Chronic Fatigue
Have you wondered why modern medicine, with all of its advanced technology, has not been able to discover the cause of this common but often completely debilitating disease? It’s because it is not an identifiable single-pathogen malady and requires comprehensive chronic fatigue treatment.
It is instead a complex breakdown of many functions of the body, and yet none of those individual components has permanently broken down into a disease state. The sad news is that this means the typical science of modern medicine can’t find a specific, single “breakdown” and thereby address it with a prescription drug.
There is good news!
- Chronic Fatigue is almost never a permanent condition – it can be turned around.
- The components of each individual’s breakdowns are highly individual and each patient with chronic fatigue must be understood from their own unique history.
- There are tests that can determine which of the many parts of any one person’s physiology is not working properly. The most common breakdowns for people with Chronic Fatigue include:
- Stress hormone dysregulation
- Sleep disturbance – which in and of itself may be complexly unhealthy by virtue of disturbances of cortisol, neurotransmitters, pain, inflammation, and post-traumatic dream disturbance
- Breakdown in the performance of the mitochondria, the cell’s power plants
- Overload of toxins
- Because Chronic Fatigue is a complex, multi-system condition the treatment must be HOLISTIC!
Chronic Fatigue is a classic example of a condition which will never respond to the conventional medical approach. Pharmaceuticals alone simply cannot measure up incoherence and effectiveness of individualized protocols and chronic fatigue treatment that include exercise, diet, sleep, stress modification, and nutraceutical supplements that support the repair of the broken-down functions. Ever heard of prescription medicine that repairs?
We offered this holistic care under the insurance model of payment, and learned the hard way of the fundamental mismatch between the disease-orientation of the insurance model and the wellness paradigm. No doubt we need both — when confronted with life-threatening crisis such as severe injury, we absolutely need medical insurance to pay for surgeries and hospitalizations whose great expense would otherwise be devastating. But we also need to understand that the insurance model is not geared to support the profound process involved in truly reversing chronic illness, pain, and emotional stress states. To truly be on our own side with regard to our health and well-being, we can’t look to the insurance companies.
So the practice changed to a fee-for-service model of holistic care. And while not filing with insurance removed one barrier to the healing process, it introduced another. We found that requiring patients to pull out their wallet each visit was its own stress, and too often discouraged the sustained engagement required for the healing journey.