I started self medicating with dangerous thyroid drugs
As a bit of an introduction to my life at the moment, I had a blood test done in the beginning of January. At the time, I was expecting a hypothyroidism diagnosis, and it is what I got. To sum the treatment up, there is a gold standard and a fringe treatment. The gold standard only came to be because of how the drug entered the market. "T4 is safer than T3" is the lie many doctors tell patients nowadays, but the argument is faulty: if you take the T3 responsibly everyday, and taper it down if you want to stop taking it, it isn't dangerous at all. But that was different in the 20th century. In its early stages, both hormones were made from cattle. And although they had a pretty good idea of how much hormone was in the pill, they couldn't be sure.T4 has a longer half-life, so if you accidentally produced a drug with more T4 in one pill, patients wouldn't have huge fluctuations and would, therefore, not feel so different day to day. T3 on the other hand, has a very ...