- Anxiety, inability to deal with out of the ordinary situations and stress
- Acne
- Heart problems, enlargement of the heart in very rare serve cases. slowed heart rate
- Elevated cholesterol levels
- Bone lose, calcium problems
- Yellowing of skin, liver problems, server cases
In women:
- PMS symptoms
- Irregular periods, heavy periods, missed periods
- Hormonal imbalances
- Infertility
In terms of adrenal fatigue. It is not always seen as a disease or problem by main stream medicine. If you look on Mayo clinics site, they say it is unfounded medicine and blame the symptoms on fibromyalgia and depression. It is not until you begin looking into alternative medicine that you will find anything about adrenal fatigue being real. Another hard thing is a lot of the symptoms are similar and can be lumped in with hypothyroidism. If your symptoms of hypothyroidism persist even after treatment, it cannot hurt to try and support your adrenal glands.
Testing:
Hypothyroidism is tested and diagnosed through blood work. The norm is TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone and sometimes a T4, Thyroxin which is one of the hormones from our thyroid. Even more rarely a T3,triiodothyronine. Only testing the TSH and T4 does not give the entire story of what is or could be going on with your thyroid. A complete panel should be done to see what all is really going on with your thyroid. These tests include:
TSH, T4, free T3, reverse T3, calculated ratios between free T4/free T3, and free T4/reverse T3, along with testing for anti-bodies against the thyroid.
Unfortunately, blood workout does not always show what is going on. It can come back with a false negative result, even though you might have many symptoms of hypothyroidism. As a patient suffering this become frustrating. You are told you are fine, or depressed, but you know something is wrong, but you are not listened to. Finding a doctor who will work with you and your symptoms is difficult.
Adrenal fatigue is generally tested through a saliva test. Not a pretty thing, but that is how they do it. This usually comes back negative, even though you could have adrenal exhaustion. These are not very accurate tests.
Well, I think I will end it here.
Saving the world one stick of butter at a time!
God bless,
Jenn
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