After several years of conducting metabolic studies, I returned to clinical practice a couple of months ago. When I did, I made an important positive change in the way the clinical practice was formerly conducted—a change that has definitely benefited my patients. That change was to make follow-up testing of resting metabolic rates available to our patients for a nominal fee.

The table below contains important results from a patient’s first and second metabolic evaluations. The numbers in the table show that she dramatically improved by switching from Synthroid to a roughly equivalent dose of Armour Thyroid. Of course, she had improvements other than those in the table. For example, on Armour, she had fewer hypothyroid symptoms, and the symptoms she still had were less severe than before.

This patient improved within four weeks after she switched to Armour. The test results speak for themselves. They substantiate a point that I’ve made emphatically on drlowe.com: T4-replacement (with Synthroid or other brands of T4 alone) is highly ineffective for many hypothyroid patients. Metabolic tests and retests objectively show how ineffective it is. And because it’s ineffective for many patients, it’s also harmful, leaving patients chronically ill, susceptible to several potentially-fatal diseases, and using more drugs.

If you want to know how your thyroid hormone therapy is progressing, metabolic testing and retesting can tell you. During the testing, we measure what is truly relevant to knowing how you’re responding to your thyroid hormone product and dose, which is your metabolic rate. (The TSH is not one of the things measured. The reason is that in most cases, it is totally irrelevant to finding a patient’s safe and effective dose.)

It is important to learn if your thyroid hormone product is leaving your metabolic rate and body temperature too low, and your cholesterol and LDL too high. If you switch from an ineffective product to a more effective one, you can dramatically improve not only the outcome of your metabolic testing, but your health and quality of life as well.

During metabolic testing, we use a breathing device that is more comfortable for patients than the usual mouth-tube and nose clip. This more sophisticated device makes patients more comfortable during testing.