I have an underactive thyroid and may have vitiligo, i feel my immune system has taken a bashing. help!?

9 years ago i was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid, and now i take 150mcg a day. last summer i started to get white patches on my skin, and ended up going to see the doc, i was told i might have vitilgo, which after the shock of having another autoimmune disease, i got on and started to take the meds. but i still have to wait for the summer to come, before they diagnose me with it, [to see if patches come back]. i was just wondering if the more auto immune diseases you have, does it affect the way your immune system works. or stop it working aswell, any ideas of boosting it up?
apart from vit c and echineaca?

well would you believe i have under active thyroid diagnosed two years ago I'm on 100 mcg levothyroidoxine a day also last summer had white patches on my neck and torso after being on hols, doctor said it was vitilgo and there was no treatment so just keep out of the sun not for it to be so noticeable. i would like to know what meds you have for this? Ive taken echineaca from time to time but don't think it helps that much.

auto immune is a supressor of the immune system. speak to your doctor about how it affects you since each person responds differently. mind over matter is the best treatment for day to day problems.

I don't think I can really help you as far as your question goes, but I can say that being with vitiligo myself (patches on my face), it hasn't affected my life at all. The most it bothers me, or the only time I really notice it all, is when in the summer if it gets hot enough the white patches will turn a little pink and hurt a tiny bit (hardly even notice it).


As far as cosmetics go, I'm hispanic but fairly-light skinned, so it doesn't contrast as much. If you were darker-skinned I could see how it might contrast more, but I'm sure a little make-up would do the trick.

Echinacea is one of the few herbal remedies that doctors have been interested enough to test, using scientific criteria. A blind placebo study showed the Echinacea group to get slightly more colds that lasted slightly longer than the placebo group. Effectively establishing that it is useless.

Linus Pauling, a once great scientist, with many great discoveries under his belt,sadly now deceased, was the great advocate of vitamin C as a viral illness preventer.

Over the years he advocated larger and larger doses but no one who repeated his experiments ever had and success. At his death he was suggesting I believe about 4 gms a day!

Even this has been shown to be useless, additionally a recent study suggested that doses of Vitamin C exceeding 500mgs/day were mutagenic, suggesting that they may increase cancer risk!

Unfortunately having shot your 2 suggestions down in flames, as far as I am aware we have no therapies that provide such a boost.