blacknbluebikes 

Levothyroxine is basically the most prescribed drug in the US. ("leevo" - they're polite and never correct me when I say "Levvo.."). Welcome to the club. Every morning before the shower, then don't eat for about an hour. Then cycle naked.

phughes

phughes

That is for low Thyroid though. Graves causes an overactive Thyroid, so just the opposite.

unterhausen

There is a covid forum where all that talk goes, please don't post any more here.

HeyItsSara

I'm not a trained medical expert nor did I read through all the posts here.

It could be more than one cause - most likely not your clothing as the sole culprit.

The trend towards thyroid irregularity runs in families. My mom had an overactive thyroid; mine is underactive. In addition, since my sister and father each had heart problems, I grew up without eating salt. As an adult, near 40, I was diagnosed and put on Synthroid, which I'll take for the rest of my life. It's not a death sentence.

And the salt in our house is iodinized!!!

Troul 

Air purity would be more concerning than the syn clothes for toxicity related things. Unless you're wrapping your body with spent car trans oil soaked fabrics, I wouldn't put much thought into it.

seypat

I wonder if sextons have a high probability for contracting Graves disease?

And

I thought all autoimmune questions had to be posted in the Living Car Free forum.

I know, don't quit my day job.

genejockey 

"In pre-COVID America, you quit your day job. BUT, in post-COVID American, your day job quits you!" - Not Yakov Smirnoff.

jay4usc

could be pollution from cars?

rydabent

Most all clothes are made in foreign countries, and who knows what they may contain.

rydabent

If a plastic water bottle new has a peculiar smell it is toxic.

cyccommute 

Based on what data or study? Do you have information on what that “peculiar smell” is so that you can assess the “toxicity”? “Toxic” is a term that gets thrown about by the chemical fearing public without much in the way of corroborating evidence. It’s overused nearly to the point of being meaningless.

Oh. You are one of those. Again, got any information to back that up or are you just afraid of them backwards furriners?

pdlamb

The put kymikalz in the clothes they send over here!

willibrord

If its natural and has a common name and has been used for ages, like cotton or wool, its harmless. If it has chemical sounding name and is a recent invention by people in laboratories, like polyester, then it is questionable. Most plastics degrade and off gas so you ingest micro amounts through breathing or through your skin or when you drink water. Many plastics are endocrine disruptors. Impossible to avoid in our modern world, but its good to steer clear as much as possible.

phughes

Yes, stay away from Gossypium and acidic carboxyl.

cyccommute 

People think something is harmless because it has a common name and its been used for ages. That may not be true. There are plenty of “natural” products that are highly toxic. Not only chronically toxic materials but acutely toxic materials.

People are afraid of chemical sounding names because they are ignorant of chemistry. Everything has a chemical sounding name. Some chemicals are toxic is small amounts and some are toxic in larger amounts. (2r,3r,4s,5s,6r)-2-[(2s,3s,4s,5r)-3,4-dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxolan-2-yl]oxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-3,4,5-triol has an Oral, rat: LD50=29,700 mg/kg (0.45 oz/lb). Granted that is a fairly high LD50...the 50% of rats that died probably just couldn’t get out of the way of the dropped sugar...but it does cause 50% of the rat population to die at that level. You might know it as β-d-fructofuranosyl α-d-glucopyranoside. Not ringing a bell? Perhaps you know it as sucrose. It’s also a natural product.

As for degradation, some plastics degrade. Most all materials will degrade to some extent and those degradation products may be toxic or they may be benign. Plastics are no different. Those degradation products probably aren’t going to get through the skin. That’s a very difficult way for most anything to get into a body. There are some materials that can do it but they are relatively few. Skin is pretty good at keeping what’s inside in and what is outside out.

And, finally, some plastics are endocrine disrupters. But they are generally few. There are also several natural products that are endocrine disrupters. Tea tree oil, lavender oil and many soy products are endocrine disrupters.

ridethecliche

If you're taking a cheesegrater to your bibs and adding them to your pasta, then it may be contributing to the issue, but this entire thing is overreach. Sometimes things are idiopathic and you don't get to blame anything for it.

canklecat

Not always. Even after my left thyroid lobe was removed (dead, calcified with encapsulated malignant tumor), the docs suggested keeping the right lobe. The right lobe was still sorta functional. And they wanted to preserve the parathyroid since I had early onset bone density loss. It's hard to compensate for the parathyroid with meds.

I agreed to the partial removal, figuring it's a reasonable risk. Thyroid cancer tends to be among the least likely to metastasize, generally being encapsulated in the calcified tissue. In fact the needle biopsies were more risky, since there's a remote risk of seeding cancer if it happened to be malignant. I understood the risks and agree. I see my endocrinologist and other docs a couple of time a year, along with ultrasounds once or twice a year to screen the remaining thyroid lobe for problems.

And in some cases auto immune disorders that affect the thyroid -- notably Graves and Hashimoto's -- can flip flop, with the patient veering from excessive to inadequate thyroid function. Makes it tricky to diagnose and generally requires long term medical supervision and frequent checks. A friend who's only in her early 30s has been dealing with this since she was a little kid. In comparison I was lucky and able to procrastinate until age 60, although neglecting the problem for about a decade didn't help.

10 Wheels

Granddaughter age 25 just had her Thyroid Totally Remove because of Cancer.

willibrord

Good to hear you are coping with it. Sounds like treatment itself is risky and involves difficult decisions.
What do you think caused your conditions? Do you think it involved environmental factors like diet, or chemicals in the environment, or air pollution or anything like that?

canklecat

Hard to tell. My endocrinologists and immunologist couldn't pinpoint any particular cause for the Hashimoto's disease and subsequent thyroid problem.

A likely culprit was a bad reaction to a gamma globulin injection, which I got after being exposed to hepatitis on the job as as dialysis nurse. I had an almost immediate reaction, within 15 minutes, and was very sick for the next two weeks. It took months to recover. My family said I was never the same again, but it was hard for me to say for certain how it affected me. The physical decline was so gradual I just attributed it to aging.

My grandmother on my dad's side and mom both had low thyroid, treated with relatively low dose levothyroxine or synthroid. But I can't recall any history of auto immune disorders or more serious thyroid disease throughout the extended family. Ditto, cancer. There have been a couple of cases but most folks in my extended family basically died of old age and related decline -- congestive heart failure, etc.

I suspect this lack of certainty is why so many folks with auto immune disorders and unconventional illnesses become attached to blaming non-specific environmental triggers -- foods, chemicals, the environment, etc. But even most medical specialists I've met are skeptical about whether some auto immune disorders are real, even when they treat patients with those disorders. And I've never meet a doctor who thought fibromyalgia or Morgellons is real. They seem to regard these more as symptoms of some other disorder, rather than new or unique diseases. (I'm inclined to agree.)

It's a maddeningly imprecise field for patients. Even when I've met doctors who say that some of these auto immune disorders are real, they tend to only treat the obvious symptoms (levothyroxine for low thyroid) and disregard the full spectrum of related problems. I've met one or two who suggest "natural" and non-pharmaceutical stuff (my ENT doc suggested bee propolis this week, because the prescription meds aren't really helping much), but I suspect they're deflecting, trying to give us something else to latch onto because there's really nothing doctors can do about this stuff.