New and confused

Google the thyroid pharmacist. You may not need those meds. Many dietary changes can be made before interfering with medication.

Hi Aim, you e been suffering for decades, yet you feel hesitant. Trust your gut. The meds are not all that and a bag of chips, as they say.

I, like you, suffered for decades with thyroid disease that didn't show in bloodwork. For me however, I had a neon sign pointing at my thyroid, in the form of a very large cyst. No denying the thyroid disease with a giant cyst, no matter what the blood tests say, right?

Well, eventually I got so bad that I resorted to meds. Started with NDTs, then levothyroxin in several different forms... Then a bovine glandular OTC. The natural meds worked enough so I could function a bit better. The levo was horrible and caused more side effects, and didn't relieve the hypothyroid symptoms for the most part. I couldn't get the dosage stable for any of the meds.

After years on the meds and becoming more I'll from them, I concluded that the meds only work for certain profiles, of which most people don't fall into. And, the synthetic meds are little more than a placebo with side effects, that shifts bloodwork. 

After much research, I concluded that the cause of my hypothyroidism is chemical exposure and heavy metal toxicity (bromine and mercury). I found amino acid therapy to be more effective than any of the meds. There is a biochemical rationale for the effectiveness of amino acid therapy. Once I got my head together enough to  think, the amino acids were the obvious solution to try after so many failures and partial successes. Voila! Amino acids work! 

There are dietary and lifestyle changes you can make to help heal your thyroid naturally. These are things that are not mainstream because there is no profit to be made. Many folks on this site have had varying levels of success with holistic approaches.  Cleansing the toxicity is super important, along with diet and nutrition. I've also found TCM to be extremely helpful. 

I'm happy to share details if you're interested.

Many people do very well on the medication, but those are the people one doesn't often hear from here. Learn about the normal levels, TSH for example, and find out what yours are. You might spend years trying all sorts of alternative therapies and get nowhere, frankly. So I would get going on the medication because it's unlikely to make you feel any worse, or, if you prefer to see an endocrinologist first, wait and see what they have to say.

The amino acids sound interesting.

if you have had the symptoms for twenty years it seems unlikely that dietary changes will be much help.