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Hi and welcome to my youtube channel my name is sarah peternell i’m the owner of family nutrition services in denver colorado today’s video is about the t3 medication often known as cytomel okay this is one of the medications that may be available to you as a part of your hashimoto’s or hypothyroid medication regimen um i get a lot of questions about what is
Cytomel why would you be interested in taking it and how does it work differently so keep in mind i’m not a doctor i do not prescribe this medication but i am a hashimoto’s patient myself and i’m a hashimoto’s patient advocate and i’m board certified in holistic nutrition and i’m a hashimoto’s expert when it comes to the diet and lifestyle measures that are really
Important for living your best life with hashimoto’s so what this means is that um the rainbow bridge right the gap between the medication and the standard treatment the whole the kind of the standard protocols of treatment which are medication and those lifestyle measures that you can um take into your own hands to eat better feel better live your life better
Um this is where i come in and so knowing about medications and knowing about different options so that you can go into your doctor’s office and be fully um informed and fully prepared to um ask the right questions is really important now if you have questions and you’re going into your doctor’s office you might want to check out my hashimoto’s checklist it’s a
Really great handout um and it’s free so just visit my website the link is in the pinned comments down below but this can be a great tool or resource for you to have the next time you go into your doctor okay so back to t3 so a lot of times patients or you know my clients will actually learn about the benefits of t3 when they have a doctor who recommends this
Type of medication because they’re not getting better on just t4 or synthroid or levothyroxine have you watched my video about why level thyroxine sucks check that one out too so a lot of times if a person’s not getting better then maybe their doctor says gosh you know i don’t know that this medication is right for you and you may do better with also adding in
Another medication which is t3 so that’s what i really want to focus on today so knowing if you do need to use this is definitely um you know a very personal decision that you would make with your physician um a lot of times um this is going to be based on your thyroid blood levels right so your doctor is going to look at labs and decide okay yeah based on the
Dose that you’re taking and the way that your labs are looking meaning you may still have a high tsh you may still have low t4 um or excuse me high t4 and low t3 low free t3 this might mean your body is not converting um the the form of t4 that’s in the medication into the active free t3 or the free and available most usable hormone in your body so what might
Be happening is that you may have a genetic condition where your body is lacking some of the enzymes that are needed to convert t4 more efficiently into t3 and so that’s where supplementing with this medication can help you may also have some other issues going on maybe metabolically where um you are not utilizing the medication properly at the cellular level
So we sometimes call this like cellular hypothyroidism basically meaning you have a lot of t4 circulating through the bloodstream but it’s not getting into the receptor sites the thyroid receptor sites in each and every cell so your labs may even look fine but you’re still feeling really crummy so a couple of things to keep in mind um your doctor may talk to you
About a t3 medication if she measures your reverse t3 and it’s high meaning that basically instead of producing the free t3 or the active form it’s all going into reverse t3 um also if you have any of these metabolic issues like pre-diabetes um if you have um like metabolic resistance or syndrome x or insulin resistance some of these other conditions may also
Contribute to why your body’s not using your t4 properly and sometimes the test that the doctor will do for you is to see if you are actually leptin resistance and so leptin is one of the hunger hormones and so your doctor may want to do a fasting leptin to see if it is also high because this may indicate some of those metabolic conditions that are preventing you
From really using your medication in the best way um also if you have an elevated fasting insulin if you know you have diabetes pre-diabetes or other blood sugar issues as i said these can all be reasons why your doctor may be thinking about a t3 this one’s interesting i read research recently that t3 may be helpful in patients who have a history of fibromyalgia
Chronic fatigue syndrome or those who have chronic muscular pain and this is often um especially the fibromyalgia and the chronic pain is often one of those um kind of like thyroid receptor site resistance issues meaning that like your labs look normal but you’re just still feeling really crummy and nobody can seem to figure out why when you’re taking the proper
Dose of say synthroid so um if you are one of those people that’s like really prone to kind of the chronic aches and pains or maybe even cyclical aches and pains your doctor may be interested in speaking with you about the addition of t3 um and sometimes you may have tried some of the other natural desiccated thyroid medications which you can also find videos
About those as well and maybe those didn’t work right so maybe the natural desiccated from the bovine or from the porchine you know origins meaning that they come from the the desiccated uh thyroid of an animal and if your body’s not doing well with that either then your doctor may consider doing a combination of synthroid and cytomel together so my clients
Ask me a lot you know i’m 20 plus years into my hashimoto’s journey and my antibodies are well within the normal range again i attribute so much of that to the diet and lifestyle measures that i’ve taken over the years but i do still take medication because i had so much thyroid damage done over the years before i really had some of this stuff under control so
I currently take a combination of tiracent which is levothyroxine in like basically like a little gel capsule so there’s no added anything which is great because of having celiac disease it means i’m going to absorb it and utilize it really well and i also take a small dose of t3 to help support some of those conversion t4 to t3 issues you know i never really
Like to think about it as a diagnosis for myself but in the past i did have doctors say well you kind of have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue because you know before i started really getting a handle on hashimoto’s and doing things naturally i was really tired and i did have a lot of aches and pains so reading that research is interesting um i wonder you know
How many more people maybe who are new on their diagnosis journey or maybe how many people like me earlier on just had things that kind of wouldn’t resolve with medication and treatment might do better with the addition of a t3 so um okay i’m going to go through just a couple more things again because i don’t diagnose treat or cure that’s not part of my scope of
Practice but here as your hashimoto’s patient advocate i’m really just kind of giving you some things that you should probably talk to your doctor about and make sure that um you have all of your options in front of you um okay so let’s see um what would be some of the benefits of using this type of medication well i think that for a lot of people who really
Have been struggling with weight loss with their hypothyroidism t3 can be one of the things that kind of really helps to support a healthy metabolism you may remember from some of my other videos that the key thing about your thyroid is that it helps with thermoregulation right your body temperature and the way that you utilize the nutrients from your food as
Fuel for energy and so taking some of the t3 medications may help speed that up a little bit and support weight loss um it’s not meant as a weight loss drug but for some people who have hashimoto’s and hypothyroidism they find when they add in t3 that they start to feel a little bit better with their weight so that could be one of the nice side effects um and
Again i said the higher basal metabolic rate for so people who are trying to conceive women who come to my practice and they’re doing like temperature taking and they’re tracking you know like cervical changes and mucus changes and they’re going through a lot of the steps to understand okay with hashimoto’s what do i need to be paying attention to so that i can
Know if my body’s ready to conceive one of them is a temperature and so elevating your basal body temperature through the addition of t3 can be very very helpful in complementing the natural food supplement lifestyle potentially maybe other things like acupuncture etc that you’re doing to boost your chances of getting pregnant so that’s really good as well um
Also um i talked kind of just generally like it may help to reduce symptoms which is really good um but it may also help to improve other hormonal imbalances that are going on so i have a lot of other videos about hormone imbalances and the ways in which all of this stuff is connected in the body our reproductive hormones our adrenal hormones or thyroid hormones
Men women it doesn’t matter sometimes the addition of t3 really helps to kind of get things back into normal levels not just for your thyroid but also for your other hormones so that may be one reason is if you’re like my period is irregular man my testosterone is low these would be reasons to bring it up to your doctor as well okay also we talked about you know
Blood sugar dysregulation um i do have a lot of information on my website and here about blood sugar and the relationship with hashimoto’s so check that out but if you know you’re pre-diabetic or you know you’re leptin resistant or you know you’re insulin resistant talking to your doctor about t3 might be really helpful for you as well so okay so i’m gonna leave
It there these are just some of the top line things um i think that are really important for you to know um to take the information from today’s video to download my free hashimoto’s checklist and take it to your doctor and to just find out you know based on my symptoms not everybody with hashimoto’s responds the same well same way to medication you want to
Feel well you want to feel your best you’re already hopefully doing a lot of the lifestyle and dietary things that i’ve highlighted here in my videos and on my website and if you’re looking for more in depth on like elimination diet going gluten-free um managing stress etc you want to join my nourished and renewed with hashimoto’s 30-day program so find that in
The pinned comments below i would love to see you on the other side thank you so much for joining me for these videos and i’ll be back soon with more take care bye
Transcribed from video
Why Take T3 (Cytomel) with T4 medication? And What Does it Do to the Body? By Sara Peternell – Everything Hashimoto’s!