Samantha, Nurse Practitioner in New York reports on the effect the national shortage of dessicated thyroid products is having on health care in her area. My own experience is that the situation is getting worse here in Florida, as well. Nature Thyroid and Westhroid which we had hoped would replace Armour in this practice has also become unavailable. At this very minute our office administrator is calling every pharmacy and pharmaceutical mail order companies we have used, trying to locate a source of these products for this practice (8 endocrinologists who serve a large portion of South Florida). Switching people back to T4 because the desired dessicated thyroid medication is unavailable, seems unacceptable in the “best health care system in the world”.
I thought Samantha’s comments were vital to see:
Samantha writes:
I’m a nurse practitioner in NY, and find that our patients generally do better or Armour Thyroid than on the usual T4 products. As for Cale, it sounds as if he’s in love with BigPharma, but many conservative practitioners and dispensors abound, so take what he says with a grain of salt. I, several MDs and NPs and a DO of my acquaintance all use Armour Thy. ourselves, but have noticed a slight decrease in effectiveness since the reformulation. The real frustration is having to convert our patients back to Levothyroxine and Cytomel which many do not find nearly as helpful. Other brands such as wes-throid and nature-throid are now out of stock, (in our area) and so there is no real alternative. Some of our patients have even tried getting stocks from Canada, to no avail. When I last checked with Forest they had stocks of 120 and 360 dosages available, but most of our patients require much less. While I will still use Armour and prescribe it, when we can get it again – as will my colleagues mentioned above – we are thoroughly annoyed at Forest for the reformulation. Most people tolerated the product very well. Patients should not have to have their effective medication routines switched out from under them. No one wants to change horses mid-stream.
