Fatigue Syndrome
Chronic Fatigue (CFS) is the Number One complaint that personal physicians hear from patients. The reason for this should be obvious, but most medical doctors are not trained in human nutrition, so they don’t know what to say.
Doctors mean well. I’m not saying MDs are bad people, but they only know what they’ve been taught. The pharmaceutical industry, through its funding of medical schools, has a lot to say about the curriculum. They have a financial interest in teaching doctors to prescribe drugs, not find cures.
Chronic Fatigue Remains A Mystery to Medical Doctors
According to the Mayo Clinic, “Scientists don’t know exactly what causes chronic fatigue syndrome. It may be a combination of factors that affect people who were born with a predisposition to the disorder.” It’s the same old answer we usually get — “We don’t know; it may be a combination of factors; it’s genetic.”
If they don’t know why something is happening, how can they correctly prescribe a cure? They can’t — and that’s not their job. Their job is to manage symptoms. I’ve found it is rare for an MD to have anything constructive to suggest beyond offering a prescription for a drug or perhaps a referral for further testing.
I have long had growing doubts that our medical profession had much to tell us about how to live a healthy, energetic life. Having seen friends and relatives come to unfortunate ends at the hands of medical doctors, I have been looking for a type of doctor that had a true understanding of how to prevent conditions like chronic fatigue and many others.
Finally, I found the Naturopathic branch of the medical “family tree” and everything I had learned in life about health began to make sense.
Having worked on both conventional and organic farms, experienced many styles of diet, and done a lot of research, it seemed obvious that our food might be the source of both our health and our illnesses. For conventional MDs to overlook this obvious source of our problems, in favor of selling us synthetic but highly-profitable drugs seemed like the wrong approach.
Why are so many of us sicker now than people were fifty years ago? What has changed?
One good thing about growing older is that — if we’ve been paying attention — we can recall that fifty years ago, conditions like CFS were rare. Now, they are common. Obviously, something has changed — and it’s not our genetics.
Infectious diseases were also present in our environment fifty years ago, but somehow more people were able to resist them.
So, What Has Changed?
It’s our food! Specifically, it is the way our food has been grown and processed since mass production methods were applied to farming. This led to major changes in how farmers fed the soil and returned the nutrients the plants took out.
Our bodies need 90 essential nutrients in order to perform optimally. Many farming areas have virtually none of certain minerals in their soil to begin with, so plants grown there may not contain any of the key nutrients necessary for healthy growth and energy production. This can be a problem for people — such as the Amish — who grow all of their own food, but live in areas where selenium, for example, aren’t present.
To compound the problem of depleted soils, we often don’t eat nearly enough of a variety of fruit and vegetables, plus we eat too many processed foods containing added sugars and chemicals, which further make us feel tired.
The result of poor diet is made worse by too little and poor quality sleep, too little exercise (which would have helped us sleep more soundly), and too much caffeine and alcohol which many of us use to compensate for deficits in other areas.