Has the makeup of the thyroid tablet been altered recently

Posted , 5 users are following.

I was asked by another thyroid sufferer if over the last few months I was feeling more lethargic than normal, I replied I did. He is French his mother also is a sufferer living in France, She has told him there is a lot of concern over the effectiveness of the tablets dispensed over there

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11 Replies

  • Posted

    I was on thyroid medication for several years.

    I don't trust any of the prescription meds. They made me horribly sick and never worked right, though I tried a dozen different ones. I found the consistency to be unreliable across every prescription brand.

    FDA dose requirements are +/- 10% of label dose. This means there can be as much as 20% difference in dose between lots. Much of the manufacturing moved to Puerto Rico a while back. Frankly, the history of thyroid medication is pretty ridiculous. The more I researched it, the worse it got. Levothyroxin was never clinically tested in the US and was essentially grandfathered into the existing FDA process in 2002, though it had been on the market for half a century prior to that time.

    • Posted

      For your information as of Oct 2007 the FDA is mandating that levothyroxine sodium drug products tighten their potency specifications to meet a 95 percent to 105 percent potency specification until their expiration date.

    • Posted

      Hi Sam, thanks for posting the specs. I got the +/- 10% information from my compounding pharmacy in 2015. Hard to believe a compounding pharmacy would make that sort of error.

    • Posted

      Hi MtViewCatherine, out of curiosity I searched the FDA site for information about thyroxine.

      I can't include the link but the paragraph above is copied verbatim so it should be easy to find. The FDA also publishes data that show how new medications or formulations are reviewed before a license is granted. For example, I had a look at the New Drug Application of Unithroid from Oct 1999.

      From what I read the struggle manufacturers face have less to do with dosing accuracy but rather with the fact that thyroxine is not a particularly stable substance, meaning that the potency may decrease as the medication reaches the expiration date.

    • Posted

      interesting. I'm familiar with thus concept and really, this is a shelf-life issue that would be a reasonable concern with NDTs, as they are basically freezdried animal product, and would degrade relatively rapidly. However, the synthetic meds should not degrade the same as biologicals, and in fact, I believe this is a problem with their effectiveness, as I can attest to the fact that even three years after going off levothyroxin, I am still detoxing this horrible chemical and can smell it periodically coming out in my urine. Yeah, I'd never have believed it would last that long either.

    • Posted

      too many issues to name. There are literally thousands of posts on the unacceptable side effects of levothyroxin. For me, it worsened my thyroid disease, caused my cyst to grow, caused massive weight gain, extremely brittle bones (broke one foot twice and it takes a year to heal), migraines that never ended, severe autoimmune disease (lupus, fibromyalgia), gut problems, and I was so anxious, I couldn't function- to name a few.

  • Posted

    I take essential amino acids and extra phenylalanine.

    You might want to switch to a natural- ThyroGold- then start tapering down while using the amino acids.

    This should work for you as long as you still have a thyroid gland.

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