Re: The t4s -- Levothyroxine

[Guest guest]

Hi Red,

Thanks for the info. It's a good beginning in my search for the most easily

tolerated /user friendly Thyroid replacement. About 8 or 10 months ago I tried

..05 Mgs of Levoxyl (Monarch- generic). For me it was awful with

heart-esophagus burn, jitters, and more. I'm generally relatively symptom-free

so when something like that happens, I look for the culprit. I stopped the

Levoxyl after about 4 days and symptoms went away.

Searching the net, I just discovered that Levoxyl was recently reformulated.

The new product dissolves way more quickly than the older one which probably

caused the gastric problems. If you haven't already done so, you and others

might want to read this article

http://www.thyroid-info.com/articles/levoxyl.htm .

Do you like the brand of thyroid you are using and do you know which one it is?

I hope I hear from others too. Since so many people seem to do well on

Synthroid and its generics, I'm willing to give it another try. I'd like to

avoid confusing the effects of synthroid with the side effects.

Thanks so much, Zoey Read the article. It's outrageous!!!

The t4s -- Levothyroxine

In a message dated 11/17/2002 5:50:03 PM Eastern Standard Time,

graves_support writes:

> I am interested in your experience, and others' too, with synthroid and it

> various generics. Is synthroid preferable to the genetics or vice-versa?

> Are their some generics that people like better than others? Has any heard

> of or noticed differences between Levoxyl and Levothyroid or any of the

> other generics?

>

>

You are asking about the various brands of T4. The general name for T4

replacement if levothyroxine. If you get the generic that's what it's

called. Levoxyl, Synthroid and Levothroid are brand names. In a large study

which was initially funded by the manufacturer of Synthroid (the most popular

brand of replacement at that time) it was shown that all were bioequivalent.

That means none were superior to the others. (Boy! Did that make the

manufacturer of Synthroid mad! ...but that's another story?)

HOWEVER, all also had problems with consistency of dosage. In other words,

you might be taking .125, but different lots would have different strengths.

This was presumably due to lack of testing of all batches.

There are often recalls of thyroid replacement because of this problem.

In my opinion, this is still a major problem. A lot of time, people don't

know what is going wrong and think they are having side effects of Graves'

when it may actually be because their T4 replacement is either weaker or

stronger than the last batch, even though marked the same (e.g., .125).

THEN, they found out that a certain manufacturer was charging more than they

should have been, and bad mouthing the competition and the natural T3/T4

combo replacements... ah, but that's much more information than you asked for.

Red

***************************************************************************

Courage doesn't always shout. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of

the day that says, " I will try again tomorrow. "