She was merely testing my TSH levels, not the full panel, which is what most primary care physicians, endocrinologists, and psychiatrists do.ĭana Trentini has a great post, The Top Five Reasons Doctors Fail to Diagnose Hypothyroidism, on her blog Hypothyroid Mom. If you are sluggish, gaining weight, have brain fog, need to lie down all the time, and are depressed, please have a FULL panel of your thyroid done. I was seeing an endocrinologist, someone who specializes in thyroid disease, for six years and she never tested me for an underactive thyroid. Every person I know who suffers from chronic depression has a thyroid issue. I want to return to the thyroid for a moment since this is so tricky and so critical. Thyroid testing, including TSH, free T4, free T3, and thyroid antibodies.I asked my integrative doctor, Alan Weiss of Annapolis Integrative Medicine, to give me a list of the three or four most important blood tests a person with chronic depression should ask their primary care physician to do for them, if they can’t afford to go outside their insurance network for a consultation. You should really get a physical and have some bloodwork done by an integrative or functional doctor however, that can be costly, especially if you get a functional doctor who wants to run every test on you. (See my piece, 6 Conditions That Feel Like Depression But Aren’t). A few conditions that are often misdiagnosed as depression are: hypothyroidism, vitamin D deficiency, vitamin B-12 deficiency, insulin resistance or blood sugar imbalances, and anemia. The reason that you may not be getting better despite trying 20 different combinations of medication is that your symptoms of irritability, fatigue, and apathy may not be caused by a lack of serotonin or norepinephrine in your brain, but rather by a tear in your diaphragm or a problem with your aortic valve. From my own 43 years of experience fighting the demon of hopelessness and from all my conversations with folks in my online depression community, Project Beyond Blue, here are some suggestions that you might try. And those good days keep me motivated to get through the harder ones. But now I do enjoy some really good days - where I feel better than I ever have. I have spent more years of my life fantasizing about death than wanting to be alive. I am one of the worst cases out there like you are. If there wasn’t any, I would not be alive writing my blog. Is there anything else I can do or will I have to live the rest of my life plagued with sadness?”įirst, hear these three words: There is hope. I keep getting the same email over and over again, and my heart aches each time I read it: “I have tried everything to overcome my depression, but nothing has helped.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |