Feeling better on iron supplements but.....

[Guest guest]

my biochemist friends...there are now three of them pleading with me...continue

to warm me about iron's toxicity. Could it be that you need to raise ferritin

ONLY until you have stabilized your thyroid function?? Then you can reduce it

to below 50 as many authorities on this subject recommend??? My Ferritin is

58...taking 18 mgs of Ironsorb daily and feeling better than I have in a long

while...seem to be tolerating thyroid (T3) better too. But the science backing

recommendations of ferritin below 50 and some even below 40 is pretty

strong...it makes me wonder whether raising ferritin to the 70-90 range only

needs to be done temporarily until thyroid issues are resolved! Chemist input

below:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

There is consensus now that the serum ferritin (SF) should be below 50 ng/mL

since otherwise one is going to get plaque in the blood vessels, and this may

lead to an insufficient blood supply in various organs. The thyroid is connected

to the blood supply of the brain, and in MS, where veins serving the brain are

interrupted, some of the blood flows out of the brain via the thyroid. This is

known as collateral circulation, and in this case, it keeps the people from

dying. The lack of blood makes these people immensely fatigued - some cannot

even open their eyelids, and when you re-open the circulation by surgery, they

suddenly can feel their hands and feet again because their brain is getting

supplied sufficiently with glucose etc. Their brains are strongly overloaded

with iron. One patent client had strokes, and his SF is about 250 so he went to

have it lowered. This was at the most advanced place in Stuttgart, and the

doctor told him that the normal range goes from 30 to 350 so he was totally in

the green range and there was no need to treat.!!!!!!!!!!! At that clinic, he

met a woman with an SF of 5000 (five thousand) who was being treated, indeed.

There is no place on earth where you hear and read so much nonsense as when you

go to hematology. It is unbelievable. In every country, there only is a tiny

number of doctors who could really be called iron specialists. You may recall

our former chancellor Helmut Kohl. Lately, I saw a picture of him where his

hemochromatosis was conspicuous, so I put this into an iron blog in very

cautious words. This was censored out after a while, but he was not treated, and

he got strokes (a common symptom of iron overload) and is bound to a wheelchair

now.

The thyroid certainly needs iron to function, much as it needs selenium, iodine

etc, but in small quantities. My thyroid was totally out of function about 30

years ago so I needed four grains of thyroid each day. At that time, I underwent

chelation treatment for iron overload, and I got palpitations so I cut down on

thyroid pills and eventually could stop them altogether, to this day. I still

have two bottles with the 2 grains pills.

In the US, there is iron fortification. In fertile women, this drives up SF by 3

ng/mL per year on average, and in men of the same age group, the value is 4

ng/mL. This is because men do not menstruate, but they may of course lose iron

via bleeding hemorrhoids which has the same effect. Iron goes into the walls of

the arteries and veins and gives a blue color to the veins which may be observed

on the underarms and in the skin above the eyes, also at the ankles. The

distribution of iron in the body is uneven, and it might get in short supply at

some places.

But this iron craze in hypothyroid people has a lot to do with their being

conditioned to regard iron as a wonderful thing of which one can never have too

much. We just got a new grandson, at term, good weight etc and drinking heavily.

Like in most newborns, his head is red from iron overload, and mother's milk

contains a chelator for iron named lactoferrin, so within a few months, his iron

will be lowered to normal on his diet of mother's milk.

But in the US, formula for babies does not contain lactoferrin - it contains

iron (just for sales reasons) and one tells the young mothers that this iron is

wonderful for your baby. My wife read the same story to me from a German journal

where they recommmended 8 milligrams of iron per day for a baby. (This would be

a good dose for an adult without hemochromatosis.) No wonder they get autism -

one third of autistic children have very high iron values.

As to your patient, an SF of 58 already is in plaque country. There is no point

in raising it. In my iron group, there are some highly intelligent women who

keep their iron in a low range of about 20 and claim that this is where they are

feeling best. It may differ a bit from person to person, but I think ten to

forty is where we are going to settle in 50 or 100 years. (These values are

highly political.)