you know… after 6 years you could have just gotten over it.
did you ever have any blood test?
glad to see you back my friend…I think the thyroid supplements helped you get better…We are finding alot of sufferers are “HYPOTHYROID”…
The more results we get, the better sense it will make…
we haven’t TECHNICALLY seen anyone that is hypothyroid really (i know mitch recovered with thyroid meds, and one guy with hashimotos, but then there are so many of us with different issues) I don’t want all of us to hop on the hypothyroid train and become devastated if we actually end up to be euthyroid… no one has posted excessive reverse t3 yet or had a trh stim test.
Golf, what are your Thyroid Results?
In response to the “could have just gotten over it” statement: I’m not responding to gratuitously dismissive statements. Either take it seriously or don’t bother. Regarding your actual input, I have had blood work, and my liver panel always came out fine, whereas I was “borderline” hypothyroid. Hormone-wise, things were all in normal ranges, but my progesterone:estrogen ratio was staggeringly low (about 12:1, when 35:1 is closer to normal for men). Testosterone was surprisingly fine, though.
I doubt it’s strict “hypothyroidism,” as in my educated guess that’s not even a real condition, but rather a series of contributing factors that retard thyroid function. There’s also Hashimoto’s Disease, but that’s really an auto-immune disorder, as opposed to just a crapped out thyroid gland.
To reiterate, I’m strongly under the impression that I had drastically escalated copper levels. It might sound over-simplified for some, but in my book, simple is good. I’d much rather work with something like “nutritional imbalance” than “permanently altered gene expression.”
Ok letsconv., would you be so kind and post your thyroid panel under hormone/blood tests section of the board.
It’s great that you got all of the testing done, we need the results though
Free Uptake T3
Reverse T3
Free Uptake T4
TSH(not a great marker for thyroid function)
letsc-
We would all like to have a nutritional balance, of course, over altered gene expression. My comment about the 6 year thing was not meant to be a personal jab, merely that some people appear to recover over time.
You’ll have to excuse me for being over-sensitive. I remember trying to get some feedback off this board years before and was taken aback by how negative most of the responses were. I suppose I’m expecting a bad reaction, so you’ll have to excuse me for jumping the cynicism gun.
Regarding the thyroid hormone results, I’m not going to post them because I believe it’s a red herring, and I don’t want to contribute to any ideas that this is a hormonal imbalance. Additionally, my blood work was done in December of 2008, so I assume it’s an unreliable indicator of what my actual levels are now. I do appreciate the request, however, but I doubt that my results would give anyone any actual food for thought.
Okay, well what specifically do u think was the dominate supplement (or step in your recovery) in recovering your erectile function/libido - especially if those are the only issues (no brain fog) remaining?
Perhaps in your case your hormones were not negatively effected… however many, many men’s are, especially considering the drug is documented to effect hormones and had caused secondary hypogonadism, as noted by many here.
Also, not sure why you would say this is not related to hormone imbalance when you yourself stated " progesterone:estrogen ratio was staggeringly low" and “Finasteride drastically increases estrogen levels”. Why won’t you post your hormone values regardless? It’s the only hard, concrete proof of what is going on internally in your body at a certain point in time (even if from 2008).
I’m happy for you that you’ve made improvements, but nowhere in the literature have I read anything connecting Finasteride to copper toxicity. Unfortunately as I’m sure you are well aware, diet and supplements in general have not enabled the vast majority here to recover to a pre-Finasteride state, especially considering that Neuroendocrinologists like Dr. Alan Jacobs believe the problem is androgen related and likely mediated via the Androgen Receptor itself.
Either way, if the supplements are making you feel better overall, great. Hopefully you can continue on and look back on this whole episode as a learning experience in the end.
Congratulations! Thanks for the information.
Golf:
It’s difficult to say which supplement specifically boosts sex drive, as you need a pretty balanced nutrient/mineral palette to acheive optimum health. One thing I didn’t realize about nutrition before I got involved with this is that one of the risks of “mega-dosing” a vitamin, beyond potential side effects from toxicity or overdose, is that the presence of any single nutrient can and will decrease other nutrients depending on how they’re related. So, keeping this in mind, if you have a mostly normal nutritional profile and your sex drive is low, adding zinc (20 mg) and manganese (15mg) three times a day is likely to improve both your libido and rectify the emotional displacement problems a lot of people here seem to experience. However! Zinc is going to reduce your sodium and eat up certain B vitamins, which could exasperate fatigue, making you feel worse than you started. At the same time, both zinc and manganese expel copper from soft tissues, which could exaggerate anxiety once excess copper is pushed into your bloodstream. The most sound approach is to take very low doses of a certain palette of vitamins and minerals. Again, this does sound over-simplified, but the proof is in the pudding.
An aside: you can’t go wrong with ox bile. Again, I recommend Jarrow’s Bile Acid Formulations, one capsule three times a day. It’s good for everything. You’ll digest food better, feel more energetic, filter out excess estrogen, have a stronger appetite, feel less jittery, maybe even your dick will get hard again, the whole nine yards.
On a related note, if one outcome of finasteride poisoning is copper toxicity, and you’ve just been introduced to the side effects, I personally think it could be beneficial to take ox bile and 50-200mcg (note micrograms, not milligrams) of elemental chromium (not chromium stearate or any other sort) three times a day. Chromium very effectively reduces excess copper levels, and if they’re just beginning to get high, it should help you out quite a bit. However, if your copper levels have been high for a while and affected other parts of your body’s nutritional profile (driving down zinc, escalating calcium, etc.), then chromium could exaggerate tendencies for reactive hypoglycemia and anxiety.
I know, it’s complicated! Hence I recommend contacting a bona fide nutritionist. I happen to have found a great one and I’m telling you his name and contact information. Make use of it!
Mew:
One thing I’ve taken away from naturopathy is that hormones are more like your body’s PR system. In other words, they can tell you what’s going on within the system, but that’s about it. With few exceptions are hormone deficiencies or excesses the sole cause of a problem. You can alter your hormones to whatever levels you want, and likely find relief from symptoms in doing so, but I doubt that’s going to affect any lasting change. (I mean, aren’t most hormone therapies permanent, with the exception of, say, menopause?) Think about it in terms of this big oil spill: clearly the entire situation is fucked up, but PR people are saying it’s actually fine, and not something to worry about so much. So you can have a relatively normal hormone profile (artificially adjusted or not) and still be a mess on the inside. Just saying.
Secondly, hormones are extremely correlated with metals. Zinc is vital to testosterone production, and copper and estrogen promote the presence of one another within the human body. To reiterate a possible view of the finasteride problem: it could be that the drug drives up estrogen, which elevates copper levels. Copper can do all sorts of damage to your endocrine system when it’s at high levels for a prolonged period of time, and this sort of situation can easily result in a very problematic cycle that can’t be fixed without some sort of medical/nutritional intervention.
So, again: I doubt hormones are responsible for much themselves, but rather think they’re indicative of the state a body is currently in. Tampering with hormones may be what set the stage for finasteride poisoning, but I doubt that hormones will be the way out of it.
Finally, there are a few points in your logic that I’d like to contend:
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It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read research connecting finasteride and copper toxicity. There’s hardly any research connecting finasteride to anything bad. But you can find documentation that states finasteride impairs liver function, and without a healthy liver, God knows what doesn’t get filtered out of your blood. This point of yours is more an observation than any platitude to argue.
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You say that diet and supplements in general haven’t helped many people here, but are any people here doing it in a routine, scientific way? It seems like most people just gobble up the vogue supplement of the month, bitch incessantly when it doesn’t show immediate effects, and everybody jumps on this bandwagon of disapproval. Where’s the methodology??
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It’s awesome that medical professionals from different fields are looking into this, but isn’t faith in conventional Western medicine and an FDA-approved drug what got everybody into this mess? Nutrition is tried and true, and I think if your symptoms made you that miserable, you’d be interested in at least the idea of a new approach. There’s no need to shoot so much down so quickly based on reasoning that amounts more to very isolated observations and some hearsay.
tdb:
Thanks! Do yourself a favor and look into this. At the very least you’ll have some interesting food for thought.
Given the amount of private messages I’ve already received from people with questions about the program, I get the impression that many people aren’t comfortable making posts in public on this forum, which is a real shame, because this should be facilitating discussion as opposed to making people ambivalent about saying something for fear that they’ll be put on the spot to defend their ideas and views against all this rampant dismissal. For the record, any questions that I’m asked in private that seem worth making public, I will be posting for anyone who may be interested in reading. Again, I’m not trying to shove my views down anybody’s throat, but I am saying that nutritional therapy did wonders for me, that I have medical tests showing something is screwy, and that the mechanisms by which nutrition is working for me make a ton of sense. I mean, I have a problem that showed up on a lab analysis, I’m being treated for it, and I feel better. This, to me, is much more worth embracing than ideas–and that’s all they are, unfounded could-be statements–that this is because of altered gene expression or androgen receptors or blah blah blah things that you can’t even analyze at this point.
If you want to sit around and wax impossible about getting over this, that’s your call. But I for one have insisted on doing as many different regimes as possible until I found something that worked, and guess what? I did. Now I’m coming back to share it with y’all, and it’s the same anti-active stance: you could be wrong, you could have magically healed, it’s probably something way beyond this, I haven’t read anything about what you’re saying before, blah blah blah. Well, boo on y’all. This is a shitty situation for anyone affected by it but you don’t have to continue victimizing yourself. Get off your ass and encourage the people who are looking for ways to solve this thing.
I have been thinking for quite some time to do a full panel of Metal toxicity/deficiency tests. I just know whats the best test and which lab to go for.
I read about some hair analysis test by a user in the recoveries section. Has anyove here gone for hair analysis? If yes, which lab did you use?
Are there any other tests which you guys suggest to check for Metal toxicity/deficiency?
Thanks.
Letsconvenience,
The main reason we wanted thyroid panel tests is because a HIGH Reverse T3 causes COPPER toxicity. I have read books on CFS/Fibromyalgia along with doing extensive research. Thyroid impairment is part of it.
A couple of points:
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Letsconvenience- thanks for your return, and well done on managing to overcome your symptoms. We really welcome your input and feedback, but please, don’t dodge the ‘cynicism bullet’ too much. After many years of suffering, many of us are cynical and it important that we have a thorough understanding of the means of your recovery.
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I think everyone is confusing Wilson’s disease with Wilson’s Syndrome.
Wilson’s disease is a medical diagnosis for defective copper storage in the liver
Wilson’s syndrome is not generally accepted as a medical diagnosis but refers to ‘Reverse T3 syndrome’; specifically the adrenal gland pumps out excess cortisol, thus forming Reverse T3 from substrate T4, instead of the active metabolite T3.
The two are completely different. 2 different men, 2 different diseases.
And now another Wilson (Dr Larry Wilson) has been mentioned above. That’s 3 Wilsons, and we need to realise this!!
Anonnn1- there are currently no cases of abnormal reverse T3 levels on this forum.
JN
True JN…I have scheduled bloodwork for monday…I will post my results as soon as i get them…Most likely within 2 weeks.
Only time will tell now.
This recovery may actually hold dome weight - as I have read that copper toxicity had something to do with low histamine which is associated with hypermethylation, a la awors theory…
Hi letsconvenience
Just wanted to thank you for taking the time to share this and congratulate you on your success.
It’s very interesting and I will give it some thought.
Nick
Annon - can you post the reverse t3/copper toxicity connection you found?
I’ll admit I was skeptical when I first read this subject regarding Copper toxicity. It is certainly clear that copper toxicity levels can effect a healthy functioning throid, it is seems rather strange to test hair to do this.
Is this the same Dr Wilson, that “Wislon’s Disease” is named for. I have done the research to verify this, so if anyone knows different please let me know.
drlwilson.com/articles/thyroid.htm
Can we simply add Copper to a blood test or is there some other way of testing for it?