Dr. Tori Hudson is an alternative medicine provider with 25 years of experience in women's health, in gynecological and primary care. She is well-versed bio-identical hormones, herbs, nutrition and nutraceuticals.
Here Dr. Hudson explains some things about the adrenals and what happens when they are no longer able to produce enough hormones. Since the adrenals are our primary stress adaptation organ, excessive stress reactions can have a draining effect on the hormones of the adrenal glands.
Dr. Hudson:
A lot of alternative medicine providers use a term called adrenal fatigue or hypo adrenalism and in fact, in the scientific literature I don’t think you’ll find that, you know in any real scientific book or you won’t find it in the Merck Manual of Diagnoses. The only, in conventional medicine they describe adrenal failure, which is called Addison’s disease, that’s when adrenal glands just don’t produce their hormones anymore.
The alternative medicine providers recognize there’s this whole gray zone that’s happening with the adrenal glands, which are two little glands that sit on top of our kidneys, kind of like hypothyroid, not necessarily thyroid failure but, the thyroid gland just isn’t producing enough hormones anymore. Same with the adrenal glands.
It’s like a hormone factory and it wanes in its production, one of the way it wanes is just by stress. It’s our main stress adaptation organ. So with pounding, pounding, pounding of stress, it starts producing less of some of it’s hormones, like cortisol and DHEA for example, and I talked to people about it kind of like you have the cash in your pocket and you have your checking account and you have your savings account and you have your investments. Well adrenal fatigue is, “Oops, I don’t have any cash in my pocket,” and now, “Oops, my checking account is all used up and now I am dipping into my savings account,” That’s adrenal fatigue. When you don’t quite have enough juice to get you through the day, you have to keep dipping into your savings account to fuel your activities and so, in natural medicine there are wonderful nutrients and herbs that start restoring the adrenal glands and stimulating its function and rebuild its function.
Sometimes we have to use hormones to replace the hormones of the adrenal glands, at least temporarily, much like the thyroid. We have to give some people thyroid hormone, with some people we have to give them adrenal hormones, and the adrenal glands are little bit funny because it’s not just a straight depletion of it’s hormones and it’s attempt to try to recover, sometimes it really spikes up some of it’s hormones.
So it’s cortisol that might go really high and that’s also because the adrenal glands are on their way to kind of getting fatigued and that’s where we see high cortisol, we can see abdominal weight gain and some other stress reactions.
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Video:
https://www.empowher.com/media/video/what-adrenal-fatigue-and-how-it-treated-naturally-dr-hudson-video