But I’m still on the course of meds for ear infection, which I do/did definitively have—took three trips to the doc before somebody actually looked at the problem and said, yep, that’s an ear infection. But, oh, well.
On the other front, I take thyroid meds for a nicely manageable condition so long as the meds are right. And around Christmas the drugstore asked me to sub a generic. It was a generic I’ve taken before, during a time when the industry was having a problem with one company, the main one—so, okay, save a hundred dollars out of pocket, yep, I’d do that. The insurance wouldn’t pay for it because they want to go generic on that one.
Well, a slight ear problem dates from that substitution, and went serious in March. Since then I’ve blamed everything but space aliens until I thought to check the med side effects.
So I went back to the endocrinologist to ask him to undo the change, and Walgreens, bless em, having innocently gotten me into this mess, took up the cause and got a doctor’s statement that I had to get OFF the generic immediately, and onto the brand name he wanted. So, upshot of the deal, NOW that I have it on my record that that is the case, the insurance will pay a portion of the new bottle (deducting the pills already taken) and fully pay for subsequent prescriptions. Plus the druggist added a Generics Contraindicated to my permanent account. This is a good thing. I was on Zoloft before we realized it was thyroid, and this is supposed to make you happy-happy and not depressed. They handed me a generic of that once, and in 24 hours it sent me suicidal ideations. Fortunately an education is a life-saving device: I could say to myself, self, it’s the chemistry. Tough it out. Stop the med and call the doc. WHich was of course exactly what you should do.
So generics and I are not good friends. And hopefully since I’m only halfway through the med for infection, I’ll ultimately beat the dizziness.
I hope you’ve gotten to the root of the problem, and the dizziness clears up soonest.
I wish you could say your go-rounds with Big Pharma and Big Insurance and I-Went-To-Medical-School-And-You-Didn’t syndrome was an isolated case but we all know that isn’t so. I had a go-round about thyroid medication of my own. I was put on Armour thyroid because it works for me and the synthetic generic doesn’t. I had a great doctor at the time who went to bat for me with Big Insurance that wanted to switch me to the (cheaper) generic, which does squat for me. I now have it in my records that I am “intolerant” of that (really cheap to make so we make a lot of money selling it at inflated prices) synthetic thyroid hormone. He got the insurance to pay for it. I had the foresight to get a copy of that record from him when he retired and I’ve got it in writing from somebody with M.D. after his name, for when the doctor in question won’t take my word for it. (Why should they? You’re only a patient. What do you know?)
That said, I think all the medical shows on TV, give people the idea that medicine is an exact science, which it isn’t. We get the idea, I’ll just go to a doctor, they’ll diagnose me, and I’ll get treatment and everything will be fine. Medicine is still largely as much a matter of opinion as it is a science.
You have to be your own health advocate. You have to keep after it and stand up for yourself. Yeah, you’re only a patient, but you know more about yourself than they do. You know what’s usual for your body and how it works. After all, it’s been yours since birth and you’ve lived in it every day of your life.
I had my mom come get me and take me to the ER on 31 August, 2001, because I knew there was something wrong with my body. (She tried to talk me out of it. I told her if she didn’t come get me, I was calling a cab and going anyway.) I was not in pain, I had not been having any pain, but I had niggling little symptoms, and a feeling of unease that something was not kosher in my right lower abdomen. Well, I got my hand patted, (I had none of the classic symptoms) and was told not to worry, that a good dose of laxative would soon sort me out, but I held out for a CAT scan, which they did. Well, there’s something going on in your right lower abdomen but we can’t quite tell what it is. We’ll admit you for observation because it could be serious but it probably isn’t. I stuck to my guns, was offered and opted for exploratory surgery, and the surgeon told me afterward I had the biggest appendix he’d ever seen. It was the size of his thumb and it was ready to blow. He said I was really lucky it hadn’t blown. But there’s more!
The apartment where I was living at the time was scheduled for demolition to make way for a freeway, and I (and my three cats) was scheduled to move on 23 September. I had to be out no later than 25 September so they could demolish the building. I was under the gun. Thank goodness TXDOT was paying to have packers come in and pack up my stuff, because it was rough enough to have to deal with all the mess of moving 22 days out from an incision from navel to nevermind. I shudder to think the world of hurt I’d have been in if that sucker had ruptured and I’d ended up with a full fledged peritonitis. My mom would have had to take off work so she could be there when the movers came to pack and move me, but she could have never coped with moving my cats (one of whom had to have a towel thrown over him to contain and restrain him so that he could be shoved into a crate by main force).
We will all hope that the days of your dizziness are numbered and that it is a one-digit number.
I don’t think it’s so much that medicine calls itself an art rather than a science, but the fact that we all have different genomes. If we want to insist we are individually unique — “There’s nobody else in the world exactly like you.” — we can’t really expect one pharmaceutical to cause the same effect in all of us. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Thyroid meds (levothyroxine) are notorious for not being brand-interchangeable; I was told not to switch even among generic brands. (Had to switch pharmacies once because of this.) I’m curious, though: when you say the brand-name med “works,” do you mean 1) your lab-test numbers are back down in the “normal” range? Or, 2) you actually *feel better*? (Or 3) both?)
Not all thyroid hormone medications are created equal. To complicate the picture, there are actually two thyroid hormones, T3 and T4. Synthroid, Levothyroxine, Levothroid, Unithroid, and Tirosint only contain T4 — even though it is synthesized from chemicals in a laboratory, it is identical to human T4. Armour thyroid is an NDT drug, which stands for Natural Desiccated Thyroid. It combines T3 and T4. It is a glandular medication that comes from animal sources (pigs, actually, that were slaughtered for meat). It is not bio-identical to human thyroid, but close enough to be effective (analog).
Here’s the thing: T4 is not active in the body, it has to be processed and turned into T3 which does all the good stuff. If you’re low on T3, taking T4 is not going to help.
Each type of medication has “inactive ingredients” and you may be intolerant to one or more of them:
Synthroid- Inactive ingredients include acacia, confectioner’s sugar (contains corn starch), lactose monohydrate, magnesium stearate, povidone, and talc.
Armour Thyroid- The inactive ingredients are calcium stearate, dextrose, microcrystalline cellulose, sodium starch glycolate and opadry white (colorant).
Synthroid can take up to four weeks to affect your lab results. Armour thyroid results may start showing up in two weeks.
Other medications you take can interfere with your body’s ability to convert T4 to T3, such as oral contraceptives, hormone replacement, beta blockers and ACE inhibitors, acid reducers, lithium, anticonvulsants, and theophylline. If you are taking any of these medication, you may feel better on an NDT drug because a T4 drug will not easily convert to T3.
If you have a vitamin B or D deficiency or are anemic, this can affect your body’s ability to convert T4 to T3. Acid-reducing medications, estrogen-containing hormones, benzodiazepines, opiate analgesics, blood pressure pills, diuretics, statins, even coffee and wine could deplete levels of nutrients such as riboflavin, selenium, zinc, vitamin A, methocobalamine (a form of Vitamin B12), vitamin B6, iodine and iron levels and thus hamper your body’s ability to turn T4 into t3.
What other health conditions you have and the medications you may be taking to treat them, your overall level of nutrition, and other factors play into which type of drug works best for you. I suspect the reason the T4 drugs (Synthroid, etc.) don’t do squat for me is because I’ve been on omeprazole (Prilosec) for years because of my hiatal hernia and also on HRT.
Dizziness is subsiding. I am in the endocrinologist’s zone of ‘good’ for ‘me’, which is a lot lower TSH than GP’s will generally call ‘normal.’ I was beseiged by depression, was on Zoloft, suffering other symptoms, and when I got the diagnosis and started treatment, I’m off the Zoloft (antidepressant) and have been for years. Moving out of the Great Plains allergy zone helped a lot, too, but not enough. As long as my TSH is in the extreme low end of ‘normal’, I’m in good shape, positive, and feeling good. My TSH numbers were actually ok on the generic, but the dizziness was a real pita—I couldn’t drive, had to be careful on stairs, even just crossing a large open space. I’m back on my non-generic and we went out for dinner last night—I didn’t drive, but I could have.
Yay!