This is Dr. Lam.
Adrenal Fatigue has four stages of development and stage 3 is called adrenal exhaustion.
Today we’re going to spend our time to discuss this very, very important stage because this
is the stage where most of the symptoms become very perplexed and very difficult to resolve
from a conventional medicine perspective.
This full article, “Adrenal Exhaustion,” is available free at my public educational
website called www.DrLam.com.
You can read that at your leisure, you can follow along.
I’ll try to point out some of the key points here for you to understand and help you to
study as you go.
Let us review first the four stages of Adrenal Fatigue relatively quick.
Stage 1 is called, “Alarm Reaction,” and this is where you have the fight or flight
response.
People who are under stress can have an alarm reaction and not even know it.
There are no physical signs to speak of, sometimes you may be tired and then you get better and
don’t even know it after a nap.
Usually recover is relatively fast.
If that fails, the body goes into stage 2, which is, “Resistance Response.”
In this case, the body starts to have some anxiety, the person becomes irritable, insomnia
may be common and infections become more recurrent and PMS and menstrual irregularity starts
to come in.
They don’t come in all at the same time and sometimes you can have one symptom more
than the other, so it’s kind of irregular, but they do show up if you pay attention.
Now if the body stress are not being dealt with and this Adrenal Fatigue get worse, then
you go into stage 3, which is what we call, “Exhaustion.”
Within exhaustion, this is the time that the adrenals are no longer able to keep up with
the increasing demands of the hormones and it basically starts to fall apart.
What is different from this stage, as compared to the previous stage is that the symptoms
become so severe that oftentimes it’s almost impossible to function regularly and a tremendous
amount of rest is necessary.
If this fails and Adrenal Fatigue progresses to stage 4, that is when failure occurs and
that could be a medical emergency because the body has basically given up and is really
in a survival mode.
Unfortunately, most conventional doctors are not well trained in Adrenal Fatigue to begin
with.
The most common complaints to a doctor’s office is fatigue, sluggishness, insomnia,
and they were brushed aside.
When Adrenal Fatigue is not attended to well, patients are often sent home to self-navigate
and they try their best, but to no avail and self-navigation programs normally fail and
the adrenals get worse and worse with time.
Now, adrenal exhaustion, as we talked about, is stage 3 of Adrenal Fatigue and this is
where we’re going to concentrate on in this paper.
Within this stage of Adrenal Fatigue, there are actually four phases that you can divide
into: Single system dysfunction, then it moves on, if it’s a little bit more serious to
multiple endocrine axis imbalances or dysfunction, and the class example of that OAT axis imbalance,
which is ovarian adrenal thyroid axis imbalance, and on my paper we’ll address that in much
more detail.
This is oftentimes what brings a lot of the patients to their knees because they just
simply cannot figure out what is going on and the bodies keep getting worse.
If that is allowed to continue, and then the body gets into a little more serious state,
where it really enters a critical point of what we call disequilibrium, which is phase
3.
This is the time when the hormones are really so deranged that the emergency system of the
body kicks in and you have a lot of paradoxical reactions with mood swings, blood sugar level
that is irregular, hypoglycemia, low blood pressure, posterior hypertension, night sweats,
severe anxiety, for example.
People normally at this stage have limited ability to even do their daily chores, it’s
limited to 12 hours or less.
If this phase is surprised and phase 3 comes into place, phase 3 is when you really have
a more severe situation where the adrenal glands are in near failure stage.
That is when the bodies hormones are so low that it really has a difficult time to even
maintain normal function.
My paper will then go through with you each of the phases in great detail and what to
expect out of each phase, the symptoms, the clinical presentations, and what usually happens
in each one of these phases, I will not go through it here in great detail because it
involves a lot of multiple organ systems that is dysfunctioning at the same time as you
proceed forward.
I do want to spend a little bit of time to discuss the phase 3C, which is when you have
a disequilibrium state, because this is a state that is so confusing and the symptoms
are so convoluted, that most people have a hard time understanding.
Now we talked about adrenal exhaustion being stage 3 of Adrenal Fatigue and stage 3C is
the disequilibrium phase and this is where the body’s thermostat, so to say, internally
is broken.
The body’s ability to regulate itself is compromised.
The body doesn’t like that and in a situation like this, the body activates the autonomic
nervous system as an emergency backup plan to try to regulate the body temperature, to
regulate the blood sugar, to regulate the salt craving, to regulate the insulin level,
for example.
But unfortunately the back-up system, or the emergency system, is very crude.
Because of its crudeness, it is not very fine-tuned and as a result the ride that the body has
to go through is quite bumpy.
Adrenalin is being released in great amount.
This is what we call the activation of the sympathoadrenal system.
Now, the consequences of this is that the body then becomes flooded in a sea of adrenaline.
What happens is that adrenaline will cause a set of reactions that is tremendously difficult
to resolve.
It is called the reactive sympathoadrenal response.
The result of this response includes things like fragile blood pressure, spacy-ness, tachycardia,
irregular heart rate, an inability to stand for a long time, temperature intolerance,
body and fluid imbalances, dizziness, a feeling of impending doom, for example.
So these are very, very significant events that can bring many to the emergency room
only to be told after extensive tests that they are fine.
They were set home and then it repeats itself.
So the clinical picture just keeps getting worse and worse.
Now if this is not resolved and it goes to the phase D, where the Adrenal Fatigue comes
to the point where it’s near failure and that oftentimes requires strong medication,
as well as admission to the hospital.
Overall, I want you to understand that adrenal exhaustion, as a state of Adrenal Fatigue,
can be helped.
The biggest problem is that most people don’t understand how the various symptoms are tied
in together.
The tendency is to treat symptom by symptom and forgetting that there is an underlying
root cause that is still existing.
When you try to only patch up the symptoms, then invariably when one symptom is resolved,
you’re going to trigger another symptom.
There’s no end to this.
The more symptoms are being addressed instead of the root cause, the more the body becomes
weak.
This is almost a self-inflicted wound over a period of time, as the body slowly continues
to get decompensated and worse and worse.
The key to identification, as well as from recovery from adrenal exhaustion is not any
laboratory test, because unfortunately most laboratory tests at this point is simply not
sensitive enough to pick them up.
What you really need to do is number one, to understand this yourself, and my article
will help you to do that.
Number two, is to educate your provider if he or she is not attune yet to this state
of Adrenal Fatigue or Adrenal Fatigue in itself.
Until your provider understands what is going on, it’s highly unlikely that he or she
will be able to have a program of recovery that’s fitting for you.
On the other hand, if your provider really understands this, they can usually spot this
right off very quickly.
Most people do recover from adrenal exhaustion, if you are given the right program.
At the same time, most self-navigation programs fail and only get worse.
So my advice to most people is try not to self-navigate if you are at this point of
Adrenal Fatigue.
Find somebody that really knows what they’re doing and that is the number one step to your
recovery.
My article will address all these issues.
We’ll give you the knowledge, we’ll give you the tools for you to help yourself if
you so want to.
At the same time, we’ll give you the tools to help your provider so that they can better
help you.
If you have any questions after you read the article, feel free to write to me, you can
do that on my website.
The article that I mentioned is on my website, www.DrLam.com.
If you have a personal attention necessary, as far as a personalized program for you to
overcome this, you can call my office.