Are you stressed and tired?

Friends of ours are nutrition specialists and published an article about stress. Here is an excerpt of an article by Dr. Vikki Petersen. For full text and more info, visit their website: www.healthnowmedical.com

"Fatigue is the #1 symptom bringing patients into doctors’ offices. Feeling “stressed” is perhaps a close second. However, stress and fatigue is so common that traditional medicine often ignores it or treats it in an offhand fashion. Patients are frequently told to “get more rest”, or “relax”, or “take this pill” - often a dangerous anti-depressant. What is not appreciated is how serious stress and fatigue can be or how relatively easy it is to solve.

The first key is to properly diagnose WHY you feel the way that you do. The root of the problem can be poor sleep, chronic pain, digestive problems or hidden infections, to name a few. Regardless of its cause, stress and fatigue can very much hinder your ability to enjoy life and be productive. A thorough physical exam must, of course, be performed. But perhaps you’ve already been through a battery of tests with your medical doctor, only to be told that you’re fine. In actual fact, what’s fine is the results of the tests. If you were truly “fine” you wouldn’t be so tired and stressed! The real problem is that your doctor hasn’t asked your body the right questions yet.

The facts are that there are some stressors in life which are unavoidable. Bills, deadlines, traffic, family problems are all things which appear in most people’s lives. It’s our ability to deal with these stressors which spells the difference between optimal health and malfunction. Sometimes the cause is simply poor adrenal gland function.

If you would like to know if your adrenals glands are functioning at less than optimum, take the quiz below. If you answer yes to 3 or more of the following questions, adrenal malfunction is having a negative effect on your health.

Do you suffer from:

1. Fatigue - this is one of the most common symptoms due to lack of adrenaline. Exhaustion may strike a person suddenly in the middle of the day or the person may make it through their workday only to feel completely exhausted when they get home at night.
2. Trouble sleeping – adrenaline imbalance can cause abnormal hormonal production at night resulting in difficulty going to sleep or difficulty staying asleep.
3. Hormonal imbalance - the adrenal gland produces the precursor hormones necessary to make estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. Weak adrenal function can result in severe PMS and menopause symptoms as well as other hormone related difficulties such as lack of sex drive.
4. Ligament weakness – joints of the body become irritated easily because ligaments become weak. A person will complain of various joint pains throughout the body such as back pain, neck pain, and arm or leg pain.
5. Sugar cravings – a desire for sugar can occur throughout the day whenever the blood sugar drops. This is an attempt to balance the blood sugar artificially with the use of refined sugar.
6. Low blood sugar – feeling confused, upset, getting headaches or light-headed when a meal is delayed or you get hungry.
7. Difficult waking up – waking up in the morning can become very difficult and many times a person feels they “need” to have a stimulant such as coffee in order to really be alert.
8. Immune system weakness – bacterial, viral and fungal infections can easily occur and poor wound healing may occur.
9. Faint feeling (light-headed) when rapidly standing up.
10. Poor dilation of bronchioles – the bronchioles in the lungs do not dilate efficiently and asthma-like symptoms may results.
11. Allergies – respiratory allergic reactions occur easily and hay fever or sinus symptoms result. Food allergies very commonly occur with adrenal weakness and can result in not only digestive symptoms but also many other often unexplained symptoms.

Did you answer yes to several of the above? So what is the next step? You need to get your adrenal function evaluated such that you know to what degree that it’s malfunctioning."

You will be wise to seek out a doctor well-versed in holistic medicine or visit the doctors at HealthNow Medical.

Exercise and Depression

Article by the Mayo Clinic: "Depression and anxiety: Exercise eases symptoms"

Here is an excerpt from the article: "Exercise can improve symptoms of depression and anxiety. Even a little exercise helps. Use these realistic tips and goals to get started and stick with it.

"When you have depression or anxiety, exercising may be the last thing you think you can do. But you can overcome the inertia. See how exercise can ease depression symptoms and anxiety symptoms. Plus, get realistic tips to get started and stick with exercising.

"Exercise has long been touted as a way to maintain physical fitness and help prevent high blood pressure, diabetes and other diseases. A growing volume of research shows that exercise can also help improve symptoms of certain mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety. Exercise may also help prevent a relapse after treatment for depression or anxiety.

"Research suggests that it may take at least 30 minutes of exercise a day for at least three to five days a week to significantly improve depression symptoms. But smaller amounts of activity — as little as 10 to 15 minutes at a time — can improve mood in the short term. 'Small bouts of exercise may be a great way to get started if it's initially too hard to do more,' Dr. Vickers-Douglas says." Link to full article.

Depression and Gluten Sensitivity

Depression and Gluten Sensitivity
Many researchers have now demonstrated that gluten exposure in gluten sensitive individuals can cause depression. One good study evaluated 16 newly diagnosed gluten sensitive people and performed assessments to determine if depression was present. Compared to normal individuals, the patients with gluten sensitivity scored much higher for having depression. What is important also is that the depression was unrelated to abdominal complaints or other symptoms. This supports that the depression was not a secondary phenomenon from simply having an illness.
Another study out of Sweden assessed 42 people with known gluten sensitivity, and of this group, 8 had depression and/or anxiety. Even though the sample was small, the percent affected was 19 percent which is significantly higher than a normal population which averages 4 to 5 percent 4. The authors’ opinion based on the study was that depression may be severe in individuals with gluten sensitivity.

This is an excerpt from an upcoming book by Dr Vikki Petersen and Dr Rick Petersen on the subject of gluten intolerance. This is copyrighted material used with the authors' permission.

Help for Your Depression

L. Ron Hubbard said, "When the mind fixates wholly upon the body we have that extreme degree of introversion visible in psychotics or neurotics. No exterior world remains - there is only the body. The dwindling spiral toward oblivion is this road of greater and greater fixation upon the body."
If you are feeling depressed or just cranky, try doing the following program for two weeks and see if you don't feel better.
1. Clean up your things and get done the various little jobs you've been putting off.
2. Get into communication with friends, relatives or people you've neglected. Talk about some happy times. Avoid those people who make you feel less or who always have bad news to share.
3. Take a one hour walk every day - outside, not in a gym. Start walking away from home or wherever as early as you can. Leave your cell phone and your ipod at home. Just walk and look around and get extroverted.
4. Get a physical examination and if anything is physically wrong with you, get it fixed up. Get tested for food allergies and vitamin deficiencies.
5. Eat a good healthy diet and take some good vitamins, like B1 and C.

Medication for Depression

If you are considering taking psychiatric medication for depression, please visit these links and watch these videos first. Get the facts.

Information on the dangers of psychiatric practices and medications:
http://www.psychiatry.info
http://www.cchr.org/

And here are two videos you should see:
Psychiatric Video One
Psychiatric Video Two

"The world is a dangerous place to live;
not because of the people who are evil, but
because of the people who won't do anything about it."
- Albert Einstein

The "Selling" of Depression

I found this article from Freedom Magazine. I think it has tremendous impact on what you may think about depression. I am only quoting about 75% - I urge you to visit the website for the entire article and many others.

From the viewpoint of the psychiatric industry, you may have a devastating and possibly even deadly disease – even though you detect no signs of illness.

The same may be true for your spouse. Or your child. Or many of your friends. Or for an estimated 55 percent of the United States populace.

The “disease” is depression.

The “depression epidemic” appears to be everywhere – on television and radio, in newspapers and magazines. Ads are ubiquitous; strategically placed articles show a fine-tuned marketing and public relations strategy at work. Treatments – various drugs and therapies including electroshock – seem to abound.

An “Online Depression Screening Test” was discovered, published by the New York University Department of Psychiatry.

Headed “Are You Depressed?”, the test contains 10 benign questions which could be answered affirmatively by virtually anyone. Almost anybody taking the test would find it hard not to be classified as “depressed.”

Drug companies also created a “national depression screening day,” held in October each year, conveniently following the arrival on the market of the latest line of antidepressants. These drugs, pumped as “more effective” and “producing less side effects,” are now among the most lucrative substances on the market, with some individual products grossing billions of dollars per year.

In the United States alone, 43 million prescriptions were written in 1995 for one type of antidepressant alone, known as serotonin reuptake inhibitors. These substances, such as Effexor and Prozac, prevent the brain from reabsorbing a neurotransmitter¹ known as serotonin. No one knows exactly how they do this and, far more importantly, no one knows what the long-term harm of altering the brain’s subtle chemistry in this manner will be.

A Solution

While no one can argue with the concept of better health care, funds to NIMH and organized psychiatry are not part of the solution. Psychiatrists are paid well to handle social problems. The worse the problem is, the more they expect to be remunerated. Why would such a vested interest want to eliminate the problems?

Churches have had far better success in dealing with mental health than have psychiatrists. After all, it was not until religions were cast aside by government-funded psychiatry that violence, drug abuse and moral decay began to ruin society.

Psychiatric treatments focus on man as an animal with no soul, to be manipulated or “modified” by drugs, electric shock and other means. Religions, on the other hand, acknowledge man as a spiritual being. They have traditionally helped to ameliorate problems and suffering and to provide hope.

Religions instill decency and moral standards to make living with our fellows more enjoyable and predictable. They were looked to for safety and support in times of need long before the psychiatrist came along.

One would do better to consult a member of the clergy – or a relative or trusted friend – for advice following the loss of a loved one or at other times of need. As innumerable case histories have attested, entering the door to a psychiatrist’s office is entering “a world where great harm is possible.”

We would also collectively slash funding for psychiatric “research.”

“In my opinion,” stated psychiatrist and author Thomas Szasz, “the ‘mental health’ – in the sense of spiritual well-being – of Americans cannot be improved by slogans, drugs, community mental health centers, or even with billions of dollars expended on a ‘war on mental illness.’ ... The best, indeed, the only, hope for remedying the problem of ‘mental illness’ lies in weakening – not in strengthening – the power of Institutional Psychiatry.”

Yet it is immediately apparent that something is amiss. A few questions reveal that symptoms of depression can include garden-variety grief and anguish, stemming from such unmysterious causes as the loss of a loved one. And since when was every other person you knew “depressed”? A closer look reveals much, much more. And billions at stake.