[MonikaT]

I appeared to have Hashimoto's thyroiditis. My TSH was 4.65, my T3 and T4 were still sort of normal but on the low side, my thyroid was enlarged, and my eyebrows could give Peter Gallagher a run for his money if I didn't trim them weekly. At no time did I lose the outer third of my eyebrows which made it hard to convince this one doctor that I needed thyroid medication regardless of having most of the other symptoms of hypothyroidism like fatigue, low body temperature, inability to tolerate heat and cold, and I forget the rest. To make matters worse, in thyroiditis the thyroid will temporarily over-produce shortly before it burns out, and one nurse practitioner freaked out and cut my dose to almost nothing saying she didn't think I needed it, and she's the one who diagnosed the thyroiditis in the first place! I'm on a natural thyroid extract, but every doctor or nurse practitioner insists on using TSH as the master test, regardless of what Free T3 and Free T4 might be. There are a lot of people with sub-clinical hypothyroidism who are going untreated. If TSH is above 2, and there are other symptoms, most people would benefit from a little extra thyroid hromone like Naturethroid or Armour thyroid extract which typically requires a prescription.

I forgot to mention that after the NP cut my thyroid medication to almost nothing, my TSH climbed to 30. I STILL had thick, bushy eyebrows even after taking six months to gradually increase the medication dose by 30 mg at a time every six weeks or so. So, at least in my case, eyebrows were not a good indicator of anything, maybe because of high DHT, I don't know since nobody has ever measured my DHT level.