Adrenal Exhaustion and Chronic Fatigue, How to Stop the Nightmare

Study Illuminates the Cause of the Sleep Problems in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Finally)

---

The muscle pains will be deep with tender bones. As with Kali phosphoricum there may be loss of memory and poor recall of names. With Phosphoric acid the nervous exhaustion comes first, followed by the physical. It may be the remedy to give when someone has CFS following an illness such as prolonged diarrhoea.

The patient may be listless, apathetic — even sullen — find it difficult to cope and suffering depression as well. They may also be very sensitive, especially to music. They will probably be very chilly with a poor appetite while being very thirsty. The other acid remedies include Picric acid, Muriatic acid and Sulphuric acid. Exhaustion is the common feature of these acid remedies.

The exhaustion in these remedies may have been preceded by overactivity, and Vithoulkas has described the mental exhaustion of Picric acid, the emotional exhaustion of Phosphoric acid and the physical exhaustion of Muriatic acid. Picric Acid has extreme muscular weakness with trembling and twitching. The legs may feel tight or have pins and needles and the person will have to lie down, which does provide relief. Also known as Mad-dog skullcap, Scutellaria is a plant native to North America and has been used in folk medicine to treat many nervous disorders like epilepsy, anxiety and headaches.

As such it can be used in the treatment of CFS especially following flu, where the patient is nervous and forgetful, having frequent dull headaches accompanied by aching and weakness of the limbs and muscle twitching.

Veronique Mead

The Zincum picture is one of weakness with restlessness and depression. The memory is poor and the patient is lethargic, irritable and hypersensitive especially to noise; restless legs accompanied by muscular twitching are also common features. Numbness and coldness and strange sensations in arms and legs are also common. All symptoms are worse from alcohol.

I have included the general term nosodes as the approach of using nosodes to treat CFS can be a useful one. A nosode is a homeopathic medicine derived from diseased tissue including micro-organisms. They are useful when there has been a history of a particular illness and the individual has reported being unwell ever since that time. So in relation to the homeopathic treatment of CFS, Influenzinum may be used when CFS has developed following flu; or the Glandular fever nosode following glandular fever, and so forth. While these homeopathic medicines are generally indicated in the treatment of CFS, they are by no means the only ones.

The diarrhoea had lasted on and off for a few months. She feels lethargic on waking and by mid-afternoon feels exhausted. She is able to work full-time and can take exercise, but this produces aching muscles especially in her legs. She feels numbness in her fingers and toes as well as cramping.

She has headaches, sometimes lasting for about five days. Diagnosed as having a mildly underactive thyroid two years ago, Sophie was prescribed a low dose of thyroxine but this made her unwell and she lost weight, so she was advised to stop the medication. Sophie likes hot and sunny weather, dislikes the cold and always has cold hands. Thunder makes her feel on edge and she feels better when near the sea.

She desires potatoes and pasta, while milk, bread and cheese aggravate her causing diarrhoea. She is generally an easy-going person, quite calm, with no real fears. She likes to be organised and tidy. Mainly on the basis of the fatigue symptoms alone and the fact that her thyroid gland was underactive previously, Sophie was prescribed Thyroidinum 6x three times daily. An isopathic medicine is derived from the causative agent of the disease itself or from a product of the disease process. However when Sophie was reviewed about six weeks later she was much better, less fatigued and now felt energised by exercise, not exhausted, so she was advised to continue the Thyroidinum for a few more weeks.

CFS is a serious and disabling illness, causing varying degrees of disability. In the past it has not always been given much recognition as a severe illness —mainly by doctors, it must be said — probably because the direct causes and pathology of CFS are not really known. To help patients with this illness more than one approach will usually be needed, homeopathy being one, as well as physiotherapy and psychological treatments. Support groups can be useful. This was like a match to the fuel that remains the Lyme wars, because people with Lyme disease often have such complex things going on due to different infections often there are co-infections with other diseases that need to be treated differently , time to diagnoses late-stage disease can be as intractable as late-stage syphilis and is an art to treat, simple courses of antibiotics are not helpful , and other problems like viruses that emerge when people's immune systems are depressed for so long.

There can even be complications and side effects of treatments tried that go unrecognized because people are just so sick without knowing what's wrong, anything else just gets piled onto the main disease picture. I wish the Dafoe's all the best in furthering research. I hope they will consider the effort to include an engineering approach to problem solving, which is a huge departure from the way disease problems are approached traditionally.

It can only be done in a research setting and with informed consent when people are so ill. Thank you for this article. My family has experienced the debilitating effects of CFS or SEID , and if nothing else it is heartening to read of others suffering the same 'mysterious' symptoms.

I also agree with the commenter above, that the disease may well be a complex of symptoms common to several underlying causes. I am super grateful to the folks raising money for long-overdue serious research into this debilitating disease. As someone who has suffered from this and related problems for over 53 years, I sympathize with those in the story.

Causes of Adrenal Fatigue Include:

However, unlike the descriptions of the bed-bound, the worst part of my experience has been looking too normal - I wish I had the proverbial nickle for each time a doctor has walked in and said to me: As a divorced mother of four,I couldn't go to bed for days at a time. I pushed myself beyond my physical and mental limits with only small periods to achieve "down time. Some of my doctors have finally observed me long enough to believe that I am not how I look.

I'm exhausted much of the time, I'm dizzy, living in a brain fog, spending four days at a time with migraines. I also have partial seizures, severe spinal arthritis, etc. I was very moved by the personal stories about this devastating disease. I hope that articles like this will help spur researchers to tackle one of the great scientific challenges of our time.

I'm here to tell you that when things get so bad that they can see it, the whole attitude turns to people ready to hammer the nails in your coffin, it doesn't result in any impetus to help you solve the problem any better even then. This goes for family too who are afraid to even tell you how sick you look. With the doctor it's so much worse because when they write you completely off as a goner they aren't going to help then either, and the interaction gets so much more grim.

What people want is problem solving. We all watch too many movies and TV. People think there will be some medical detective work if their lives are going down the toilet -- or if at least, someone can see it. That's not how problems are approached in medicine, at least not presently. I was first diagnosed long distance by Dr Jacob Teitelbaum who can be found online, and who had the disease himself and found a way out.

Chronic fatigue syndrome saps its victims, but new research may find the cause

Montoya, who cannot take any more patients, but his office directed me to Open Medicine. The article and documentary were so moving, and I feel so badly for those who have not recovered. However, I think the article and documentary both did a disservice to how many people do either moderately recover or completely recover. I have gone in three months from being bed - bound 23 hours a day to hours a day up, rest of the time puttering around house, able to tutor part time, to go to movies, and to beach to sit, if not to walk.

ME/CFS Is Not Psychological

As it turns out, my collection of symptoms were caused by 1 Extreme adrenal fatigue and very low cortisol, 2 Hashimoto's disease attacking my thyroid, 3 Very high levels of reactivated viruses, including Epstein Barr and HVV6, and 4 a very bad case of Small Intestinal Bowel Overgrowth, or SIBO. IN addition, I had very low B12 and Vitamin D, and my immune system was severely compromised with a natural killer cell amount so low that the lab came back saying this was unmeasurable. I have been on anti-virals, antibiotics, supplements, B12 injections, and stress reduction meditation, and a total diet change to no dairy and no gluten.

I have a long way to go , but with this kind of diagnostic work and treatment, and with the degree of improvement I have already shown, I am hopeful. It is a very nasty disease, because if you overdo it feeling fine one day, you pay so heavily for the next few days. You also look okay, which means no one has any idea of what you are really going through. We need more research money, and PAMF needs to get with it. They will be getting some letters from me!! If anyone wants to email me for more information, I would be delighted to help. It causes severe post-exertional malaise, and my recent understanding of the role of ATP in exertion and durability has helped me manage my life better.

Shimshock describes the impact of Post-Exertional Malaise very effectively. You discover you have a daily budget for activity and a certain amount of rest that you need before you have any energy again. My understanding of this dynamic is based on how our bodies use ATP. ATP is the chemical that releases the energy stored in the mitochondria in our cells. Each of us has a finite amount of ATP that should be dynamically recycled through our cells all day long. In chronic fatigue, there seems to be interference with the ATP recycling process: Thus, the long recovery period mentioned by some of the patients in the article.

The opposite is true. If I budget my energy, I can live a limited, more balanced, daily life. Overextending myself causes big setbacks. It's very important to stay active within my limits every day, including slow walking. If I'm successful in maintaining the right balance, I can increase my energy budget very gradually over weeks and months. There is commonly inflammation, which might be caused by an immune system reaction to an infection that is either hard to diagnose, or as-yet unknown. Some people have thought that CFS is a problem of the immune system not knowing when to turn off; I think my immune system is actively trying to fight off infections that haven't yet been identified or for which there aren't effective tests.

I have been diagnosed with 4 of the tick-borne diseases listed above, and 5 years of treatment with antibiotics, anti-virals, anti-fungals, anti-parasiticals, and nutritional supplements has allowed me to return a life that looks mostly lazy rather than incapacitated. Dafoe's doctors and his father can avoid a common problem in addressing CFS, which is to develop and pursue a theory with a degree of focus that acts as blinders.

Newer research and other possible causes may be ignored because of the investment put into pursuing one line of research and the need to filter out distractions. I think it will take intentional open-mindedness and humility to sort through all the subtle symptom variations to figure out the base cause s and the best treatment. Thank you for this article Sue Dremann. It is one of the best I've read on the subject. I hope it gets picked up by the national and international media.

I have both fibromayalgia and resultant depression. It's very debilitating, and I work with it regardless. Some days, it's almost impossible to get out of bed, but somehow I manage. I wish there was something to make it easier, but so far, not much helps. Just financial desperation keeps me moving forward. First of all, I wish to posit that, from having two close friends and two acquaintances with this disease, I firmly believe this is a serious, even life threatening disease. Everyone who develops it goes from being very vivacious to being totally debilitated and bedridden.

My own hunch has always been that there is a viral connection--two of my closest friends suffered viruses and complications from those viruses immediately before being stricken. I do not doubt that this is not a new, modern disease, OR that Florence Nightingale may have had it: When I studied medical history two decades ago, I learned that Florence Nightingale, while attending the wounded soldiers during the Crimean War, contracted typhus, a louse-borne disease now easily cured with antibiotics. However, before the advent of them, most people did not survive--though Nightingale did, though not without the loss of her hair from prolonged fever.

This may have been a result of an irregular immune response to typhus and any other bacteria and viruses she picked up in the Crimea typhus and the lice that carry it are endemic to Russia and the Ukraine. Nightingale had a vigorous life and a workload that often precluded adequate sleep, similar to today's victims, so adrenal and immune system fatigue may play a role just a hypothesis , as may anemia--since such a lifestyle often precludes adequate nutrition as well.

I truly hope that research and funding increase and Improve to the point that a cure will be found before any more lives are destroyed or lost. Thank you for spreading the word about this awful illness, one that I have been living with for 30 years and 5 days. There is an editorial mistake however in the article that I think is important. Chronic Fatigue and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are two different things. Chronic Fatigue is ore of a symptom of many causes where as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a particular illness. This type of mistake also happens with medical providers that are well educated on the subject and leads to many misunderstandings.

Again, thank you for the effort, and cheer your article. Meanwhile back on the ranch, it's the water, soil and air that put the chronic in chronic fatigue. Never met one yet without gut problems. I was diagnosed with MS in Symptoms for about 10 years before that. Then diagnosed with Lyme Disease and co-infections in Chronic Fatigue is certainly a large part of how I feel. I've tested positive for EBV, but don't remembering having it. Chronic low WBC counts. I think it's all from Lyme Disease. It's a pandemic in CA that not many are talking about. So many are suffering needlessly and ridiculed if they ask their doc about Lyme.

I agree with the comment by lolly. Everyone needs to take care about the unfortunate name of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which was a grossly misnamed disease. Chronic Fatigue is a symptom of many other illnesses, diseases, depression, medications, medical treatments. Chronic Fatigue can be overcome once the illnesses, disease, etc.

CFS is a lifelong disease. I cannot find any information on the July 16th fundraiser mentioned in this article. Does anyone have more information on this event? I forgot to write that a good place to be tested for Lyme Disease is right in Palo Alto! Janet and Ron, I am really sorry about your son's conditions. As soon you will contact local doctors at the beginning by email in the hospitals it can be Jamaica, India, or Ecuador rain forest , where your son spent time, as quicker your son will be healthy. These doctors know very well local diseases, including diseases from bites of local insects, and the have good experience how to treat them.

They will put quality diagnose. It is important Whitney will call to memory what area he stayed when the symptoms started and contact the doctors exactly in that place. I also encourage Dafoe's family to have him tested for tick borne diseases at IGeneX. Tick borne diseases can be immunosuppressive, resulting in rampant viruses and a whole host of other systemic problems.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (2011)

But even IGeneX's testing isn't perfect. Babesia often comes up false negative, as does Bartonella. Bartonella is a surprisingly pernicious disease found worldwide. There are over a dozen species that infect humans, but "standard" lab tests only look for 2, and they even miss half of cases they should find. Given this young man's worldwide travel, he could easily have a species from overseas. Costly, but likely worth it in this case.

Ed Breitschwerdt at NC State has done some great work and written some papers trying to call attention to this hidden epidemic. Mozayeni in MD has also developed some pioneering treatments. It'a shame that doctors are so apprehensive that cfs patients must see 20 doctors on average before the diagnosis is given when CFS is fairly easy to tell for anyone with experience: I myself saw half a dozen before quitting 7 years ago. I stopped looking for the diagnosis since I don't need it, but it must be a hell for the less fortunate who need it to qualify for the disability.

Dear PA-North and others who might be interested: Thank you all and the Palo Alto Weekly for your support! The direct website for much appreciated donations is: Web Link Please email me at ykishimoto earthlink. It will be early evening of Thursday, July 16th. Jose Montoya is the leading expert in CFS and has been doing clinical trials, research and treating patients at Stanford for the last 10 years. He is known worldwide, and his team has discovered much about this disease.

He has treated people, many of which are much improved. I am surprised that this excellent article does not mention him. Ten years ago, Dr. Montoya started his CFS research at Stanford when it was an extremely controversial topic - most doctors did not even believe their patients. Montoya did, and has defined the direction of this terrible disease.

Go to youtube and search Dr. For all the commenters above, this video will give hope, information and clear science. All my best to everyone suffering form the awful disease. My niece had been debilitated for years, but with Dr. Montoya's medical care, she is a functioning adult again. He is at the Stanford Clinic. I appreciate that the reporter interviewed a variety of people with different severities of the illness.

Too often the most severely ill are neglected but there are also those of us who struggle through life daily and appear 'normal' to those who don't see that we spend hours or days at home to go out for a few hours once a week or less. As a scientist, I would make one correction to the facts listed at the bottom. The two are not the same.

The research is still spotty but they indicate that the age people most commonly come down with the illness are teenagers and people between years of age. That is probably why the greatest numbers - prevalence - are in the years old range. I don't wish to sound arrogant, nor do I wish to sound like a tin foil hat wearer, but There is a possible answer that I have not seen mentioned in these articles or the comments.

Fluorinated antibiotics and anesthetics are both known to cause the major symptoms of CDS: May I ask the sufferers here Polly, Another of Us, and any others what is your history of taking antibiotics with the string 'floxicin' in their names? These include the most common, ciprofloxcin sometimes called just 'cipro'.

Also levoquin is an antibiotic in this class. The fact that many sufferers' stories start with an infection tells me that you may have been prescribed a drug for that infection. Additionally, for the sufferers here, what is your history with surgery? The most common inhalation anesthesia in use today, for both animals and people, is isoflurane.

Isoflurane is proven to cause alzheimer symptoms in laboratory animals where it literally causes amyloid tangles known to cause alzheimers , and is equally well known to cause post-operative cognitive deficity in both elderly people and elderly dogs. Folks, these are established facts and I'm a little dismayed to read an entire article about CFS and not see one mention of these factors. It is tragic, so tragic. When I questioned her on that assertion she got defensive and told me she "majored in" vector-borne diseases at Johns Hopkins and that was the end of the discussion.

Just like the posting above, I would encourage everyone -- especially sufferers of poorly understood diseases -- to "question authority", do your own research, leave no stone unturned and do NOT be deterred by the so-called experts that are so plentiful in this community. My prayers are with all of you. Here's A link to Fluorinquinolone Antibiotic Toxicity on facebook I have Chronic Fatigue as well I feel so deeply for him I am so sorry: If you are looking for a way to make a difference in this world- this is it.

My child became ill in the 6th grade following an acute H1N1 infection. He has never been the same. His pediatrician's response to his fatigue was to recommend psychotherapy. Eight months later he caught a flu and had a major allergic reaction. He spent 2 years so cognitively impaired that he couldn't remember anything about his life, recognize his parents faces, read, do school work, have a social life, and was mostly bed bound. All the while I kept researching his symptoms, disease theories, and treatment protocols. No doctor had a clue! It took 6 months to get in to see him.

He did specialized testing which hadn't been done before and found an active enterovirus infection and confirmed the diagnosis. He put my son on antiviral medications, immune system modulators, and medications for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. My son now remembers his whole life, recognizes his family, can be upright, and can read. He is much better and we are very, very grateful for that. He still cannot do school work, play video games, exercise, get out of the house more than once every few weeks, maintain a social life, or work toward fulfilling any of his aspirations.

All of these things require too much exertion, post exertional worsening of symptoms is a hallmark of this disease. Making a sandwich, showering, studying, running for the phone, walking in the library, carrying on a conversation, and going to get himself a drink of water can all land him in bed for anywhere from a few days to a few months. This is no kind of life for a smart, hard working, fun loving, kind kid who wants to take the world by the horns. He should be entering his senior year of high school in a few months, instead he is hoping to be well enough to begin high school work.

He lives in a state of suspended activity and aspirations. There are millions of people living with this illness all over the world. They have a brilliant team of medical researchers ready to get to work on this disease, all they need is money. I am donating, I hope you will, too. You can make a difference. I hope you will. Thank you for taking the time to tell this story. I am grateful daily that, although housebound, I am not at the severe end of the spectrum. And I live my life carefully, that I might not step over an edge that pushes me into a severe state like Whitney.

Like many, I look pretty normal. I don't appear sick. They can't understand, couldn't comprehend, how limited my brain power is, how little I can exert myself without precipitating a crash. I grew up in your part of the world, went to Woodside High, but have lived many years in Australia. There's some hopeful work going on at Stanford, maybe articles like yours can heighten awareness, spur researchers on to get to the bottom of our illness. The article description on Facebook that I saw said that the title of this article is "Chronic fatigue syndrome saps its victims, but new research may find the cause is Lyme.

Maybe you were hacked? I've suffered with CFS for 25 years. Michelle Akers couldn't work an 8 to 5 job suffering from her condition but she could play on the U. Women's National Soccer team.

Tony, Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Seabiscuit, was able to write her book from her bed, but participates almost not at all in interviews and publicity because of her health. She is said to have CFS. I read the article you linked to, but don't understand your comment. The article describes a person who struggled hard and had numerous setbacks and finally lost her battle and had to quit soccer altogether.

People who battle things like that are to be commended for not giving up, and for accomplishing whatever they can. You wouldn't expect a healthy person who runs to be able to do a marathon every day just because they completed one once. I don't understand your scorn for Akers when the article tells a different story. Apart from the constant pain i was in, i was pushing harder each day to overcome my difficulties for the last two active years until i could no longer carry on with my business, of which i was paid extremely well!

I became bed bound for 8 months, i found i was unable to read or write through cognition short term memory failure. Each year my abilities i feel are improving, but my ability to pace myself has not, so within 2 hours of activity i am fatigued. I know people who did not have the option to go home and have parents take care of them, and suffer incredibly for lack of help.

However, there probably are many being cared for by close relatives - people who are that sick often lose key relationships - if they need that kind of care, who else is going to take care of them? But the fact that you make such a claim says more about you than it does about anyone who is sick. Goswellen Jorae sorry, got confused in making the last post, that was me to GJ: Thank you for the February Institute of Medicine link, but did you read it?

It basically says that people are seriously physically sick, a majority of doctors don't know enough about the problem, and they inappropriately dismiss it as you have just done. Misconceptions or dismissive attitudes on the part of health care providers make the path to diagnosis long and frustrating for many patients.

We've had this debate, and much of what this article recommends has been done. The adrenal glands were never designed to maintain this pattern of production and so cortisol output plummets.

Post navigation

You actually feel worse after exercise when you are adrenally fatigued, whereas exercise typically energizes us. Every time you eat something sweet , you eat too much, or another month goes past without much movement. When you reflect on this, you feel guilty, you might say mean things to yourself—and you may silently lose hope. During adrenal exhaustion, your clothes keep getting tighter and this just adds to your stress.

The vicious cycle is self-perpetuating. Free Enlightened Living Course: Rest must follow action for us to have optimal health and excellent fat burning, and very few people these days truly rest, although we might believe we do. A part of our nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system PNS ; is active when we truly rest.

For now, all you need to know is that if you do not lose weight from high-intensity exercise, it is likely that your SNS is dominant, which is common with adrenal stress. If you do shift weight from this type of exercise, then your nervous system is likely to be well balanced. It is breathing , and for some, it can be the key to shifting body chemistry from fat storage to fat burning.

How is this possible? The role of the autonomic nervous system ANS is to perceive the internal environment and, after processing the information in the central nervous system CNS , regulate the function of your internal environment. Think about a family of ducks and their newborn ducklings.

Just like ducklings, the autonomic nervous system will always follow the leader, and the breath is the only part of the autonomic nervous system that can be controlled consciously.

• Santa Rita Pintor: In Memoriam (Portuguese Edition)
• The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies in Psychology
• No. 3: Viewpoint (How to Write a Novel)
• Shel Silverstein Made Me Do It Volume 2
• Moving Central Admin to a Different Drive in SharePoint 2013 (SharePoint 2013 Solution Series Book 11)
• Les Jours de la nuit : Le Sourire blessé de notre enfant (ESSAI ET DOC) (French Edition)