RLR
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Indeed, the sensations you experience as palpitations are merely the heart muscle responding to wayward nerve impulses arising from the vagus nerve. The "flip flop" sensation is due to the fact that the heart is in motion and depending upon precisely when these irregular nerve impulses arrive, the characteristics of the subsequent sensation can vary.
Thyroid irregularities can indeed produce palpitations, tachycardia and bradycardia among other characterizations. While your TSH is elevated, it's important to look at the entire thyroid profile such as T3 andT4 values in order to establish more precisely what may be taking place. In general, however, medication is rarely considered advisable subsequent to a single thyroid panel test. If subsequent test 6 weeks or so later reveals similar values, then other tests and/or treatment options are normally discussed. This latency in treatment is because a number of factors can produce irregularities in the thyroid values which are transient in nature. Treatment should only commence if the high values are observed on secondary evaluation a few weeks or so apart from the original test.
Indeed, thyroid dysfunction can cause all of the symptoms you describe but I am constrained to point out that all of these symptoms are just as easily produced by significant stress and anxiety. Indeed, anxiety of a certain type can produce physiological disturbances which patients misconstrue as symptoms of disease.
As I have mentioned many times on the forum, true disease cannot suddenly hide from detection or its symptoms suddenly abate in the presence of medical evaluation. Such an observation is of high clinical significance that the underlying cause is functional, rather than organic, in nature.
The tests you've undergone would reveal any sort of underlying problem related to your heart. You feel certain that something is wrong because of your perceptions about what the palpitation events actually constitute in your own mind. When tests such as those rendered prove negative, then any persistence in contrary beliefs must unavoidably be held to great scrutiny regarding their origin in fact or fiction. You are basing your fears upon what you suspect or fear, not what the tests actually state as medical fact. Such tests are extremely definitive and accurate. They are not an approximation or derived by hit-or-miss technology. When you find yourself making a contrast between these sort of tests and your own subjective concerns and demonstrating preference for your own rationale, it very strongly indicates the need for self-examination and drawing questions of whether the means by which you stand so firm in your beliefs are rational, logical and scientifically sound. It is the persistent fixation to one's beliefs about fearful prospects which reveals the true nature of the circumstances.
You are not concerned whether you are right or not, only that you maintain vigilance to factors which you believe are placing your life at some measure of risk, which in all reality is not anywhere near the truth at all and extremely inaccurate. These palpitations produced by the vagus nerve have no more capacity to harm or stop your heart than plucking an eyebrow will result in a stroke. You do not understand their actual nature and therefore, they constitute a risk of unknown magnitude. In other words, if you don't know how they function, then they are just as capable in your mind as being deadly as they are harmless. You do realize, however, that such plausibility is not reality-based, but derived through subjective fear.
The very existence of this forum should cause you to pause from your headlong pursuit in the belief that you are in danger. You're not and that's not going to change simply because you believe it is somehow possible. You are suffering these manifestations because you believe your life is in peril from their presence and the brain responds in a very particular and unrelenting manner to any feedback that survival is at risk. This happens where the risk is real or merely perceived and as long as you persist in your beliefs, then the brain will continue to compel you to seek safety and identify the threat in order to either challenge and overcome it, or escape from it. That's how humans are genetically programmed to react to matters that challenge survival.
You're going to be just fine and you are in no danger whatsoever, regardless of how hard you try to prove otherwise.
Best regards,
Rutheford Rane, MD (ret.)
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