TSH Dosage Calculator: Find the Correct Thyroid Medication Dosage

It is a question I hear a lot: am I on the right amount of thyroid medication? I have seen people who have been on far too much, too little, and on the wrong type.

In today’s post, I want to show you how to calculate your TSH dosage. This information can help you calculate levothyroxine dosage or check your dose of other medicines and compare it to whichever thyroid medication dosage chart you may be using.

Let me give you a better sense of what I mean, and what you can do if you are in this same situation to get your thyroid levels in an optimal position.

Too much thyroid medication can feel almost the same as too little. So, how would you know you are taking too much?

It is really tough to tell if you are taking a higher dose than your body needs, but you may have symptoms like:

• Hair loss
• Weight gain
• Fatigue

I want to help you figure out what is going on with your thyroid medication dose. So, I created a TSH dosage calculator! It will show you, in terms of percentage, how much your dose is (compared to your body’s actual needs).

The Concept of a Physiologic Dose

A physiologic dose is how much thyroid hormone your body would make on its own if it were working perfectly (Read: How to test your thyroid, the definitive guide). Ultimately, the goal here is to have you feeling your best while having your thyroid be as involved as possible.

Knowing your physiologic dose can help you chart your thyroid medication dosage. It can help you determine if you have calculated your levothyroxine dosage, or other medication, correctly or incorrectly.

Using The TSH Dosage Calculator

There are a few things that I like to explain with the TSH dosage calculator. This is to bring optimal clarity to your situation and your results.

Here is what you need to know…

Weight

Someone who is larger is going to need more thyroid medication than someone who is smaller. It is a pretty simple distinction, but one that we definitely want to make note of when we move forward.

Current Medications

In order for the TSH dosage calculator to work to its full potential, I am going to ask you for all the thyroid medications that you are currently taking.

If you are on more than one, make sure to list them all out. If you are just on one, feel free to leave the other fields blank.

Gender

The reason for needing to know your gender is that women often have a lot of hormonal factors which can cause their bodies to require different amounts of thyroid than a man’s body would require.

For women, we will need additional information to calculate your TSH dosage. I’ll need to know if you are pregnant, on an oral contraceptive or a natural hormone replacement, and if you are menopausal and not on hormone replacement. These factors are important when calculating the dosage of medicines such as levothyroxine or when you use any thyroid medication dosage chart.

How Will Your Thyroid Medication Results Look?

Here is what will happen: Once we have all of the numbers entered into the TSH dosage calculator you will receive a number. This is a percentage of how much your thyroid medication satisfies your body’s physiologic dose (the amount your body would truly make in its best-performing form).

Let’s say that someone’s thyroid gland was removed and they were on the perfect medication for their needs. In this case, their percentage would be close to 100%. This would mean that close to 100% of their thyroid needs were being met by their thyroid medication.

On the other hand, if their thyroid gland is halfway underactive and halfway active, they may be using a small amount of medication such as levothyroxine. The TSH dosage calculation would be around 50% for this scenario because their medicine is fulfilling half of their body’s needs in this situation.

The number you get should help confirm whatever dosage your current thyroid medication chart indicates (if any).

Understanding Your Thyroid Medication Results

There are three things that can occur when you use the TSH dosage calculator.

1. Your score is over 100% and your TSH is below 0.4. The paradox here is that when there is too much thyroid hormone, your body makes itself thyroid-resistant (causing your TSH to go down). In cases like these, you may feel exactly the same as if you were getting too little thyroid medication.
2. Maybe your score is over 100% but your TSH is not below 0.4. This is a case where your body is off when it comes to using these hormones.
3. The first thing is whether you are taking your thyroid medication all by itself, with only water. Whether you know it or not, pairing your thyroid medication with anything but water can lead to malabsorption. This can make it difficult to judge how much of your current calculated dosage of levothyroxine or other TSH medicine is being absorbed.

There are also some rare cases where digestive problems can also lead to the malabsorption of thyroid medication in the body. Malabsorption can make any thyroid medication dosage chart inaccurate.

Studies have shown, especially in patients with celiac disease, that thyroid malabsorption is present in particularly devastated intestinal tracts.

The last thing to think about is production quality. This is especially true for compounded thyroid or an over-the-counter thyroid glandular. In general, these are not standardized products, so no one is truly confirming just how much thyroid hormone you are receiving.

The TSH Dosage Calculator and Thyroid Medication

Here is the comprehensive breakdown of the steps and how this helpful thyroid calculator can help you learn more about your health:

Step 1: The Dose

Please enter the dose of your thyroid medication or medications. As I mentioned before, if you are on one thyroid prescription, simply enter it on its own. If you are on multiple thyroid prescriptions, please do your best to enter them all.

If you are not on NDT, please enter your dosage in milligrams. Some of the most common products include:

• Nature Throid
• WP Thyroid
• Armour Thyroid
• NP Thyroid
• Erfa
• Compounded desiccated thyroid.

Please enter your dose of T4 in mcg in the TSH dosage calculator. Products here include:

• Levothyroxine
• Tirosint
• Synthroid
• Levoxyl
• Compounded T4

Finally, enter your dose of T3 in mcg. These products may include:

• Cytomel
• Liothyronine
• Compounded T3

Step 2: Weight

Every thyroid medication dosage chart or calculator needs to know how much you weigh to be accurate. So enter your body weight in pounds, even if you have to double-check to make sure it is accurate.

Step 3: Gender

After entering your gender, if you are a woman, please indicate whether you are premenopausal or menopausal.

Please include perimenopause in premenopause and postmenopause in menopausal (How to lose weight if you are in menopause). This information is necessary because it affects the amount of hormone your body produces. Without it, the resulting numbers will not be accurate. So to calculate levothyroxine dosage and to get accurate results from other thyroid medication dosage charts, make sure to supply this to the TSH dosage calculator.

Interpreting Your Thyroid Medication Results

Your full dose, that 100% number, represents approximately how much your gland would make if it were working perfectly.

This is also the same as your approximate dose requirement. This would be if your thyroid gland were completely removed and you had perfect absorption of thyroid hormone pills.

Your percentage dose represents how much you are taking relative to your body’s full needs.

If you calculate TSH dosage to be over 100%, this is too high or your body has poor thyroid absorption or thyroid resistance (as I touched on before).

If your dose is under 100% and you still have hypothyroid symptoms, you may need a higher dose of thyroid medication (assuming your blood levels show you are not taking too much). You may need assistance calculating the right dosage of levothyroxine or finding the right place on a chart for thyroid medicine dosage.

How much you are making assumes that your TSH is between 0.5 and 1.5 and that your T3 and T4 or in the normal range. If they are, this number is the approximate percentage of the hormone your thyroid is producing.

Your Thyroid Medication & You

Building the knowledge you have of your thyroid is so important.

It helps to get to the root cause of some of the symptoms that might be plaguing you every single day. That is the reason why we built this Thyroid Calculator in the first place: to help.

Use the TSH dosage calculator today to learn more about your thyroid and your physiological dose. Use the results to help calculate levothyroxine dosage, for example, or use it to check the results of other thyroid medicine dosage charts. Whatever other methods you use, the two dosage levels should line up.

Once you have learned more, I would definitely recommend reaching out to one of the professionals at Integrative Health to initiate the next steps.

If you’ve used the TSH dosage calculator and are ready for the next step, here is how I can help you now:

1. Schedule a Thyroid Second Opinion with me, Dr. C.
   2. Need a Personalized Supplement? Check out my Thyroid Specific Formulations.
   3. Download and use my Favorite Recipes Cookbook.
   4. Check out my podcast Medical Myths, Legends, and Fairytales.

Dr. Alan Glen Christianson (Dr. C) is a Naturopathic Endocrinologist and the author of The NY Times bestselling Adrenal Reset Diet, The Metabolism Reset Diet, and The Thyroid Reset Diet.

Dr. C’s gift for figuring out what really works has helped hundreds of thousands of people reverse thyroid disease and diabetes, lose weight, and regain energy. He can help you figure out complex issues that affect your thyroid and calculate TSH levels for levothyroxine dosage or other thyroid medicines. He can show you how to interpret other thyroid medication dosage charts if you are using them so that they work best for you. Learn more about the surprising story that started his quest.