Do you really want to know??

Well, given that it is still in use as a powerful antiseptic in wound dressings like Inadine, and also as tincture of iodine in operating theaters (at least, I think that's what the yellow stuff is that you see them swabbing over the incision area before they get to work with their scalpels), it clearly has very profound antibacterial effects.

There isn't any benefit in urinating out a lot of iodine, as such. The iodine loading test, which measures how much iodine you're excreting, in theory shows how much you're absorbing - what doesn't get absorbed gets excreted. It is supposed to show how deficient you are - if you excrete almost none, you must be guzzling it up and are therefore deficient, if you excrete high levels, you aren't absorbing it and therefore, the theory goes, you are not deficient.

However, you can excrete high levels of iodine in the presence of deficiency, because bromide/chloride/fluoride is blocking the iodine receptors, so people doing this test often report that their initial loading test showed higher levels of iodine than subsequent tests carried out after months of iodine supplementation.

Re iodine absorption. Yes, stomach and small intestine are where it's absorbed. Absorption sites are a different thing from residency /storage sites - iodine is present (or should be) in every cell in your body. There are some major sites, like the skin (20%), muscles (32%), thyroid, pancreas, adrenals, gut, etc. It doesn't stay in the area of absorption, it travels in the bloodstream to the different storage sites.

(Sorry, I can't remember the figures for thyroid and other sites, I'm foggy today due to bromide coming out. I upped to 5 drops twice a day yesterday, and it's really kicking in. On my Lugol's  2% solution, that's a total of 25mg, which is halfway to my first goal of 50mg, though because of previous breast cancer, I really want to be at 100mg. I'm hypothyroid, too.)

Some people have taken Lugol's and Iodoral together, because they think taking Iodoral alone will mean their stomach missed up. It won't, because as I said, iodine, like every other nutrient substance, will travel in the bloodstream and either get used immediately, or get stored until it's used.

I'm glad you checked the cost of the drops again None of us have the cash to throw around on necessarily expensive supplements!