"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
- Albert Einstein
On July 12, I will be posting my book club episode on the book "Pottenger's Cats." I'll be discussing it on my Instagram Live that night at 8 pm, and the paid-subscribers only Q&A will follow 8:30 pm.
Adrenal fatigue is one of the most abused "diagnoses" in the world of natural, alternative, holistic (call it what you will) medicine. Why is this diagnosis so misunderstood?
First, because it exists along a spectrum, and subtlety is something that simple minds either dismiss or exaggerate. There are gurus telling virtually everyone that they have adrenal fatigue. There are also skeptics who completely dismiss the diagnosis, except in extreme cases, leaving their patients fatigued, malnourished, and miserable. This is why I made videos recently on whether or not you should take DHEA and tyrosine. DHEA is an adrenal hormone. Tyrosine is the precursor to dopamine - it is frequently low in my patients.
Second, because there is a sales and marketing narrative founded upon adrenal extracts, adaptogenic herbs, and nootropics that people are abusing to enable themselves to do what they want, rather than what they should.
The truth is somewhere in the middle, and the devil is in the details.
What is adrenal fatigue? Adrenal fatigue refers to the state in which the adrenal glands are no longer secreting adequate amounts of adrenal hormones and neurotransmitters.
What does that mean? "Adequate" is a loaded word. The adrenal glands are critical to your stress response. When you experience any stress or threat, your adrenal respond by secreting cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. Each of these has various metabolites, and each of these metabolites in turn has unique physiological effects.
A well-rested, well-nourished human being has an abundance of reserve hormones and neurotransmitters in their adrenal glands. They can withstand great stresses with ease. Chronically stressed, exhausted, over-stimulated modern Americans do not fit this description, which explains why mortality is rising and longevity is declining in America today.
What happens when you get a vaccine? Your immune system is modulated by stress steroids. In the absence of adequate levels of these hormones, the immune system has a tendency to get confused and/or rage out of control. Sound familiar? This is why one the things I routinely use in patients with vaccine-injuries is a short round of low-dose prednisone. The same is true of acute infections. However, in all of these cases, the patient needs rest, a nourishing diet, and a healthy environment.
Adrenal fatigue exists on a spectrum. The spectrum ranges from the extreme low-end of adrenal hormones and neurotransmitters, in which levels are so low that patients will die if you do not replace them, to those who have borderline-low levels that are still well within the "average" range.
Many people wind up with a diagnosis of adrenal fatigue who have never even had these levels tested. They are being driven into complex webs of sales funnels where they buy one bag and bottle of adaptogenic herbs and supplements after another, while no one tells them the ugly truth about adrenal fatigue.
If you have adrenal fatigue, you are trying to do too much and be too much to too many people.
Many people come to me to enable them to continue to abuse their bodies to meet the needs of others. They want me to use my prescription pad to give them another week, month, or even year of burning the candle at both ends.
I consider this to be a mistake, but I also understand that in modern life, you sometimes have to make hard choices. If you are over-worked, you need a game-plan to escape the chronic cycles of over-work. Frequently, I find that people who are burning themselves out have a history of being abused and neglected by the families. They are surrounded by people who expect more of them than is reasonable, who denigrate and demean them, and who, while always expecting help, never offer it. These people do not value their time and effort adequately, and this is why they burn themselves out.
There are also, by the way, plenty of people with adrenal fatigue who in fact have low testosterone. This is why I held a book club on this (paid-subscribers Q&A here). But you won’t hear that from most gurus and experts, because they don’t understand the connection.
There are two key factors that are driving rates of adrenal fatigue in our society through the roof, in my experience. The first of these is artificial light at night. Blue and green light are triggers for adrenal hormones and neurotransmitters to be released. Chronic over-stimulation can readily lead to exhaustion of these hormones and neurotransmitters - how could it be otherwise? Likewise, melatonin is required for repair and regeneration each night. This is why blue blockers are one of my recommendations to every single person who I work with. It's why I am such a strong proponent of fixing your light environment. People who won't fix their light environment shouldn't count on getting better. That might sound insensitive, but I've watched too many people fail to pretend otherwise.
It’s why I love photobiomodulation for adrenal fatigue. People with adrenal fatigue can’t stand the stress of sauna, but do great photobiomodulation. More on this later…
The second key factor is electromagnetic pollution. These fields chronically stress the body, and stress is the key word here. Academics and over-educated experts will proclaim that there is no proof that artificial eletromagnetic fields are causing fatigue and "burn-out," but they are wrong. They are pretend experts in ivory towers who never really engage in real-world medicine. All their know are shots, pills, and surgeries. They are the doctors that Hippocrates warned us about.
"Physicians are many in title and few in reality."
- Hippocrates
This is why I strongly urge my patients to mitigate their exposure to artificial electromagnetic radiation in our modern world. Patients who choose not to do so are picking a losing battle.
What does all of this have to do with cats and their nutrition? That is the subject of Pottenger's Cats, and the topic of this blog post. Dr. Pottenger found that what cats ate determined their longevity, fitness, and fertility. He chose to study this because he found that malnourished cats required higher and higher doses of adrenal hormone to get the same results.
This is the exact same phenomenon that we observe in patients, who may require radically different doses of a hormone or medication in order to get the same result.
What Pottenger found was that seemingly inconsequential changes in diet could lead to massive changes in an animal's fitness.
What does this mean for you?
What does this mean for modern people?
What nutritional mistakes are you making right now, today, that are setting you up for failure tomorrow?
That is what we will be covering in this book club.
This book is one of the most important in the history of medicine, despite being just a few hundred pages and now being over 100 years old.
What I will explain in this book club is information and insight you will not get elsewhere.
You don't want to miss it.