Video: Chronic Fatigue

Hi, Dr. Minkoff, LifeWorks Wellness Center.

Today I want to talk about chronic fatigue and how to handle it.

So chronic fatigue means you’re tired all the time.

You wake up tired, you’re tired all day, you go to bed tired.

For some people that means they’re going
to be in bed all day and they can’t work

and they can’t think and
they can’t do anything.

For some people they’re able to keep going but it’s always a struggle, it’s always hanging there, they feel just big “massiness” in their head and they just can’t seem to get through it.

So there is no one cause of chronic fatigue

and chronic fatigue is kind of a big wastebasket as a diagnosis, the doctor said well I’ve got chronic fatigue syndrome.

But what does that actually mean?

Well it means that you’re tired
but it doesn’t actually tell you

why are you tired or
what made you tired?

Because most likely six months before, a year before, five years before, depending on how long this has been going on, you weren’t tired, you were okay.

You’re tired because your body has too many things going on that it can’t deal with.

Usually this falls in the category of some kind of chronic infection or more than one.

Or some kind of chronic toxins that are bothering the body

and what they do is they actually block

the energy production system that’s within each cell in the body.

So, in each cell there are these little organs, they’re called mitochondria.

Their job is to take the oxygen you breathe and the food you eat and turn it into energy.

And if these mitochondria make enough energy, you will have energy and you won’t be fatigued.

If they’re in your brain, you’ll be able to think straight.

If you’re in, if they’re in your liver, they’ll be able to to detoxify and make proteins.

If they’re in your muscles, you’ll have good strength.

But if those mitochondria are not working at the level that they’re supposed to,

you will be fatigued and have everything else that goes with it.

Now external poisons, chemicals,
pesticides, heavy metals,

things like this, drugs,

can get into the mitochondria and slow down their ability to make energy.

Infections, Epstein-Barr, Lyme, cytomegalovirus, herpes type 6.

These are notorious for getting into mitochondria slowing their ability to make energy

and then when you don’t have energy, you have fatigue.

One other big one is nutritional deficiencies.

Let’s say that you’re low in magnesium or potassium or amino acids or essential fats.

If, you may even be eating them but if your gut isn’t any good, you’re not absorbing them.

Your mitochondria can’t work without those things.

So if we can put these things together,

what are the external things, the outside things that are in you that should not be?

Like viruses or bacteria or chemicals or pesticide and help you to detoxify those things.

And find out what nutrients that you’re actually missing and supply those nutrients.

Then what’ll happen is your mitochondria will start to work

and when they start to work,
you will get energy

and when you have energy, you
won’t have chronic fatigue anymore.

Now sometimes there’s some hormonal considerations on this too.

The person’s testosterone is way too low, or their estrogen’s too low or above all their thyroid’s too low.

Many doctors believe that if you’re in the range that the lab says

of normal say for thyroid that that means you’re fine.

And yet the person may have symptoms of
fatigue, dry skin, hair falling out, can’t think, gaining weight.

And what’s really wrong is, their
thyroid for them is too low and while they may be in that
range that says is normal, they may need to be at the very high end of the range for their body to actually be normal.

And so we work on their hormones too to get them idealized.

And most people with chronic fatigue when we fix these things, their chronic fatigue goes away and they feel fine.

One other thing I want to say about this is sometimes infection,

low-grade infections that the person doesn’t know about can also be contributing.

So a person may have infection in their jaw bone, in their teeth and their gums.

This can also weigh them down, cause fatigue and that’s another piece of this puzzle.

Okay. So that’s chronic fatigue, that’s how we handle it. I hope this helps.