Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs of Adrenal Fatigue
A few years ago, a beloved naturopathic doctor had me soak pieces of cotton in my spit, i.e., do a salivary hormone panel to suss out adrenal function. Dragging myself to her office, I had all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, but alas a picture-perfect thyroid.
The results of the panel were so odd the lab ran the test twice, getting the same result the second time. Instead of elevated cortisol, common in most adrenal fatigue cases, my cortisol stores were quite low to start, and tank to zero by noon. Then, instead of me turning into a basket case the rest of the day, DHEA, another adrenal hormone shoots up 2-3 times its normal level by late afternoon, giving me an internal shot of espresso. Then my cortisol peaks at midnight, enabling lots of energy to cybersurf and play geetar, and essentially throwing my circadian rhythms all to hell.
So my doc at the time wasn’t sure what to do about this. We tried a few adrenal support supplements, but nothing made a dent in my weird biorhythms. She said I could do an ACTH challenge test, which is basically where they flood your adrenals with the adrencorticotropic hormone, and if your adrenals collapse that means you’ve got adrenal fatigue.
Which reminds me of something we called the “Door Test” in music school. We made reeds for oboes and bassoons, and if we were unsure a reed was good or not, we’d put it in a doorway and then slam the door on it. If it broke, it was a bad reed. So the ACTH test is exactly the same thing - putting your adrenals in a doorway and then slamming the heck out of them to test their viability. Now that’s sound medicine.
Foregoing that, I’ve been googling high and low for “low cortisol, high DHEA” and have found nothing, just other sufferers with the same strange results. Until now.
The other day I made an appointment with a naturopathic doctor who specializes in endocrinology, and while he wasn’t the warmest dude, he did happen to mention this. That adrenal fatigue is a continuum, and there are seven stages of it (or three overarching ones). He had me do another spit panel to see which stage I’m in now. (I won’t know the results for about a month.) I had never heard of this before, so when I got home, my busy little beaver self netted a goldmine of stuff all about the stages of adrenal fatigue. And a slew of videos of a Dr. Michael Borkin lecturing on adrenal exhaustion.
I have been watching and listening with rapt attention, although some of the video titles don’t match what he’s talking about, and he talks more about the condition than the treatment. However, here he explains why I walk like a duck:
It’s a little (or a lot) on the technical side. But his brilliance in talking about the endocrine system and correlation to parasitic infestation makes me hot.
Hey, my hormones are working after all!
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.