# Am I suffering from hypothyroidism?



## SomeGuy (Sep 18, 2015)

Hello, everyone.

My TSH result is 3.32, and I feel cold in my extremities when others around me aren't cold, lose hair easily (only when I play with them, though), gained a significant amount of weight in the abdominal region, feel extremely exhausted (to the point where I often even have a hard time paying attention in video games and movies), have a hard time focusing (such that if someone interrupts me when I'm talking, I often need at least like 10 seconds to remember what I was talking about); my short-term memory is bad when I get tired (which happens with little exertion), but my long-term memory is good.

I am in Canada, but according to what I read, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) updated their value for the TSH lab range from around 0.5 to 0.5 to 0.3 to 3.0.

It's unbelievably hard to convince any of the doctors I have seen so far that I have hypothyroidism due to being labeled "normal" in some interval that the clinic I go to uses that's even wider than the AACE's old 0.5 to 5.0 interval, and as one of the doctors I saw put it, these symptoms could be caused by many different illnesses, which makes sense to me, but my TSH result, coupled with the updated range of the AACE, seems to point in the direction of hypothyroidism instead of anything else.

So, I am in fact sufferring from hypothyroidism, right? Or, could I still be sufferring from something other than hypothyroidism? Also, if anyone has a PDF file of a scientific publication (so not just some random website found on Google) related to my argument about the updated TSH range, could you please point me to it?

P.S.

I asked one of the doctors for a full thyroid panel, but if I understood her correctly, she said that they're not allowed to do that if my TSH is labeled "normal".


----------



## Octavia (Aug 1, 2011)

You could be correct in your guess about being hypothyroid. Further testing would be beneficial. In the U.S., we have ways to order our own blood tests (and we have to pay out of pocket for them) if doctors won't order them. Do you have a way to do that in Canada? For example:

So.....your doctor says your symptoms could be caused by a variety of illnesses, but won't do further testing?


----------



## Giga_2015 (Jul 7, 2015)

too bad all doctors just stick to lab results rather than understanding symptoms of patients.

Is it possible to get another doctor and test from another lab? With me its happened, in my one lab test my eosinophils came to 0 and in other 3 tests it was 8.

doctor said its a lab error.


----------

