8 Reasons You Have Symptoms of Too Much Thyroid Medication

Heavy metals, such as arsenic, mercury, cadmium, or lead, can contaminate seaweed in the water where it grows. Most commercially available seaweed is roasted, which means it has undergone an additional heating process that makes it crisper than dried seaweed. This includes the variety called nori, which is the standard sushi seaweed. Nori comes in thin, dry strips often wrapped around a sushi roll. If you’re not accustomed to eating seaweed, you may want to start with small amounts of dried seaweed and increase it as you get used to the flavor or find ways you like it.

What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Seaweed Regularly

The Ruscio Institute has developed a range of high-quality formulations to help our clients and audience. If you’re interested in learning more about these products, please click here. Note that there are many other options available, and we encourage you to research which products may be right for you. The information on DrRuscio.com is for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. You can see that there are a lot of available options when it comes to weaning off of thyroid hormone—there’s no need to rush the process.

Speak to a healthcare provider if you’re concerned before consuming seaweed. Seaweed may have health benefits, including improved thyroid function, blood sugar control, heart health, and weight management. However, eating too much seaweed can have potential risks and side effects. Levothyroxine is a prescription medication that is used to treat hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid gland). Levothyroxine works by mimicking the activity of the natural hormone that is normally generated by the thyroid gland. Levothyroxine is a medication that is generally taken for life to maintain normal thyroid function.

Rare side effects

However, taking unnecessary thyroid hormone won’t help improve symptoms and can lead to the symptoms of too much thyroid medication 10 11. To avoid overmedication with levothyroxine, your healthcare provider will use your thyroid blood test results to see if you are getting too much. In some cases, having a TSH level that is lower than normal (or a triiodothyronine(T3) or thyroxine (T4) level that is higher than normal) can be a sign of overmedication. While seaweed is nutrient-rich, too much may cause health risks due to the iodine and heavy metal content.

Increasing your thyroid dose also puts excess strain both on your bone density and on your heart tissue. The more thyroid hormone you have the higher your metabolism will be, the more fat you will burn at rest, and the more energy you will have. If you are truly taking too much then you will most likely also see some changes in your lab tests. Sometimes, you end up getting too much levothyroxine because of factors that are not directly related to the medication. There are a number of ways you can end up taking too much levothyroxine. Sometimes, it takes trial and error to get your dosage just right.

• Contact your healthcare provider if you’re experiencing symptoms of too much levothyroxine.
• Before increasing levothyroxine, it’s important to check thyroid hormone levels with thyroid function tests 2.
• I can’t promise that you’ll be able to remove thyroid medication altogether.
• Consumption of certain foods and beverages such as soybean flour, cotton seed meal, walnuts, grapefruit juice, coffee, and dietary fiber can decrease the absorption of levothyroxine.

Your menstrual cycle is one of the many things regulated by your thyroid and one of the primary signs of hypothyroidism in women is an irregular period. Going on Synthroid should actually help you return to a normal cycle, which is a good thing, but may be surprising if you’ve gotten used to synthroid concentrations missed or delayed cycles. If your cycle is still wacky after a few months on the medication, talk to your doctor, Goldfarb says. If you’d like to try reducing or eliminating your thyroid hormone, do so only with the help of your doctor. Additionally, our team at the Ruscio Institute for Functional Health is passionate about both gut and thyroid health, and we’d love to assist you on your healing journey.

Monitoring for Thyroid Overmedication

• The patient needs to discontinue it for a couple days, as it’s a water-soluble vitamin, and then it won’t impact blood testing.
• Heavy metals, such as arsenic, mercury, cadmium, or lead, can contaminate seaweed in the water where it grows.
• For more information on fluoride and other strategies to minimize your exposure and encourage detoxification of fluoride specifically, check out my article on fluoride.
• A third-party lab test revealed that this particular product had high levels of arsenic, and this matched up with my own toxicity lab results, which showed elevated levels of arsenic.
• Many people end up on a T4-based therapy if they don’t have enough thyroid hormone, something like levothyroxine, which is the generic, or it comes in many different types of brand names.

Many people prefer NDTs because they are considered more natural. Consumption must be fairly high—more than 4 grams daily—and results are inconsistent across studies. For example, one study found positive effects only occurred in males. Studies show that a dose of seaweed above 4 grams (g) daily for about a month is needed to see blood pressure benefits. Other components in seaweed may have an effect similar to those of blood pressure medications called angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors.

Thyroid Supplements: Popularity and Controversy

Unfortunately, this rapid cycle does NOT allow for normal ovulation. It doesn’t allow for the normal peaks of various hormones such as progesterone and estrogen and it is these problems that lead to infertility. As your dose of levothyroxine increases, it will become more and more difficult for you to fall asleep and have a restful night’s sleep. The exact opposite is true when your levothyroxine dose is not high enough. This is different from when your dose of levothyroxine is too low.

Even cleaning, laundry, fragrance, and personal care products marketed as “natural” or “green” can still contain chemicals that have been artificially synthesized, and could cause health problems. Opt for fragrance-free products whenever possible, and make swaps for everyday household products. They will mention these symptoms and mention it’s related to the thyroid. Then their clinician thinks the numbers look kind of funny, and they get concerned about that, so they adjust the patient’s thyroid hormone.

Excessively high TSH levels signifies that an individual is likely not getting enough synthroid. Since the severity of hypothyroidism is subject to individual variation and synthroid dosages necessitate patient-specific optimization, “too much synthroid” for one user may be a normal dose for another. An upset tummy and diarrhea are two potentially embarrassing but relatively common side effects of Synthroid.