Hi. Sorry I have't read the whole thread, hope I'm not being repetitive. I have to take a compounded thyroid hormone with both T3 & T4. Synthroid, thyroxine are T4 only, and I don't convert T4 to T3 very well. If you have ever read "Brain on fire", Dr Ackerly explains that inflammatory cytokines in the brain can cause this problem for people.
I recently had a doubling of my thyroid dose. It made me see that my ratio of T4 to T3 has to change with dose increases. Too much T4 with too little T3 makes me have crazy CRAZY hot flashes (menstrual periods every two weeks in earlier years... And I wonder what other nonseen problems?) The severity of the flashes is definitely dose dependent and maybe I'm lucky it's obvious. To more rapidly clear out the storage hormone, T4, I quit taking my med for 8-9 days. Not recommended, but my doctor situation is less than ideal so this is what I did. My feet swelled up to where the tip of the side ankle bone was just visible. My shoes hurt and bruised the top of my feet. The nerve pain was definitely worse. i have looked this up before, and so I know that hypothyroidism can cause swelling, and thus bother nerves.
I think fluctuating cortisol levels also makes my feet hurt more. For those who don't know, cortisol is a potent anti-inflammatory. To save money lately, I stopped my hormones for a couple of months. Hormones and cortisol all are part of adrenal output and HPA-axis problems seen in fibro. Progesterone (and maybe testosterone...?) may be used by the body as the precursor for cortisol. Foot pain did worsen without the progesterone.
Before all this, when we first were working this stuff out, we got my progesterone up enuf that my cortisol levels got normal, I felt fluctuating foot pain that seemed to sometimes to maybe follow the diurnal graphing of how cortisol falls over night, and then is supposed to start rising I think when the pituitary starts asking for more at 4:00 am. Of course if you are becoming more and more hypocortisol (hypo=low) your body may not follow the diurnal pattern at all. When my adrenals were bottoming out on making cortisol my morning cortisol was very low, at the time when it should be highest. And highest when it should be lowering. Not unusual with adrenal insufficiencies. So looking for patterns is not necessarily useful. But if you have higher morning pain, that has been shown in the Torpy,Clauw et al study of morning cortisol to be a fibro problem.
Other thoughts, I think that since you have fibro, you do have a condition which is condusive to having neuropathies. There have been at least 6 fibro/neuropathies studies, which I posted about
here once upon a time.
Post Edited (Rockon) : 1/18/2015 3:48:25 PM (GMT-7)