This week is International Stress Awareness Week. The World Health Organization is calling ‘stress’ the health epidemic of the 21st Century. And yet, the medical profession is slow to recognize or treat ‘adrenal fatigue’ or ‘burn out’ as a real condition.
Introduction
Persistent fatigue and tiredness are some of the most common symptoms that drive people to seek the help of a doctor. Often the doctor finds it hard to come up with a diagnosis. She may take your medical history, carry out a physical exam and do some blood tests. Often this yields no explanation. To complicate things further for the doctor, fatigue may be linked to thyroid dysfunction, anaemia, fibromyalgia, M.E. and various other conditions. If he is testing solely for adrenal dysfunction, he’ll be looking for the extremely low ‘hypo’ or extremely high ‘hyper’ production of cortisol, for a diagnosis of Addison’s disease or Cushing’s Syndome, but anywhere outside of these ranges will not deliver a diagnosis. Neither do the Endocrinology Society and other medical specialties recognize this condition. Your doctor is in a bit of a dilemma. At best, he may not think you are neurotic and may accept that your symptoms are real. At worse, the doctor thinks you are depressed or neurotic and if so you may walk away with a prescription for anti-depressants. This now becomes your dilemma because with no diagnosis there is no treatment. But what if you do have adrenal fatigue, you are not depressed and there is another way? We place so much of our trust and hope in our doctors, often they are in a position to help us and just as often they are not. But here’s the good news, that doctor may not yet be aware that in other streams of medical practice namely ‘functional and complimentary medicine’, adrenal dysfunction is recognized and it can be tested and treated as a real condition.
Limelight Nutrition 