adrenal fatigue Archives - Hormones Matter

Burning Out From Worsening Dysautonomia

Published on July 27, 2022

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Longstanding Symptoms of Dysautonomia

I am a 34-year-old male with symptoms of dysautonomia including small fiber neuropathy (SFN), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), fatigue, insomnia, and problems with attention. I have had some of these symptoms for as long as I can remember but they have become worse after contracting COVID in December of 2021. I suspect I have issues with thiamine and possibly other nutrients.

History of Heavy Medication Use and Poor Diet

At around age 19, I felt what could be described as intracranial hypertension. I had multiple MRIs and CAT scans, but everything came back normal. At age 22, I began exhibiting signs of fatigue and insomnia coupled with anxiety. I most likely have some form of hypermobility too.

I was diagnosed with ADD and anxiety in my teens and prescribed Adderall and Prozac at the time. I was on those medications from the age of 16-25 years old. Then again from the age of 27-32 years old, I was given Adderall. I smoked and chewed tobacco until age 30 and was on and off hydrocortisone for poor adrenal function too. Evidently, adrenals can “fatigue” or become dysfunctional under high amounts of stress, even though blood cortisol was normal, saliva cortisol levels would always be low. Only functional doctors buy into this diagnosis.

I had strep and sinus infections a lot in my teens and early twenties and have probably had 40-50 doses of various antibiotics over the years. During this time, I worked out regularly with weight training and ice hockey. I was pretty competitive growing up. I would train 4-5 times a week and wake up early every Saturday to play hockey. I still work out around 5 days a week, mostly weight training now.

As a child and teenager, my diet was filled with carbs and crappy junk food like waffles and cereals and breads, and sweets. At around age 25, I began to eat a more healthy, paleo diet. I also began to avoid gluten. My diet currently consists of mostly carnivore/keto. I consume no alcohol at all. I did have a 10-year marijuana habit, from age 15-25, but I quit cold turkey years ago. I am currently taking Klonopin and have begun supplementing bone broth and a multivitamin. I have been taking 1mg per/day of Klonopin for a decade now. This may be affecting my symptoms.

Along Came COVID

In December of 2021, I got COVID and since then I have felt even worse. The COVID was mild. I took Ivermectin for 10 days and seemed to recover from the virus but all of my symptoms of dysautonomia have worsened.

Given my history, I am looking for advice on how to repair the damage I have done to myself with the poor diet, medications, and drugs. I have read about thiamine deficiency and it fits many of my symptoms but I am unsure how and where to begin. What else may be required?

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Recovering From Medically Induced Chronic Illness

by KJ N

Published on February 6, 2020

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Unexplained or Medically Induced Chronic Illness?

“Unexplained.” That’s what doctors say about chronic illness. Conventional medicine says, ‘learn to live with it.’ Rather than offer a true treatment or cure for these debilitating conditions, they suppress the immune system and offer more drugs for depression and anxiety – none of which are effective. I’m here to tell you that common wisdom is wrong. I know, because my own lucky story proves we can heal from chronic illness. Pharmaceutical insults created my disabling illnesses – Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, estrogen dominance, adrenal fatigue, POTS, Graves’ Disease, Hashimoto’s, Bell’s Palsy, infertility and more. I share my journey to offer hope. The doctors were wrong. I have recovered and am once again, healthy.

Early Clues and Pharmaceutical Insults

My childhood had some clues – things I now know predict chronic illness. My lymph glands swelled when I was otherwise healthy. Mosquito bites turned into angry 3” welts. Childhood bunions and hyper-mobile joints suggested leaky gut. All these issues correlate with chronic illness and, seen in hindsight, hint at the difficulties that awaited me in adulthood.

My immune system may have been awry from the start, but pharmaceuticals tipped the scale toward chronic illness. As a teen, I took birth control pills for heavy periods and cramps. When vague symptoms appeared in my early twenties, I asked about pill side effects. The gynecologist laughed at the idea, but I trusted my gut and finally stopped the pill. I felt better in some ways but developed new symptoms. Sleep became difficult. I was hypersensitive to noise and light and struggled with unquenchable thirst. The doctor suggested my extreme thirst stemmed from hot weather and salty foods. This explanation didn’t add up to me, but I was young and so was the internet. I had no resources to connect the dots. Today, I recognize that 10 years of hormonal birth control created nutrient deficiencies (folic acid, vitamins B2, B6, B12, C, and E, along with magnesium, selenium and zinc) while also raising my risk for future autoimmune disease.

Recurrent UTIs, Fluoroquinolones, and New Onset Graves’ Disease

A few years later, recurrent urinary tract infections led to many doses of the fluoroquinolone antibiotic, Cipro. Cipro now carries a black box warning and is known to induce mitochondrial damage. My mid twenties also brought pre and post-menstrual spotting and bleeding for 10 days each month. Doctors did nothing for my hormonal imbalance but diagnosed Graves’ disease (hyperthyroidism). Everything about me sped up. Food went right through my system. I was moody. My mind was manic at times. I was unable to rest and yet physically exhausted from a constantly racing heart.

The doctor said Graves’ disease was easy – just destroy the thyroid and take hormone replacement pills for the rest of my life. I didn’t have a medical degree, but this treatment (RAI, radiation to kill the thyroid) just didn’t make sense. Graves’ disease is not thyroid disease. It is autoimmune dysfunction, where antibodies overstimulate a helpless thyroid.

As I studied my options, I learned that RAI could exacerbate autoimmune illness and many patients feel worse after treatment. It was surprising to find that the US was the only Western country to recommend RAI for women of childbearing age. Armed with this knowledge, I declined RAI and opted for medication. The endocrinologist mocked my decision. I was in my 20s and standing up to him was hard, but it marked a turning point and spurred me to take responsibility for my own health, rather than blindly trusting doctors. Recent reports suggest RAI treatment increases future cancer risks. My Graves’ disease eventually stabilized on medication, although I never felt really well. I pushed for answers for my continued illness, but doctors refused to test my sex or adrenal hormones.

IVF and More Damage to My Health

Things turned south again when I was unable to conceive. The supposed best fertility clinic in Washington, DC could not find a cause for my infertility. I’ll save that story for another day, but the short version involved a few years of torment and four failed IVF attempts. The fertility drugs and the stress worsened my overall health considerably.

Our last try at pregnancy was with a specialist who practiced functional medicine. Labs and charting uncovered a clear progesterone imbalance, and also explained my spotting. This simple diagnosis was completely missed by the conventional fertility clinic. A brief trial of progesterone cream resulted in two naturally conceived, healthy pregnancies. Isn’t it remarkable that several years and over $100,000 failed to produce a baby with IVF and $20 of progesterone cream on my wrist did the trick? This could be a cautionary tale about profit motive in modern medicine, but that, too, is a topic for another day.

Years of Conventional Medicine: Thyroid Damage, Autonomic Dysfunction, and Profound Fatigue

I weaned off thyroid medications and felt fairly well after my babies, but my system took a big hit when life brought an international relocation. The move was intensely stressful and my health sunk after we landed half a world away. I had no energy, gained weight, and lived in a fog. The tropical heat and humidity of Southeast Asia felt like a personalized form of torture.

Perhaps the stress of our move left me vulnerable to the reappearance of autoimmune and adrenal dysfunction, as my next diagnosis was Hashimoto’s Disease and adrenal fatigue. Doctors ordered functional medicine tests (hair, organic acids, stool, saliva cortisol and hormones) that identified nutrient imbalances, but their treatment ideas fell short. Despite replacement hormones and supplements by the handful, I remained very sick, with profound exhaustion, brain fog, sleep disruption, pain, and terribly imbalanced sex hormones.

Taking Matters Into My Own Hands

If setbacks have a bright side, it is in the drive to get better. I started studying when my doctors ran out of ideas to treat my illness. Fibromyalgia was the best description of my pain, but I knew conventional medicine offered no help for this condition. I dug into the topic and found the work of Dr. John C. Lowe, who used T3 thyroid hormone for fibromyalgia, and Paul Robinson, creator of CT3M, the circadian method for using T3. CT3M and high daily dose of progesterone cream improved my quality of life in the short term. Near daily bleeding eventually regulated back into a normal cycle and my adrenal function improved greatly.

Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) was the next bump, bringing a very high heart rate, very low blood pressure, heat intolerance, and extreme sweating on the lightest activity. By this time, I didn’t even ask the doctor for help. My research pointed to salt and potassium, and so I drank the adrenal cocktail and salt water daily. POTS symptoms vanished quickly with this easy strategy, as did the nocturnal polyuria that plagued me for many years.

I steadied after this time. I was not well but functional, despite some major life stressors, including another international move and a child’s health crisis. Even though I managed the daily basics, things like house guests, travel, or anything physically taxing required several days to a week of recuperation.

The Next Step: Addressing Nutrient Deficiencies

The next step in my recovery came thanks to a B12 protocol that includes co-factor nutrients, developed by Dr. Gregory Russell-Jones. Addressing the deficiencies connected to B12 helped and things progressed well until I had a disastrous reaction after eating mussels, which I hoped would raise iron levels. I vomited for hours and stayed in bed for days. I kept up the B12 protocol, but just couldn’t recover. Largely bedridden, and napping 4 hours at a stretch, I got up in the evening only to drive to a restaurant dinner, too exhausted to prepare food or deal with dishes.

Debilitating exhaustion lasted for a month, and then two, with no relief. It was an awful time, but hitting rock bottom proved a blessing in disguise, as desperation turned me back to research. Slowly, I pushed through brain fog and started to review studies on chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. This led me to a promising Italian study using thiamine for these conditions.

Studying thiamine, it seemed plausible that the allergic reaction to mussels drained my B1 reserves, making it impossible to recover. Inspired by the research, I started on plain B1 at very high doses. To my surprise, I felt better right away. The first dose boosted my energy and mental clarity.

I continued to learn about B1’s benefits, thanks to this website and the text by Drs. Marrs and Lonsdale. Two weeks went by and thiamine HCL seemed less effective, so I switched to lipothiamine and allithiamine, the forms recommended in Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition. WOW. What a difference! Virtually overnight, my gears began to turn, and I felt better with each new day. In a single month, I went from bedridden to functioning well 2 out of every 3 days. I had ideas, I had energy, and I could DO things. The setback days were mild and disappeared entirely after 2 months on thiamine.

At the 2 month mark, I had to travel for a family emergency. My pre-thiamine self would have needed at least a week of rest following this kind of trip, and I expected pain and fatigue as I stepped off the plane. But to my great surprise, I felt well! I remember walking through the airport late that evening and thinking it felt amazing to stretch my legs. Maybe that sounds like an ordinary feeling, but years of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia conditioned my body to stop, to sit, whenever possible. It was entirely novel to FEEL GOOD while moving! The next day came and I did not collapse, I did not require days to recover and was able to carry on like a normal person. It was a remarkable change in an unbelievably short time.

Recovery From Conventional Medicine’s Ills Came Down to Thiamine

Getting better feels miraculous, but it’s not. The real credit for my recovery goes to experts like Dr. Marrs and Dr. Lonsdale who spread the word about thiamine. Despite years of illness and dead ends, I believed I could heal and I kept trying. Tenacity eventually paid off when posts on this site helped connect the dots between my symptoms and thiamine deficiency. More than anything, my recovery is a story of tremendous luck, as I finally landed upon the single nutrient my body needed most.

The difference between my “before thiamine” and “after thiamine” self is beyond what I can describe. Birth control, Cipro, and Lupron created nutrient imbalances and damaged my mitochondria, leading to multiple forms of chronic illness in the years between my 20s and 40s. Replacing thiamine made recovery possible by providing the fuel my damaged cells so badly needed. At this writing, I am 7 months into high dose thiamine and continue to improve. I have not experienced any form of setback, regardless the stressors. My energy feels close to normal, the pain is resolving, and brain fog is a thing of the past. My sense of humor, creativity and mental functioning are all on the upswing. I owe thanks to the real scientists who dare to challenge wrong-headed ideas of conventional medicine, and who provide hope for these so-called hopeless conditions. My wish is that this story will do the same for someone else.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

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Fatigue, Hair Loss, Diarrhea: Just Hormones or Crohn’s Disease?

by Taylor Provost

Published on January 29, 2016

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Instead of wondering where I’d be going out for the weekend, much of my twenty-first year was spent wondering “Why is my hair thinning so much?” and “Why am I having diarrhea every day?” The last thought on my mind was a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease – an incurable inflammatory bowel disease. Now unfortunately, even amidst trying to finish college and plan a wedding, the word Crohn’s, as well as its bodily effects, are on my mind every single day.

On a quest to find true health, I became very invested in learning all I could about natural living and healing about two years ago. Ironically, around the time I began to become proactive towards my health, I noticed my health begin to deteriorate in a number of ways.

What I had assumed to be due to the normal stress of college life, a tumultuous relationship and the fast-paced life of a nanny, I began suffering from chronic fatigue, night sweats, consistently cold hands and feet, unexplained weight loss, and now chronic diarrhea to add to my laundry list of health concerns a person my age shouldn’t be having. Could my adrenals be worn down? Am I eating enough? Drinking enough water? Do I have a thyroid issue?

Hypothyroidism?

My family has a history of issues with hypothyroidism – my mother and maternal grandmother both struggle with maintaining correct hormonal balance. When my mother suggested this as a possibility to me, I figured after two years of wondering, it was time to investigate.

At a local health expo I attended last fall, I went to an informational seminar on thyroid health – all of the symptoms of poor thyroid health resonated so deeply to me. I was convinced, at this point, that this was the missing piece to my healthy body puzzle. I went out and bought an iodine supplement, but decided to hold off on taking it until I got official bloodwork done to confirm my self-diagnosis.

I cashed in on a general physical as an excuse to get some bloodwork done with my pediatrician (regrettably, I have not found a general practitioner yet). I requested a variety of tests: a full thyroid panel, a check on my adrenals, selenium, iron, vitamins, DHEA sulfate and more. Fully expecting my test results to come back saying I had poor thyroid function, much to my surprise I received a rather concerned phone call from my doctor.

Vitamin Deficient, Iron Deficient, Protein Deficient

“Your thyroid panel came back normal, but your iron is dangerously low; you are severely anemic and you need to begin on iron supplement immediately,” he said. I had not been anemic since I was four years old, but I recalled craving crushed ice when I was anemic, and I had not craved this in years. This news was shocking to me, but even more shocking was his further explanation. “You are also extremely deficient in vitamins C and D, as well as showing signs of malnutrition, such as not enough protein. Your white blood cell count is also concerning; it is what we call ‘immature,’ which shows that your body is fighting something.”

Dumbfounded, I had little clue as to how to process this information. How could I be showing signs of malnutrition? I eat all the time, and eat meat every day. The diagnosis made no sense to me. My doctor expressed concern of an irritable bowel syndrome, such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, as his suspicion was that I was not properly absorbing the nutrients I was consuming.

The Diagnosis: Crohn’s Disease

Following a colonoscopy, an endoscopy and further bloodwork, my diagnosis was confirmed – Crohn’s disease.

My doctor explained Crohn’s to me as my immune system attacking my own digestive tract, supposedly without explanation.

Tacking the word ‘disease’ on the end of any diagnosis is devastating, to say the least, especially at the age of 21. But when a professional can’t seem to articulate a probable cause to your chronic disease, perhaps the most overwhelming sensation is confusion. With all of my efforts to live consciously and support my immune system, the news of having an autoimmune disease has been especially emotional and frustrating. While I am grateful my hormones are in balance, at least for now, my body is experiencing constant inflammation, and all I know for certain is that this is not normal.

After having a pity party for myself on the ride home from the doctor’s office, I resolved that I refuse to believe that nothing can be done for my condition, despite being told that diet will have no bearing on my inflammation. I have spent the last two years taking responsibility for my health, and Crohn’s cannot shake that philosophy.

I am currently taking steps to heal my gut through the Gut and Psychology Syndrome Diet, and while I am on an immunosuppressant steroid drug for eight weeks, I am determined to remain drug-free for this condition after this period. I am determined to achieve remission through a total transformation of my diet, and with the help and guidance of other doctors I am pursuing who have experience treating Crohn’s disease along with other autoimmune issues.

In light of this, I urge any and all who suspect that something is just “off” in their body to look seriously into the problem. And when doctors tell you what the problem is, but offer no solution, dig even deeper. Seek out a Functional Medicine Doctor; get to the root of the issue. Most importantly, take charge of your health, whether it’s your hormones, your gut, your mind, or something else. We cannot function properly as a whole when one part of us is out of balance. Keep searching for answers in your quests for true health, too, and do not let a diagnosis shake you – even if it’s Crohn’s.