# Do you take your thyroid medication the day....



## Julied1071 (Mar 31, 2017)

Do you take your thyroid medication the morning you do labs? Why or why not? I have been on .88 mcg for 8 weeks, today, fasted and had all thyroid labs drawn (new doctor Endo.). I did take my Synthroid this morning. I'll get lab results back in 3 weeks. Thanks.


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## Lovlkn (Dec 20, 2009)

I do not take my thyroid meds the morning of my draw as I want to avoid any false reading, meaning some medication may be absorbed and show on the lab.

Consistency is key - you either take your med's or you don't but you need to be consistent.

I also take my labs about the same time of morning everytime. I have recently taken my medication and labs drawn 6 hours post T3 ingestion and 9 hours post T4 ingestion and found the lab results changes a mere .02 different while it does affect the outcome, it was nowhere as large an impact as I expected. This was a 1x test and in no way confirms anything ;-)


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## joplin1975 (Jul 21, 2011)

I'll fully admit that I used to take my meds on the day of the draw. I used to take my meds at 5:00am and have my labs drawn around 8:00am. I'm on t4 only and never thought it would make a difference with t4-only people (but with t3 meds, it clearly makes a ton of difference).

My endo has always been concerned with my free t4 number, which was always in range, but just under the upper end of the range. I always felt good, had no hyper symptoms and my free t3 was always in a good spot, so we ignored it.

The last time I had blood work done, I had changed jobs and wasn't able to get blood drawn until just about 5:00pm -- almost a full 12 hours after I took my meds. My t4 was exactly at the 75% of the range and my endo is much happier with those results.

So next time, if I do a morning draw, I'll wait until after the blood work to take my meds.


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## Felli (Nov 15, 2017)

In the country I live in we are not allowed to leave the blood samples if it hasn't gone at least 12 hours since last intake of thyroid medication. It will give you a falsely high result.


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## Julied1071 (Mar 31, 2017)

I did end up taking my Synthroid the morning I went to have my fasting Labs drawn. I just saw my new endocrinologist yesterday who went over my Lambs but did not give me a copy of them, frustrating! But she told me that my levels were still too low and she needed to have me to decrease my Synthroid which is 88 MCG by taking it 6 days and on the 7th Day cut it in half and she said I should be good. I was hoping to be prescribed T3 medication along with the T4 medication as my free T3 is always consistently where it is and I feel like that makes it hard for me to lose weight. So when I brought that up to her, about wanting to lose weight she prescribed phentermine which I do not have a problem with portion control so I am just so confused. I need to talk to my pharmacist because it doesn't seem like Phentermine can be taken with Cymbalta and my endocrinologist knows that I'm taking Cymbalta.


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## jenny v (May 6, 2012)

It sounds like she is dosing you off of TSH, which is not going to help you at all. You'll probably not be able to lose much weight until you can get your FT3 higher and you'll probably need to find a new doctor who is better versed in how to dose thyroid meds.


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