Tired? Stressed? Trouble Sleeping? Is It Adrenal Exhaustion?

Are You Tired of Feeling Tired? You're Not Alone! 

To say the symptoms such as fatigue, exhaustion, stress and sleep trouble are common would be a grave understatement. Closer to the truth is that such symptoms are bordering on epidemic and we certainly see that in our medical and nutritional patients. 

Living in a medical, drug-based society, such symptoms are often “treated” with advice to take it easy, receive a prescription for a sleeping pill and an antidepressant, along with a hefty dose of self prescribed caffeine and sugar to try to lift the fog of low energy.

What’s wrong with such advice? 

It doesn’t get to the root cause of why the body is feeling poorly. If a drug addressed the true root cause, you wouldn’t have to keep taking it, and for it to be beneficial for you, it certainly wouldn’t have dangerous side effects. And that’s a claim no drug can make, let alone antidepressants with the known side effect of suicidal tendencies.

You Need to Know WHY You Don't Feel Well 

I'm not trying to be negative, but let’s really get a grasp of what it means when your body gives you a symptom. Does your body make you have little to no energy because it’s mad at you? Is your body vindictive in some fashion? The good news is “no”. 

The body gives you a symptom as a simple means of communicating that it is having difficulty adapting to some stress that’s coming its way. And when I say “stress” I don’t just mean mental stress. A stressor could be anything from a poor diet or eating foods you are reacting to, to poor digestion and hormonal imbalance. It could be the reaction to a drug or it could be an infection of a chronic nature.

The point is that once the true stressor(s) are identified and removed, the body can revert to the healthy state its designed to have.

How Does Root Cause Medicine Work? 

 

Getting back to masking symptoms with drugs – taking a drug that makes you “not feel” a certain symptom (but does nothing to address the real root cause) is akin to taking a pain reliever because there’s a rock in your shoe causing you pain. Wouldn’t it make more sense to remove the rock?

The example is simple and you may think the human body is complex, but surprisingly, identifying the root cause of a problem is fairly easy when you’ve been trained where to look.

Let’s look at sleep problems as an example. A person complains of poor restless sleep. They may take a long time to fall asleep or have trouble staying asleep. They may be tired all day and get a second wind at night, making it difficult to “turn off”. A sleeping pill might knock them out for a while, but in my experience with patients, the sleeping pills rarely work for long before the patient is looking for a new pill.

What should be known is that the same system of the body involved in making healthy energy during the day is involved in creating deep, restorative sleep at night. Further, what allows that healthy energy to be produced is a good diet and digestive tract that turns good fuel into utilizable fuel from which to make energy.

It’s not complicated. It’s almost like wondering why your car doesn’t move when there’s no gas. The energy that creates motion in your car requires fuel. Your body is very much the same.

Look at Digestion First and Move on to Adrenals Nest 

It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that the first system we begin with is the digestive tract and the patient’s diet. If the food being eaten is of low quality, it won’t turn into good fuel. If the food is good, but the digestive tract isn’t working properly, again we have a fuel delivery problem. And of course if you're eating a food you're sensitive to such as gluten, again we won't have good fuel.

Once that is addressed, which isn’t at all difficult, we move on to the system that makes that energy, theadrenal glands. You may not have heard of them--but you likely know the word adrenaline, something the adrenal glands produce.

While the adrenal glands are responsible for making effortless levels of energy during the day, they also tie into creating the balance with the sleep hormone at night. In other words the adrenal glands insure great energy when you are awake, but they also feed into the creation of deep, restorative sleep at night--sleep that would be uninterrupted and allow you to bounce out of bed in the morning ready to greet your day.

Why have most people never heard of their adrenal glands? 

Why do doctors never mention them to their patients who are complaining of such symptoms as fatigue, brain fog, stress and poor sleep (to name a few)?

The answer lies in our medical model that asks a doctor to take a symptom, discover if there is a disease process and then treat that disease with a pharmaceutical drug.

The adrenal glands, fortunately, do not fit into this model. The reason is that they disease rarely. There is a disease they can manifest, but it’s thankfully rare, though serious. The downside of this rarity is that doctors are disease-oriented and because adrenal disease is rare, they assume their patients won’t often have a problem that is adrenal related.

And they’re not wrong – they don’t see many patients with adrenal disease, but what they do see is a multitude of patients with adrenal fatigue. Their training doesn’t look for it or even provide a treatment protocol. Remember, it’s not a disease state. What we are describing is a malfunction of the adrenal glands.

What Do the Adrenal Glands Do? 

 

The malfunction of the adrenals can create the following symptoms:

Fatigue

Weakened immune system

Trouble sleeping

Weight gain

Thyroid problems

Hormonal imbalance

Anxiety, depression, mood swings

Hormonal imbalance such as PMS, menstrual cramps, infertility, etc.

Brain fog

Joint pain and muscle aches

Light-headedness - some people call this a "head rush"

Allergies

Inflammation –the cause of most degenerative diseases including heart disease, cancer and diabetes

Premature aging

Asthma

Sensitivity to bright light

That’s quite a list. And for two glands the size of walnuts, it’s a pretty impressive job description that they control all those aspects of your health.

Do you see the problem of missing the adrenal glands as the root cause of your symptoms when they are responsible for so many important jobs?

Imagine you’re tired and have muscle and joint pain and you’re prescribed a pain reliever. The pain reliever seems to do the job somewhat, although it’s temporary. Drinking several cups of coffee or soda gives some relief to the fatigue. But is either "treatment" making the adrenal glands healthier? Absolutely not. So while you may have started with two symptoms on the list above, ignoring the adrenal glands as the underlying root cause will find you in the future suffering from more symptoms or a worsening of the original symptoms… or both.

Would it be worthwhile to find out how to keep one’s adrenal glands happy and optimally functioning? Remember then adrenals also impact aging and inflammation, which is another way of saying that theyextend your life expectancy and fight against degenerative disease.

As an aside, when we wrote our book “The Gluten Effect”, the chapter on adrenal fatigue was the largest chapter in the book, now perhaps you see why that would be.

The exciting news is that the adrenal glands dislike drugs. They thrive on a natural program that is not difficult to implement.

Part 2 Will Tell You What to do Next

In Part 2 of this article, I will review what you need to do and what your doctor needs to do in order to revitalize and rebalance your adrenal glands.

It’s not difficult.

Need Help? We're Here for You! 

If you felt as if I was describing you above, you are not alone. As I mentioned earlier, adrenal fatigue/exhaustion is almost epidemic. If you would like assistance and don’t have a clinician whom you feel can assist you, consider contacting us for a FREE Health Analysis. We are a Destination Clinic and treat patients from across the country and internationally. We would be delighted to help you as we have been doing so for over two decades.

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

To your good health,
Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”

Chronic Fatigue and Gluten Sensitivity

Chronic Fatigue, now known as Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS), affects between 400,000 and 900,000 adults, and is characterized by unexplained fatigue that lasts for at least six months, fails to get better with rest, and interferes with daily activities. It is also accompanied by at least some of the following additional symptoms: extreme fatigue after exertion, memory and concentration problems, poor sleep, headaches, muscle and joint pain, sore throat, or tender lymph nodes.

Chronic fatigue is unfortunately one of those syndromes that seems to “fall through the cracks” of our traditional medical system. Why? Likely because it doesn’t fit into the symptom-drug model. No drug has been created that successfully treats the myriad symptoms associated with CFIDS.

Not being a particular fan of masking symptoms with drugs, I don’t find the lack of “effective” drug treatment a negative. But what I would like to address is the success we’ve had here treating Chronic Fatigue and the interrelated causative factors.

Research studies have associated the development of chronic fatigue with patients exposed to traumatic events and chronic stress, with stress increasing an individual’s risk by 500%!

If you evaluate the symptoms associated with adrenal gland exhaustion and compare them to those of chronic fatigue, you will see a common thread between the two.

The adrenal glands are your stress gland and when they aren’t functioning adequately you can expect to experience such symptoms as fatigue, immune system weakness, joint pains, muscle aches, depression, anxiety, insomnia and headaches. Basically the symptoms of adrenal fatigue are identical to those of chronic fatigue.

Our philosophy is to address the underlying root cause and upon evaluating a chronic fatigue patient it is most common to find the following:
Weakened adrenal glands
Food sensitivities
Digestive malfunction
Infections of the digestive tract
Hormonal imbalance.

While the list may seem a bit extensive, a program can embrace most all of those issues simultaneously resulting in a patient feeling substantially better in 2 or 3 months.

Many researchers are putting chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia in the same category and I too see similar features in both disorders.

But more important than the label is to truly normalize body function such that the unrelenting fatigue and other debilitating symptoms are no longer an issue. When addressing root cause one needs to get to that undercut of malfunction that, when resolved, results in regained health. While this can prove challenging it truly isn’t difficult when one understands how the body functions.

We reviewed that adrenal malfunction and chronic fatigue have similar symptoms. So the next question is, how do we resolve adrenal fatigue? It’s a natural therapy but it doesn’t tend to be the bottom line root cause. Rather it’s often a secondary effect of the root cause. The primary problem is often digestive in nature and involves food sensitivities (think gluten and dairy as the biggest culprits), infections in the small intestine and a resultant weakened immune system.

Diagnosing and treating the above is not difficult and it’s completely natural (excepting an occasional antibiotic to treat a particularly stubborn infection). But the program must be done as an orchestrated whole utilizing strong enough remedies to affect the necessary change. Simply going to your local health food store and picking up some vitamins or probiotics is likely not going to be sufficient.

We have treated many patients with chronic fatigue successfully. The worst of which was a woman in her 30s that was disabled because of it. I’ll never forget speaking to her on the phone and her relating to me that she would lift her forearm off the bed just to see if she still could. That was the extent of effort she could perform. We not only got her back to work but it has been over a decade and she continues to do well and has a very productive life.

If you know someone suffering please forward this to them and let me know how I may be of further assistance. I truly believe that the treatment protocol that I’ve laid out above can be successful for most.

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”

Gluten Sensitivity and Your Stress Gland

Following is an excerpt from our new book, The Gluten Effect. Please let me know if this subject is of interest to you.
CASE STUDY
K. is a lovely, intelligent 37 year old attorney who came to us 2 years ago with severe, chronic migraines which were resistant to even the strongest medication. The migraines could last for a week at times. They first started when she was 5 months pregnant with her second child. She had never had any migraines prior to that time.

Asthma and allergies had also developed during her second pregnancy. She had mood swings associated with her migraines, and she states that she has “never been the same” since her second pregnancy. She is completely exhausted, has little energy, and gets sick “all the time.” She complains of numbness, tingling and burning pain of her big toes. She has gained weight in her mid-section which she dislikes though she is very petite and not overweight. Additional symptoms include abdominal bloating, carpal tunnel symptoms of the hands, acid reflux, and severe premenstrual syndrome.

She came to see us in March and had been sick three times during the past 5 months and was suffering from a continuing illness for the past 6 weeks. She has a stressful job as an attorney for a large corporation and admits to poor dietary habits.

She was on Lipitor, birth control pills, and Zyrtec, but none had helped. She had a strong history of genetic heart disease in the family.

She was found to be gluten intolerant by testing which included positive anti-gliadin antibodies in both blood and saliva. She had a parasitic infections found by testing as well. She reacted to dairy products, rice and corn in addition to gluten.

When she was initially put on the hypoallergenic diet, (which we call the Modified Elimination Diet), she noticed a change in her migraines within a week. After being on the diet for one month, she accidentally ate gluten and diary and suffered a migraine that lasted for 8 days. Also after a month on the modified elimination diet, she started to sleep better and have more energy. Two months into the program, we received the results showing the parasitic infections and began treatment for this as well. Shortly after this, she was able to wean off all regular medications for her premenstrual syndrome and migraine conditions, and the intensity of her now rare headaches were much milder.

Four months into program, she no longer needed even occasional medications for her headaches. The frequency of her headaches was down to twice a month, and her energy level was much improved. Her premenstrual symptoms had also improved. After six months, she had less bloating and after eight months, her headaches were essentially resolved totally. She was exercising three times a week, had good energy, and had very rare acid reflux. Eleven months into HealthNOW program, she checked in and was absolutely amazed at the restoration of health that she had received.

Here’s a question: If you had a part of your body that was responsible for creating great energy levels, maintaining your ideal weight, encouraging restful sleep, balancing your mood, reducing pain and inflammation, preventing allergy symptoms, keeping your immune system strong and promoting anti-aging; would you want it to function properly? Of course, and we are in complete agreement with you. So let’s learn something about our adrenal glands.

I hope you enjoyed this excerpt.

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”

I have to admit that I've been a bit of a "bad blogger" these past few months. I'm hoping the fact that I, along with another Gluten Doctor, have been writing a 350 page book on gluten is an adequate excuse!

We're very excited about this book because we believe that not only will it be a reference book for many suffering from gluten related health issues but it is literally the first of its kind. There are several books about celiac disease as well as several books about gluten-free cooking. But to the best of our knowledge there isn't a book which makes the distinction between celiac disease and gluten sensitivity while providing an abundance of scientific references to support the cause and effect relationship between gluten and such conditions as arthritis, thyroid disease, diabetes, IBS, etc.

I have included a bit of the book's introduction here and I would appreciate feedback about it.

Introduction

If you’re picking up this book in the hopes of finding an answer to your health problems, you have the right frame of mind. This book is about gluten sensitivity and its under-appreciated ability to have far reaching negative effects upon your health. The decision to write a book about gluten came as a result of an amazing phenomenon that occurred repeatedly throughout many years of practicing a method of medicine that focuses on identifying the root cause of a patient’s health problem which we call The HealthNOW Method. Again and again we had patients describing to us how significantly their lives had changed as a result of discovering that they were gluten sensitive. We write this book to inspire you to seek out the root cause of your health problem and to help you discover if the root cause of your illness is gluten sensitivity.

It has now been more than fifteen years since we became interested in the effects of gluten on our the health of our patients. At that time, even the most commonly known form of gluten sensitivity, Celiac Disease, was a rare diagnosis. What is even more startling is the fact that Celiac Disease is diagnosed in only a small fraction of affected individuals even today. Why is this? The biggest reason is lies in how standard medicine approaches health in general. Patients with gluten sensitivity, we have found, demonstrate many different symptoms. Likewise, the symptoms are usually nonspecific which means they could result manifest from many different health conditions. As a result, more common conditions are investigated first and sometimes the under-appreciated disorders such as gluten sensitivity go unnoticed.

Vikki’s mother was such an example. In addition to having many medical problems including an adrenal gland dysfunction, she had long suffered from constipation, chronic headaches, fatigue, low blood sugar, constipation and a host of gastrointestinal other complaints. She had undergone many tests and examinations, but none of these had given her an answer. Medicines were prescribed, treatments recommended, but in the end, the symptoms stayed the same. We had just begun investigating gluten sensitivity in our office, and when we tested Vikki’s mother for anti-gliadin antibodies. This is a test to see if the body’s immune system is reacting to gluten in a negative way. Well, to our surprise, she had elevated levels of these antibodies. Even more intriguing was the fact that she responded dramatically well to a gluten-free diet. Her headaches, low blood sugar symptoms and constipation resolved after having suffered for well over 50 years. Today she is a vibrant, healthy 85 year-old that takes no medication and by her own statement considers that she is in “the best health of her entire life”.

To drive home the point even further, 15 years ago our newly born daughter had been having persistent problems with projectile vomiting. When this is an ongoing problem, believe us that when we say you try to find an answer as quickly as possible. Not only is it painful to see your child suffer, but the mess is not much fun either. After Vikki’s mother was found to react poorly to gluten, and knowing that this can run in families, we tested our daughter as well. Sure enough, she likewise demonstrated gluten sensitivity and responded very nicely to the elimination of gluten in her diet. This started our crusade to evaluate the effects of gluten on people’s health.

But what is gluten? You have maybe heard of it in recent years with gluten-free foods being sold at health stores, and the rash of gluten-free recipe books in the bookstores now. But what is it? And what is gluten sensitivity? Gluten is essentially the major protein component of wheat, rye, and barley and to a lesser extent oats As it is metabolized or broken down, it can give some people tremendous problems particularly along their digestive tract . In short, the body’s immune system can see it as an infectious a toxic protein and can launch an attack against it (as if it were a virus) which can it also damages you’re the body’s tissues that harbors it (for instance the intestinal lining). Secondarily, you can develop a multitude of symptoms depending on what is organ system is affected, how severely it is, and what other problems occur later as a result of the prolonged damage. In short, the body’s immune system can see it as a toxin and therefore launches an attack against it. Varied and multiple symptoms are created depending on what tissues of the body are attacked.

Are you ready to consider a fresh approach to your health? Are you interested in finding what the underlying cause is rather than what is currently happening to your body merely masking your symptoms? So are we. If you suffer from cramping, nausea, chronic bowel problems, or stomach pains, the information in this book about gluten could be what you have been seeking. If you have chronic fatigue, sleep difficulties, depression, memory difficulty, or anxiety, you will want to hear about how gluten affects the nervous system. If you have joint pains, rashes, chronic pain, weight issues, or menstrual problems, don’t rule gluten out as a potential base cause to your symptoms. If you are constantly getting infections or have other immune or autoimmune disorders, gluten certainly is worth your time. While all of these complaints are varied in nature, their appearance occurrence reflects how gluten may “stress” your health individually.

It wasn’t until the 1970’s that we clinicians even appreciated how “bad” cholesterol and fats in our diet caused heart disease and stroke. But since that time, attention to these dietary components has significantly decreased these diseases. Likewise, we are just now understanding the effects that simple sugars have on our body’s ability to produce insulin and regulate glucose in relationship to diabetes and glucose intolerance. Diet has always been a major influence on our health, and truly we are what we eat. New vitamins, minerals and herbal nutrients continue to be discovered decade after decade. This is such a virgin field in this modern era of medicine, even though it would seem to be so basic. It is no wonder then that we are only now embracing how gluten can affect our bodies. This wheat protein in wheat, rye and barley has been around for thousands of years. But its evolution, and its growing appearance in our diets, has finally caught our attention. For many of you, it indeed may be the root cause to your symptoms. As we have stated earlier, the reason we have written this book is because of experiences with our patients. We love helping people get healthier so that they can live life to it fullest without having any attention on their body. Illness and symptoms keep a person from fully experiencing and fully participating in life. We believe life is meant to be lived, full-out with no stops.

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”