In this video I explain how to convert from armour thyroid to levothyroxine or from levothyroxine to T3. It is based off of a thyroid conversion chart that I create which is more accurate than the traditional conversion chart used by most Doctors.
Hey guys it’s dr. child’s here today we’re going to be discussing thyroid conversion and what you need to know when you’re switching from level thyroxine to natural desiccated thyroid or np t2 t3 or t3 to level thyroxine no matter what you’re doing i want to kind of give you some information on how that should be accomplished okay and the reason i even spending
Time going over this is because i think the chart that i’ve created here is certainly more accurate than the chart that most doctors are using which is down here and we’re going to talk about both of them okay so first so don’t worry i’m gonna come back to this but i want to go up to the chart that i’ve created here and explain to you why i think this one is a
Little more accurate accurate and a little more important so one of the downfalls that i see of many doctors and patients occurs when they go and find a new doctor who’s willing to prescribe them natural desiccated thyroid armor thyroid nature troy – etc one of those medications so the story goes something like this they’ve been on levothyroxine for years maybe
Even decades they’ve never really felt that great on the medicine they read a lot of information online so they’re thinking to themselves i know what i need if i can just be switched to natural desiccated thyroid something with t3 all my problems will be solved right does that sound a little bit familiar to many of you and i see that a lot so what will happen is
Let’s say they go they’re on 100 micrograms or 150 micrograms well let’s just use a hundred for this example so let’s say they’re on a hundred micrograms of levothyroxine so they go to their their primary care who doesn’t have a lot of experiencing experience in prescribing natural desiccated thyroid so he thinks okay well 100 micrograms is probably about one grain
Right so he gives the person the patient which is you one grain of wp thyroid nature–the roit armor thyroid whatever it is and you feel worse okay you check your labs a month six weeks later cuz you’re like well if i just stick on it’s gonna get better you check your labs and guess what your tsh goes up and you’re like and see your doctor says see i told you this
Medication isn’t as consistent as level thyroxine so they they use as an excuse to put you back on your old medication of level or t4 only medication so and and here’s the big problem okay so if you if you look at this this is a hundred micrograms and on my chart i’m saying it’s it’s the equivalent to two grains okay but if you come down here you can see one grain
Of the natural desiccated thyroid is equivalent in their opinion to a hundred micrograms of t4 so they’re using this chart when they give you that medication they’re saying okay you’re right here a hundred of the t4 you know synthetic level thyroxine etc so just come down here to one hundred and then go right across to the desiccated portion which is one grain does
The k2 thyroid so but if you look up here i’m telling you 100 microgram is more closely related to two grams so really what they’re doing is they’re switching your medication and they’re under dosing you okay so remember that one grain of natural desiccated thyroid only has about thirty-eight micrograms of t4 in it and about nine micrograms of t3 in it so you’ve
Gone from a hundred micrograms of t4 to thirty eight plus nine of the t3 and then you’re you know you’re wondering why you feel like crap so a better option would be to say okay well let’s let’s use this conversion let’s just think about it and say 100 micrograms is more closely related to two grains which is two times 38 equivalence of t4 and then nine times two
Which is eighteen of the t3 okay so that’s one of the biggest mistakes that i see both patients and doctors making when they when they switch medication so i want to provide this chart so in my opinion 50 micrograms of t4 is more is about equivalent to one grain 100 micrograms of t4 is equivalent to two grains 150 to three grains and 202 for grants okay and then on
The other side now most most most doctors may switch you from t4 to ndt but most will not or are certainly not comfortable switching you to t3 only however if you do have a provider who’s willing to add some t3 i want you to use these conversions this conversion over here as well so in my opinion based off clinical experience treating you know hundreds of patients
At this point i would i believe that t3 is about twice as strong as t4 now the inconsistency comes when we compare the effect of t3 versus tsh on vs. t4 on tsh suppression okay so when you look at the studies t3 is about 3.3 or 3.4 times more potent at suppressing the tsh then t4 is so most doctors will say okay well then t3 is about four times as strong as t4 and
That’s where they kind of mess up the conversion but in reality it’s about twice as strong so if you’re on 50 micrograms of t4 and you are switching to t3 only i’d recommend the 25 micrograms if you’re on a hundred cut it in half to 50 of t3 if you’re on 150 cut it in half to 75 200 to 100 micrograms now rarely do i get people up to 100 micrograms but i certainly
Have some patients they usually have other issues and we’re not gonna get in that into that today but they have a high cellular demand for t3 what i prefer to do in a lot of patients is do a combination of natural desiccated thyroid plus t3 is assuming that they can tolerate that okay but i want to show you this specifically and how to use this conversion chart so
You don’t fall for that whole this that whole the shenanigans where your doctor says oh you’re on 100 micrograms let’s give you one grain no that’s not gonna do it i’m gonna tell you right now you’re gonna feel worse because it’s just simply not accurate in terms of conversion so that’s a big deal he basically dosing you in half so i also want to spend a couple
Minutes here talking about when switching from t4 to ndt how to make this transition successful because a lot of patients also mess this up and then talk a little bit about the average dosages that i see in my patient population okay and patients that come in to see me because what you’re probably going to be doing is you’re gonna be thinking well okay you know
I heard so-and-so i have some friends or i’m on a facebook group or whatever and they’re on 200 micrograms of of t4 and i’m on a hundred so i need more something like that you know so-and-so is on four grains and i’m on one and a half so what’s what’s the deal there and so what we’ll explain that in a second here as well so to start with when you are switching
From t4 to ndt the the biggest thing you want to make sure you do and one of the most important things is take that transition slowly okay and the reason for that is if you’ve been on t for medication for you know you no longer you been on it years to even decades your cellular receptors are not used to high amounts of t3 so if i suddenly supply your body with t3
From natural desiccated thyroid or just from t3 medication by itself those receptors are ultra sensitive and they uptake that t3 very rapidly and the tissues that seem to be the most sensitive to that t3 are the receptors in your heart okay and so they they utilize thyroid hormone a little differently there t3 especially than the other cells in your body and they
Tend to be very sensitive to it when they’re introduced to it if they haven’t been in a long time so when that happens patients may experience palpitations fluttery sensations jitteriness they may also experience some anxiety they actually might get tachycardic which means their heart rate actually increases that usually doesn’t happen normally what will happen is
The patient will just feel the fluttering sensation but if they check their pulse it’s not actually a rapid pulse okay but to prevent those symptoms from happening i recommend starting out quite slowly and usually about fifteen milligrams or a quarter of a grain 15 as if you’re using armour if you’re using nature 3 wp thyroid or one of those other ones that’s not
Armored its 16.25 milligrams so just i would say just go based off of a quarter of a grain and i usually have patients do a self titration by increasing their dose every 10 to 14 days depending on the sensitivity of the patient okay some patients can can you know go up really quickly and some patients even need to go slower than that so this this is just an average
Don’t live and die by this information okay but this is what i’ve seen in my practice and i’ve treated a lot of people who i’ve transitioned from t4 to mdt and by doing this it will help reduce those symptoms that i just mentioned before getting too overstimulated and then maybe even scaring you a little bit from using that medication further so if you do it the
Right way there’s there’s less side effects and you’ll you’ll do better in the long run okay yes if you notice this you are going to be slightly hypothyroid in the beginning as you transition so the bigger the dose let’s 150 micrograms and i’m starting you out on a corner of a grain okay that’s like 1/12 of the dose you’re going to need but it’s a better way to do
It okay and like i said if you tolerate the titration hopefully your doctor will give you that leeway to kind of do a little bit on your own to get up to like a 1/2 grin and then you can you can stop by and reevaluate the physician at that point that’s kind of the way that i do it in my practice okay so let’s talk about the average dosages that i see patients on
In my office so on level thyroxine so first of all before i even get into these you’ve got to realize that the dosage that you’re going to be on varies tremendously from person to person all right there’s a there’s a very unique demand at the cellular level for thyroid hormone and it varies not only by person it varies by time of the day it varies by social social
Stressors and trauma etc anything else that your body goes under you know you might have an increase the man you might need 100 micrograms one day and 75 the next you might need 100 in the morning 150 in the afternoon these things vary tremendously okay but i want to give you some average dosing here all right so level thyroxine i would say the majority of the
Patients fall somewhere between 25 micrograms per day to 200 micrograms per day yes i’ve seen someone four or five even six hundred micrograms those are unusual and i’ve seen people even on lower you know less than 25 that’s been compounded but i have to say the majority of patients usually fall between 75 and 150 okay per day if they’re on t for only for natural
Desiccated thyroid i have patients on anywhere from a quarter of a grain which is 15 milligrams i’m putting here to 195 milligrams which would be the equivalent of about three grains i kind of i kind of goofed here on these numbers that should have been 16.25 to 195 so forgive that but basically what i’m trying to say is 1/4 of a grain all the way up to about
3 grains and i would say them in this situation the majority of of my patients fall between the 2 and 3 grain range now you also have to remember that i usually add pure t3 onto their ndt to begin with so you know some people come into me with on four or five grains because they needed that extra t3 but really what they needed was the t3 without the t4 so it’s
Often better to reduce by a grain or two and increased by the t3 so but that’s just something that i found in my personal practice that if you if you’ve found a doctor that’s willing to provide it and eat ndt realize you may need to go higher than this if he’s not willing to also prescribe t3 okay but probably around the 2 to 3 grand grand mark in my practice and
Then on t3 i have about i’d say 1/3 or so of my patients on teeth t3 only and that changes based off of their medical conditions but i would say it ranges anywhere from 5 micrograms the lower end if you’re if you come in on t4 only medication and then you can add you know 5 to 20 that’s kind of a way i’m more like 5 to 10 if you’re a conventional physician here
But five micrograms by itself is a pretty low dose if you’re not on anything else but ranging from 5 micrograms all the way up to 100 micrograms per day hundred definitely been on the higher side the patients who would need the hundred micrograms or people with fibromyalgia treatment-resistant bipolar disease chronic lyme disease those type of patients who have
A very high very high amount of inflammation in the body very low conversion rates people have been sick for a really really really long time i’m talking two three four decades those are the patients that really need these higher doses of t3 and i would say most patients that i treat fall between somewhere between the 25 and 50 microgram dosing range here not and
Again it’s highly variable and i will usually add 25 to 50 mike’s in addition to this two to three grains or so depending on the person but anyway i want it i wanted to go over this with you guys because i think it’s very important and it’s something that that physicians and patients mess up quite a bit when they’re when they’re transferring over medications and
The reason this happens is because they’re just most doctors aren’t comfortable switching from level thyroxine to ndt even though they may be willing they just don’t have that information so i i recommend using this as kind of some guidelines here just realize they’re not perfect but i think they’re more accurate then this chart here which is what unfortunately
Comes up when you google thyroid conversion so if your doctor and this is in the textbooks and things like this too so if your doctor if you finally convinced them to to switch you this is what they’re probably going to be using alright and so you can see here as i mentioned before that one grain they put the – 100 micrograms of t4 but you can see here the amount
Of t4 and t3 in one grain is only 38 micrograms of t4 and 9 micrograms of t3 so they’re they’re basically saying this 38 + + 9 is the equivalent to 100 and you know i i disagree with that which is why i created that chart above so feel free to use this information i hope it helps you guys i try to make these things so they’re they’re very helpful so that you know
Even though i can’t treat every single one of you hopefully what i can do is provide you with the information so that you can you know help yourself or even share this information with other people or or doctors so that they can help you a little bit better so i wanted to also show you where this this information came from i have a lot of good information on this
Blog post it’s actually what is this one about oh it’s a level thyroxine dosage guide so i talked about the right dose of levothyroxine for patients what to look out for when you’re on this medication and some other things so feel free to go through this if you’d like i’ve got some other videos on this a couple of other images here but i’m gonna go over that in
A different video so don’t focus on that one too much but anyways i hope this was helpful for you guys leave any questions or comments below feel free to subscribe if you listen to those – this on the podcast you know leave me a comment and i’ll get back to you ok thanks and i’ll talk to you guys soon
Transcribed from video
Thyroid Conversion Chart – Armour thyroid vs Synthroid vs T3 By Dr. Westin Childs
