Post Parathyroid Adenoma Surgery

A Case History

This particular patient had persistently high calcium levels on routine lab tests. This prompted a trip to an internal medicine doc who verified the parathyroid tumor.

Just a quick refresher, the parathyroid is so named due to its location not its function. It is embedded in or next to the thyroid tissue. The parathyroid typically has four nodes, two on each side of the thyroid. The thyroid regulates metabolism and has no function in the regulation of calcium and the parathyroid has no bearing on metabolism and regulates calcium for the body.

Why parathyroid tumors pop up seems to be largely unknown and we could find no useful tips in the natural world to help treat a parathyroid tumor. The logical option was to find a competent surgeon and have the effected node or nodes removed. I say competent surgeon because first you have to identify which node or nodes are affected and then remove it or them. These glands are not nicely color coded like you would see on a chart.

You can find a fair amount of information about the surgery online so won't spend time on that. I am more interested in documenting the experience with the post- surgical management which isn't discussed much.

We didn't know that any special steps had to be taken until just before surgery. The surgeon gave instructions to take at least (4)-1000 mg Tums per day for the first week. He said that up to 10 a day was normal without concern. More than that should trigger a call to the surgeon's office. He didn't say what that would mean and the patient didn't ask. I am guessing that if you need more Tums than that to control symptoms, something is amiss.

The patient didn't see any reason to screw up digestion with Tums for a week or more, especially as the body was working hard to normalize after the anesthesia. So she elected to go a different route. She was quite sure she could come with something better.

We recommended Karuna CalGuard. She tried Apex Cal-Zyme but the patient was having a lot of nausea from the opiates they gave her post op and the Apex formula wasn't well tolerated at the time, causing even more nausea. Plus they have a relatively low calcium content as most of the supplement is made of co-factors so this formula isn't appropriate for the condition. The CalGuard has 500 mg calcium per tablet plus magnesium and vitamin D. This worked great at calming the numbness of the hands and feet that result from super low serum calcium.

She started with two at a time and went by symptoms (numbness) and also did some muscle testing a la Victor Frank and TBM. She needed two of these tablets or 1000 mg about every two hours the first 4 days or so. After that it began to taper off and when a week came around and it was time for the next calcium blood test, she only took about 2000 mg that day.

There is really too much magnesium in the CalGuard (intestinal gripe) and she was out of town for that weekend so ended up at CVS looking for a calcium without magnesium. She found one brand that had just 500 mg of calcium and 800 IU vitamin D per tablet. She began to use that and found that found relief from the excessive magnesium. Side note: a person should limit all travel until 2 weeks post-surgery. Like most surgeries, the recovery is a bigger deal than is apparent the first couple of days.

The next day we found the body seemed to test best on one CalGuard and 1 Xymogen Calcium D-Glucarate. At two weeks out and the amount of calcium the body wants to control symptoms varies from about 2000mg to 5000mg per day or so. Some days were better than others.

Hope this is helpful for you to manage a parathyroid tumor surgery.