Fatigue - depression or adrenal exhaustion?

Chinese medicine honors how you feel - if you're tired, you probably need rest. How much rest? That depends on how much you've been "overspending" your resources. We highly value rest and relaxation - and we know that being busy and not sleeping enough adds up over time. Somehow in this modern American culture we think we can just keep going - or worse, that we must: "I'll rest when I die."

It isn't conducive to quality of life if we just keep running, and don't stop to assess where we are, where we've come from, where we're going... and how our actions affect others who we are close to. When we busy ourselves in only seeing the immediate urgency and forget to look at the larger perspective, it's a lot like driving without any idea of what turn to take next. Besides getting lost, we're spending resources (time, energy, relationships, consciousness) going nowhere.

Sometimes it takes a bigger crisis to make us stop and take stock. Often the crisis is one of health. The thing is, the crisis took a while building up, it just wasn't noticed until it got to be a problem. Sometimes it starts as just fatigue, difficulty getting out of bed. Depression seems to be the catch-all diagnosis, take some meds, feel "fine"! Well, that just hides the problem under the rug, until something else shows up... More meds? Or maybe it's time to take stock of how we got here, accept that we don't have unlimited resources, that our bodies aren't the invicible 20-year-old body we used to have, that seemed to take all sorts of abuse with minimal repercussions... And maybe it is ok to sleep 12 hours a day - even for 2 years!

The Western medicine diagnosis is adrenal fatigue. Check out Dr Mercola's article on it:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/09/05/Most-Common-Cause-of-Fatigue-that-is-Missed-or-Misdiagnosed-by-Doctors.aspx

People Vote with their Dollars - Acupuncture Works!

New Study Reveals Number of Visits to Acupuncturists and Amount of Out-of-Pocket Spending Annually for Practitioner Visits and Self Care Such as Tai Chi and Qi Gong Up Significantly from Previous 2002 Study

According to a new study from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics, in 2007, adults in the United States spent $33.9 billion out-of-pocket on visits to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners and purchases of CAM products, classes, and materials for self-care. Nearly one-third of this out-of-pocket spending was to pay for CAM practitioner costs (see figure below.) Further, according to this government survey, the number of visits to acupuncturists rose 32% between 2002 and 2007. Also, nearly 12% of the out-of-pocket money was specifically spent on yoga, Tai chi and Qi gong for self-care (see figure below).

To read more about these significant findings on increase use of acupuncture, Tai chi, and Qi gong, please go to the link below, which provides access to the newly released National Health Statistics Reports (NHSR), (Number 18, July 30, 2009) as well as the earlier, NHSR (Number 12, December 10, 2008).

Link to the press release: http://nccam.nih.gov/news/2009/073009.htm

Acupuncture beats Western med for low back pain

http://www.naturalnews.com/026249.html

It's not enough to have a diagnosis... Give acupuncture a try, maybe that diagnosis is only a single-moment snapshot of where you are - it may not be permanent at all!

This article is hardly news to me! I see it every day - low back pain, and other muscle aches, are really hard for Western medicine... Even arthritis is often correctible with acupuncture, some exercises, and maybe some daily self-massage! I have even treated torn meniscus and herniated discs and had good results.

And people find all this "miraculous." I don't mind the enthusiasm one bit, but it strikes me that acupuncture and hands-on massage are very straightforward, no magic at all! The only reason it seems so wonderful is that Western medicine has left the hands-on so far behind that many folks who go to a doctor are never touched once... even those going in for surgery don't even get the basic "Does it hurt here or here?" examination. Instead they get a machine that takes a picture of a living changing organism - and the verdict is rendered by reading a machine's interpretation of the body!?!

And then based on such a fuzzy picture, the doctor recommends three things - surgery, meds, physical therapy... and marginalizes the hands-on therapy to only the things he writes down on a pad of paper! How can someone who hasn't even touched you prescribe manual therapy to someone else who isn't legally allowed to stray from the doctor's orders?

The way I work, I don't know in advance what I'm going to do. It's a combination of examining the patient, experience... and intuition! The results speak for themselves.