It is a good sign you are healing, but you will still want to read the following chapters to accelerate your improvement. Now complete the section below before you finish reading the rest of the book. If this total is more than 9, you are likely suffering from a relatively severe form of adrenal fatigue.
Additional Symptoms ones that are present now The areas on my body listed below have become bluishblack in color. There may have been only one factor or there may have been several, but the number does not matter. One severely stressful incident can be all it takes for someone to develop adrenal fatigue, although typically it is more. This list is not exhaustive, but the items listed in this section are the most common factors that lead to adrenal fatigue.
Use this section to better understand how your adrenal fatigue developed. Seeing how it started often makes clearer what actions you can take to successfully recover from it.
This section also leads into a following section that explores in more depth how your adrenal fatigue developed. Approaching Your Doctor Now that you have decided that you have some form of adrenal fatigue, it is only natural for you to want to run and tell your doctor. Or you may want to have your doctor do further tests. If you skipped over the last chapter, a word of caution before you share your newfound revelations with him or her. First, your doctor may not believe that adrenal fatigue exists.
He may give you some tranquilizers, send you to a psychiatrist, tell you to quit reading the self-help books, or offer other unhelpful advice. Even many alternative physicians are not yet aware of the problems of adrenal fatigue.
Believe it or not, the fact that adrenal fatigue is so common and so pervasive makes it more difficult to recognize. But regardless of what your doctor says, adrenal fatigue is real and the questionnaire in this book is a valuable tool in identifying its presence and severity. However, the truly important questions are not how many studies relate to adrenal fatigue or whether or not your doctor recognizes it.
The important questions are do you suffer from adrenal fatigue and if so, what can you do about it. To help you answer these questions, read on. The next chapter will help you determine how you came to have adrenal fatigue. The purpose of this section is to develop a timeline or sequence of events that will reflect how your health may have changed with time, either improving or getting worse.
This will help you see with more clarity what has affected your health and which associated events may have led to further problems that have gone unrecognized. Adrenal fatigue is usually preceded and aggravated by multiple events. It is very therapeutic to see how seemingly unrelated events combined to undermine your health. In this case, the crime is the decline in your adrenal health and you are both the star detective and the victim and sometimes the culprit as well.
Your objective is to assemble as much information as possible regarding the events leading up to the crime. The timeline is a very useful tool for uncovering previously unrecognized sources of adrenal fatigue. Recording the events that preceded the onset of your fatigue and putting them in a meaningful, sequential order will help you recognize the contributing factors.
The categories listed below are only guidelines for organizing this information. If you think there are other categories or incidents, list them as well. It will be easier to see the patterns of changes in your health with brief entries placed at their appropriate times, even if you want to write pages about an incident, be brief.
Then start 2 years before this date and list the events as requested in the section below. Do not try to associate it with any signs or symptoms of the previous questionnaire. Simply enter it on the lines provided. If you need more space to complete any section, use a separate piece of paper. Remember, you are the most authoritative source of information about you, so now is your chance to be an expert on a subject of great interest and importance to you, You!
In the following section, list and date all the accidents, illnesses, emotional traumas, lifestyle changes, etc. Even if you do not see any connection between these events and the symptoms you are experiencing now, write them down.
There may also be long term, ongoing factors that have not changed. For example, you may have had a poor diet and little exercise for years before an illness or other specific event precipitated your adrenal fatigue.
Write these down because, even though they did not begin within the two-year time frame, they were ongoing during that time. Poor dental work can also lead to hypoadrenia. If you have had root canals, amalgam fillings, gum infections, abscesses, teeth pulled or other dental work after which you noticed your health sliding within months , or if there were complications from dental work that seem to persist, it is important to list these. The mouth is an extremely important, but often unrecognized, factor in your overall health.
In some cases it has been the pivotal key to health. The timeline can provide surprising information to help you recover. Like many things, the more you put into it, the more benefit you will receive. For example, if your accident happened in June of , your surgery in August of , you lost your job in February of , and had a root canal in April of , number them in the order in which they occurred. Then go back and circle any events that stick out in your mind.
These would be events after which you seemed to feel particularly tired or required an extended period of time to recuperate. The first events after which these symptoms occurred are likely to be the onset of your adrenal fatigue. The events before it probably helped precipitate it and the events afterward helped intensify it. Having the knowledge of how your adrenal fatigue began is often valuable in your treatment plan and is psychologically very gratifying.
It takes away the impression that you were walking along one day and adrenal fatigue fell out of the sky and hit you. Instead it allows you to see that your adrenal fatigue had an origin and that you can identify the probable source.
This immediately places you in a more powerful position. Adrenal fatigue often comes in stages and its onset can only really be seen when you review the series of seemingly unrelated events leading up to the fatigue.
Look and see if there is a pattern to the events that preceded your adrenal fatigue. If so, recall in detail how you felt after each of the events and make a few notes concerning your recollection of the times after those events.
If it was after an accident, injury, surgery, or chemical poisoning that your energy became especially low or you developed many of the symptoms of adrenal fatigue see questionnaire , you may never have recovered completely from that experience.
In that case you may need to do further healing related to that event to completely recover from your adrenal fatigue. By making the patient look at the light we see that immediately after the initial miosis the pupil starts to dilate slowly as if it does not want to, seems to try to contract again but the dilation gains the upper hand and, after a fight between miosis and mydriasis lasting for about 40 seconds, the pupil remains dilated in spite of the persistence of the exciting agent [the light].
This sign is consistent and present in all cases of hypoadrenia in all of its clinical forms. In the normal individual, it does not appear as I have investigated.
The quote above describes Dr. You can do this test at home yourself. The only equipment you need is a chair, a small flashlight or penlight, a mirror, a watch with a second hand and a dark room. Darken the room and sit in a chair in front of a mirror.
Then shine a flashlight across one eye not directly into it from the side of your head. Keep the light shining steadily across one eye and watch in the mirror with the other. This occurs because the iris, a tiny circular muscle composed of small muscle fibers, contracts and dilates the pupil in response to light.
Just like any muscle, after it has been exercised beyond normal capacity, it likes to have a rest. But if you have some form of hypoadrenia, the pupil will not be able to hold its contraction and will dilate despite the light shining on it. This dilation will take place within 2 minutes and will last for about seconds before it recovers and contracts again. Time how long the dilation lasts with the second hand on the watch and record it along with the date.
After you do this once, let the eye rest. If you have any difficulty doing this on yourself, do it with a friend. Have a friend shine the light across your eye while both of you watch the pupil size. Retest monthly. If your eye indicates you are suffering from adrenal fatigue, this also serves as an indicator of recovery. As you recover from adrenal fatigue, the iris will hold its contraction and the pupil will remain small for longer.
This diminished ability of the iris to remain contracted is present in moderate to severe adrenal fatigue, but may not be present in mild cases. Endocrine Diagnostic Charts. Harrower Laboratory, Inc. Glendale, California, , pg. Blood pressure is an important indicator of adrenal function. Although there are other causes associated with low blood pressure, low adrenal function is probably the most common and the most neglected by doctors. If your blood pressure drops when you stand up from a lying position, this almost always indicates low adrenals.
This drop in blood pressure upon rising is called postural hypotension and can easily be measured at home. All you need is a blood pressure gauge called a sphygmomanometer from a local drug store, medical supply house, or on the internet. Get the type that takes your blood pressure for you without requiring a separate stethoscope.
Some also have convenient printed readouts. After you know how to use your blood pressure measuring device, lie down quietly for about 10 minutes and then take your blood pressure while still lying down. Next, stand up and measure your blood pressure right after you stand. If it drops when you stand up, you likely have some form of hypoadrenia or you may be dehydrated. If so, try it again on a day when you have had plenty of water. It will not work to just drink a glass of water and then try again right away because your tissues take a while to re-hydrate after drinking.
If it still drops 10 mmHg or more when you are sure you are not dehydrated, you probably have some form of hypoadrenia. The more severe the drop is, the more severe is the hypoadrenia.
An associated dizziness or lightheadedness may also be present when you stand, so do this test with someone beside you or have something you can grab on to in case you become dizzy or light headed. Tests for Adrenal Fatigue You Can Do at Home 81 If you discover you are one of the many people with adrenal fatigue and low blood pressure, you should find your blood pressure increasing to normal as you follow the program in this book. Your lightheadedness and other related symptoms will also disappear as your adrenal health improves.
Do not stop the program in the fear that it will get too high. Low blood pressure is no more desirable than high blood pressure. Occasionally, someone can have high or normal blood pressure and still have hypoadrenia. This is usually due to the lack of elasticity in the arteries seen in atherosclerosis hardening of the arteries.
If your questionnaire indicates adrenal fatigue, but your blood pressure is elevated, consult an alternative doctor for the possibility of hardening of the arteries. This program does not produce high blood pressure. Rather it helps to normalize blood pressure by strengthening the adrenals. As your adrenals strengthen, your blood pressure will come back to normal so that when you stand up from a lying position it will actually rise mmHg and you will no longer become lightheaded.
If so, then your lower overall blood pressure does not necessarily mean you have hypoadrenia. However, a drop in blood pressure upon standing up from a lying position will still indicate hypoadrenia. You will find a list of doctors at their website at www. Within a few seconds a line will appear. In a normal reaction, the mark made by the pen is initially white but reddens within a few seconds.
If you have hypoadrenia, the line will stay white for about two minutes and will also widen. The first two are reliable indicators found in nearly every moderate to severe case of adrenal fatigue, but often not in mild cases.
Again, the questionnaire can be your guide, especially in mild cases because symptoms of adrenal fatigue usually precede signs.
In addition to these self-tests, there is a relatively new laboratory test that can be extremely useful for diagnosing and monitoring adrenal fatigue, if used properly. The next chapter will give you the information you need to have this lab test done correctly. Laboratory Tests for Adrenal Fatigue 83 Chapter 11 Laboratory Tests for Adrenal Fatigue None of the standard laboratory tests typically used by most doctors are designed to detect adrenal fatigue in its varying degrees of severity.
So unless your hypoadrenia is this severe, your doctor will interpret your test results as indicating your adrenal function to be within the normal range. However, there is a relatively new lab test that accurately measures several hormones, and is especially useful for measuring several of the adrenal hormones. It is called saliva hormone testing. Saliva Hormone Testing Saliva hormone testing measures the amounts of various hormones in your saliva instead of in your blood or urine.
It is the best single lab test available for detecting adrenal fatigue and has several advantages over other lab tests in determining adrenal hormone levels. Saliva hormone levels are more indicative of the amount of hormone inside the cells where hormone reactions take place. Blood, on the other hand, measures hormones circulating outside the cells, and urine measures the spill over of hormones out of the blood and into the urine.
Although blood and urine hormone tests have their uses, neither of them correlates with the hormone levels inside the cells. The level of a hormone circulating in the blood or excreted in the urine does not necessarily reveal how much of that hormone is getting into the cells. However, saliva testing for hormone levels is simple, accurate and reliable, and many studies have confirmed its accuracy as an indicator of the hormone levels within cells.
All you have to do is spit into a small vial. The tests are non-invasive no needles and you do not even have to go to a laboratory to complete them. This means that they are an extremely useful way to monitor your degree of hypoadrenia and your progress over time because they can be repeated as often as needed.
Saliva tests are also less expensive than blood tests for hypoadrenia. They can be done by many health practitioners, other than medical doctors, such as chiropractors and naturopaths, who may not have laboratory privileges in your state, but who perhaps know much more about adrenal fatigue than your family doctor or specialist. You can even obtain a saliva kit by mail and then send it back to the lab from anywhere in the United States.
However, unless you know how to interpret a hormone test, it is far better to have a health practitioner familiar with saliva tests and adrenal fatigue do the interpretation for you. In this case it is important to find a practitioner who has experience with adrenal hormone testing and interpretation, which is unfortunately not a procedure widely known to mainstream doctors.
The best way to determine your particular adrenal hormone cortisol levels is to use the saliva test that measures your cortisol levels several times per day.
Typically, laboratories testing hormonal content of saliva have test kits that take samples four or more times per day. You merely carry around a few small tubes and, at designated times of the day, you spit into one of the tubes and recap it. The samples usually do not need to be refrigerated and can be sent by mail to the laboratory. For a list of laboratories that do accurate and reliable saliva testing, as well as a list of doctors familiar with this test, see our website at www.
By measuring your saliva hormone levels at least four times per day, you will be able to see for yourself where your cortisol levels are compared to the norms. After you receive your report, you can see whether low cortisol levels are responsible for the feelings of fatigue that you experience during particular times of day.
Because saliva hormone levels correlate well with the amount of hormone inside the cells tissue Laboratory Tests for Adrenal Fatigue 85 levels and samples can be taken as needed without inconvenience or adverse side effects, saliva testing is often more useful than blood or urine testing of hormone levels.
How I Use the Saliva Hormone Tests I use the saliva hormone test to confirm other signs and symptoms of adrenal fatigue. I start with a saliva cortisol screening test that measures cortisol levels at four different times during the day: between AM within 1 hour after waking when cortisol levels are highest; between AM; between PM; and between PM. This shows how your cortisol levels vary during the day something else you cannot easily do with blood or urine tests.
In addition, if I have a patient whose main symptom is fatigue and their questionnaire is inconclusive, or if someone has intermittent symptoms, I use the saliva test to determine if their symptoms are related to low adrenal function.
Sometimes I have patients carry around some test vials with them so they can take saliva samples while they are experiencing a low period or other symptoms, at any time during the day. On each saliva sample they write the date and time. They also record, along with the date and time, information on a separate sheet of paper and send the vials off to the lab. When I get their test results back, I compare their saliva cortisol levels with the laboratory standards for the time they are experiencing symptoms.
If the cortisol levels are low at those times, we know that low adrenal function is involved in the symptom picture. This gives me a way to assess adrenal activity at the time they were experiencing a symptom.
Another way I like to use the saliva test, when possible, is to compare samples taken when a patient is experiencing an energy high or low with samples taken during a regular day, when the patient is feeling relatively normal baseline samples. After we have a baseline, these patients carry around some spare vials to take saliva samples at times when they are feeling especially good or especially bad. Again, they record the symptom s they were experiencing as well as the date and time on a separate sheet of paper.
They also record the date and time on each vial and send them off to the lab. To my knowledge, no other physician uses this method, but it is quite a handy method of determining cortisol levels in relation to symptoms. The DHEA-S level is a direct indicator of the functioning of the area within the adrenal glands that produces sex hormones the zona reticularis. Saliva tests for testosterone, the estrogens, progesterone and other hormones can also be done, if needed, and may be of value in working with adrenal fatigue.
If the cortisol levels are also decreased, the 3 tests together further indicate chronically decreased adrenal function. The Effect of Transdermal Hormone Replacement on Lab Results When using transdermal replacement hormones hormones applied through the skin, such as progesterone cream , the saliva values for those particular hormones frequently rise out of the testing range.
These hormone levels will remain abnormally high on saliva tests until a few months after you stop applying them. Blood tests, on the other hand, will not reflect tissue levels of the transdermally applied hormone creams because the hormones from the creams are transported through the lymph to the cells rather than through the blood.
The blood levels will not change even though more hormone is getting into the cells. So if you are using transdermal hormones, neither blood nor saliva test results are accurate indicators of your tissue levels. In this case, your symptoms or lack of rather than lab tests are better indicators of your own hormonal output.
Symptoms are very closely related to tissue hormone levels of most hormones. Similarly, if you use topical cortisone or related preparations, it is best to have a period of non-use of 1 week or more to get accurate indicators of tissue cortisol levels from saliva tests. Like progesterone, cortisol and its synthetic analogs used in topical creams can falsely elevate saliva levels.
Laboratory Tests for Adrenal Fatigue 87 Problems with the Interpretation of Standard Laboratory Tests in Adrenal Fatigue If a doctor does not use the saliva hormone tests, piecing together a correct diagnosis of adrenal fatigue from other laboratory tests is more difficult. In addition, there has never been a reliable urine or blood test that checks for, and can definitively diagnose, mild forms of hypoadrenia.
Currently available laboratory tests can be useful in the diagnosis of adrenal fatigue, but they require special training in their interpretation.
In fact, common tests done as part of a routine blood work-up can be very useful in the detection of signs of adrenal fatigue if physicians know what to look for. However, standard laboratory tests have certain limitations of which you should be aware.
They were only screened for severe hypoadrenia, i. Thus the very standards to which laboratory tests compare patients are faulty from the outset because the population used to standardize the tests may include many people with some level of adrenal fatigue. Another problem is that laboratory tests are defined and standardized according to statistical norms instead of physiologically optimal norms.
That is, test scores are based on math rather than on signs and symptoms. When the adrenal function of a population is tested, all the individual scores are taken and averaged together.
In this case the probability distribution is a statistical prediction of how often each score will occur when the adrenal function of a group of people is tested. The most frequent scores occur close to the mean, thus forming the dome of the bell. Less frequent scores occur further from the mean and so form the slope and skirt of the bell. Only the highest and lowest 2.
As a result, this statistical model only catches extreme adrenal dysfunction and misses all the rest. To make matters worse, standards can vary from lab to lab and therefore it is not always possible to even compare the results of one lab with another. Laboratory Tests for Adrenal Fatigue 89 Additionally, standard laboratory tests also do not take into account the important factor of individual biochemical variation.
This individual variation is not considered when scoring lab tests; you are either inside or outside the normal range. As a consequence, the level of a hormone in an individual may be halved or doubled and thus be abnormal for that person but still be within the so-called normal range. McGraw-Hill, NY, p, Ideally, doctors would have baseline scores for each patient that had been obtained when the patient was feeling well and functioning at a healthy level.
This way, when the patient becomes symptomatic and is functioning at a lower level, the test could be repeated and the resulting scores compared to the original scores.
The difference would be quantifiable and the doctor could make an accurate judgment as to whether or not adrenal function in this patient is below his or her own normal. There is also a significant problem associated with the way laboratory results are reported. Scores are sharply demarcated as falling either Laboratory Tests for Adrenal Fatigue 91 within the normal range or outside the normal range.
There is no gray area. Most doctors have taught themselves to look only at those scores outside the normal range. These are clearly indicated on laboratory test printouts. Therefore, if Marsha received a score of 2. But if she scored 1. In the first case, the doctor would consider her normal, tell her as much, and ignore the actual score. If, on the other hand, her score was 1. Further complicating the problem of proper interpretation of laboratory data in adrenal fatigue is the fact that steroid hormones occur in more than one form in your body but most lab tests measure only one.
Cortisol, for example, takes on three forms in your blood: 1 unattached to any other substance free , 2 loosely bound and 3 tightly bound to blood proteins. The most common measurement for hormones is the amount of hormone not attached to anything, called the free circulating hormone. It does not measure the bound hormones, which act as reserves and become free hormones if needed. This reserve can be critical to proper physiological function.
For example, very low circulating cortisol levels can be brought to within normal range by the administration of a synthetic cortisol. But people taking synthetic cortisol cannot withstand stress as well as people with naturally normal cortisol levels, even though blood tests for both show normal free circulating cortisol levels. Blood tests can often be deceptive because they do not typically give you the whole picture. The diverse roles played by adrenal hormones explain why adrenal fatigue can be the underlying cause of such a wide range of symptoms and conditions, including:.
Adrenal fatigue is often precipitated by recurring bouts of bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma, sinusitis, or other respiratory infections.
The more severe the infection, the more frequently it occurs or the longer it lasts, the more likely the adrenals are involved. If there are other concurrent stresses, like an unhappy marriage, poor diet or stressful job, the downhill slide is steeper and faster. These pathogens exert a tremendous drain on adrenal resources.
Some professions, notably the medical profession, are harder on the adrenal glands. Other professionals at increased risk include the police, secretaries and teachers, and middle executives, all of whom live in the middle, taking the blame when things go wrong but lacking the control to make them go right.
All these symptoms reflect the effects of chronic stress that produces elevated cortisol levels. And there are also congenital differences in adrenal resiliency. And there are also congenital differences in adrenal resiliency. Children born to mothers suffering from adrenal fatigue or who experience severe stress in the womb typically have lower adrenal function.
If any of your patients are suffering from a chronic disease and morning fatigue is one of their symptoms, the adrenals are probably involved. If a patient presents with three or more of the following signs and symptoms, adrenal fatigue is highly likely:. A self-help manual for the person suffering from adrenal fatigue — both in diagnosing and treating the condition — the book is arranged sequentially, each part preparing the reader for what follows.
Part I provides an overview of adrenal fatigue: what it is, what causes it, who is likely to suffer from it, how it progresses and why medicine has not yet recognized it as a syndrome. In this section, Wilson also provides an excellent review of laboratory tests for adrenal fatigue discussing not only his preferred option, saliva hormone testing, but problems with the interpretation of standard laboratory tests and ways to still get useful information from these tests.
Part III is an unbelievably comprehensive guide to restoring healthy adrenal function. It is designed to be a self-help book…. The book is divided into 4 parts that are arranged sequentially so that each section prepares the reader for the successive readings. Part 1 is an overview, including the causes of adrenal fatigue, while part 2 segues to self-help assessment tools, including a questionnaire designed to help readers determine if they are experiencing adrenal fatigue.
Part 3 provides an extensive guide focused on recovery from adrenal fatigue, while part 4 presents a reference section on the role of the adrenal glands. This is an exceptional book, written for the patient.
It should be made available to support the physician-patient relationship during the treatment profile. Stacie Deyglio, ND received her baccalaureate degree in biology with a minor in chemistry from the College of Mt. Vincent in New York.
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