Are you tired?
A lot of people assume that they are tired because they work too hard. It is true this may be a cause if they don’t
get enough sleep but there are often other things that are ignored because work or stress is assumed to be the culprit.
It is not normal to feel tired all the time and genuine
fatigue almost always has a ‘real’ cause.
It may be due to a vitamin
deficiency. I had a patient once who was so tired she couldn’t get out of
bed in the morning plus she had convinced herself that she had early
Alzheimer’s. She came into the office
crying because she didn’t want to have to tell her children. Vitamin testing showed her to be extremely
deficient in 3 vitamins, once we replaced those she was back working in the
garden that she loved. Another cause of
fatigue is adrenal gland dysfunction.
Once again this can be so severe that patients cannot stay out of bed for more
than a few hours and have to nap all the time.
Bottom line: tiredness and feeling exhausted is not normal and can
usually be corrected. Sometimes patients have read on line that being tired
comes from a lack of thyroid hormone
or low iron and once those two tests
are normal they assume nothing more can be done. Others go to the local health
food store and start taking all kinds of supplements
and stimulants, this is like playing roulette, if you get lucky it may help.
Some supplements make you feel like you have more energy for a short while but
then you rebound and crash, or cant do without them. It is always best to
figure out the cause of the problem and then treat it appropriately. If you
have cancer or a connective tissue disease or even depression all the
supplements in the world will not fix it. The sooner you get to the root of the
problem the better. If on the other hand
the problem is just lack of sleep then that can be worked on too (see my blog
on sleep from earlier this year). Sleep
prolongs life.
If you have a problem of tiredness, malaise or fatigue make
an appointment now.
