Dear Curezone Members,

I am very baffled and I hope you might be able to shed some light into my mysterious situation :)

I have been on the Iodine protocol for 2 years now, I started low but within a few months I had built up to 100mg with co-supplements, experimented with taking KI as well around 300-500mg. Felt well, no major detox symptoms, apart from some ear ringing that went away after a few months.
I have had no prior thyroid disease, the reason I started taking Iodine was because of a cyst on my left ovary and mild FBD.
Through the course of the therapy I’ve developed a slight pressure in my throat and goiter that now it’s been there for over a year.
I feel well, have no hypo or hyper symptoms, good energy levels, good sleep, my overall health has generally improved (less asthma, allergies, no infections, FBD is on and off, some months I feel it before my period, others nothing and cyst shrunk a bit last time I checked) it’s just this thyroid swelling that I don’t know how to get rid of.
I have tried pulse-dosing, lowering the dose, making the dose higher, salt loading, more vitamin C, more magnesium, switch from Iodoral to Lugol’s… nothing seems to affect it. Recently I have been on 100mg (16 drops of 5% Lugol´s) plus co-supps.
Based on some forum posts I know that this might be a normal reaction of the thyroid while it’s getting saturated with Iodine, but what I can’t find anywhere is the information about how long should someone expect this to last??
I don´t know anymore is this the way my thyroid showing me that it´s happy or not?
Should I take a break from Iodine or should I just stick to the schedule and hope that one day I will get saturated enough for the goiter to go down?

Also I want to add that I asked my GP for some blood tests and this way I kept an eye on my thyroid hormones. The last time I had a full profile test was in November 2021 and my TSH was slightly elevated at 5.19miu/L, T4 a little lower at 11.6 pmol/L, T3 normal at 3.7 pmol/L, and TPO normal at 17iu/mL.
I also had a finger prick test in January this year as part of a hormonal test and TSH was a bit elevated at 6.31 mU/L and T4 normal at 13.6 pmol/L, FSH and LH were normal, but my Testosterone came back high at 1.99nmol/L as well as the SHBG at 145nmol/L.
I know that TSH can be a bit higher and T4 lower when supplementing with iodine but I don’t know whether there might be a connection here with the elevated testosterone and SHBG?

Another useful info might be that end of 2019 before starting the protocol I did an iodine loading test and it came back as 66%.
January this year I took another loading test which came back as 62%! How is that possible after 2 years of supplementation?
I am really baffled because I can feel the benefits which suggest absorption but the loading test still shows low!

Could there be an absorption issue? But then why do I feel the benefits of iodine supplementation?

Any ideas?

I will be grateful for any input, personal or from patient experience, also if someone can recommend an iodine literate doctor in Europe (I am based in Portugal at the moment) that would be fantastic!
Sometimes it feels quite lonely going through all this alone with all my notes and research etc. and not being able to discuss it with anyone (sigh!). And GP back in London of course prescribed me hypothyroid drugs because of elevated TSH (which I am not taking of course!) without even discussing symptoms (facepalm)!