Taking care of our health is a difficult task. It often feels like we need to do a lot just to break even. Sadly, there’s no way to really get around this fact given the body has a very specific way of working. Sometimes this makes it hard to tell when something is going wrong. Mistakes in your body can often feel a lot like one another instead of giving you a solid idea of what you’re trying to work around. That’s central to some of the ideas of adrenal fatigue. This is a condition proposed by people interested in alternative medicine. They propose that you can easily explain a lot of conditions with adrenal fatigue and as a result they can be addressed quickly and get you back to feeling good. This merits closer examination as a claim to be able to solve a myriad of problems with simple treatments means we could all benefit, right? To do this, we need to start by looking at what people think of as adrenal fatigue.

Defining Adrenal Fatigue
Stress has a major impact on the health of the body. In many ways it keeps you in “fight or flight” mode constantly and contributes to your body wearing itself out. The end result tends to be overall degradation of the body as well as notable cognitive issues as well. Proponents of adrenal fatigue would like to add it as another result. The adrenal glands in the endocrine system help to regulate a lot of things in the body. It makes an intuitive sense that we might be able to overtax them. That’s at the heart of adrenal fatigue. People claim that we eventually put too much wear and tear on the glands and they can no longer function as needed. This in turn leads the body to experience a wide variety of symptoms that they believe to be adrenal fatigue. Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the actual recorded ways that the adrenal glands work and casts severe doubt on the very idea of adrenal fatigue. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t review the believed symptoms of adrenal fatigue though.

Scattershot Health
The basic symptoms people credit adrenal fatigue with are fatigue and general mental haziness. These two are generally paired with one another already given that we tend to feel mentally sluggish when we begin to get physically tired with the reverse being true as well. There are a lot of things that can cause a visit from this pair of symptoms as well. Proponents also like to highlight that people seem to get sick or suffer from allergies more readily when they’re suffering from adrenal fatigue. Unfortunately, this is also true if you’re suffering from generalized fatigue as well. Your body simply can’t muster the energy necessary to mount a full defense if you’re tired. Some proponents will even so far as to claim stress as being a symptom of adrenal fatigue. This is unfortunate given all the symptoms we’ve discussed can also be the result of pure stress instead of a condition. Adrenal fatigue’s symptoms are so vague that they make it hard to take the condition seriously even if the symptoms people experience are valid and require treatment.

Alternative Medicine Fatigue
Alternative medicine does the best it can to try and fill in the gaps of modern medicine from the perspective of the people who believe in it. They advocate for “natural” cures to solve things that have an intuitive appeal. It makes perfect sense that so many of us enjoy looking to it for cures. The sad part is that much of it is frequently based around ill-founded ideas about how the body works and a certain level of willful ignorance. There’s nothing wrong with looking for something simpler to help you manage health problems, but there is a problem when people begin to invent conditions to justify their treatments. This helps no one and the belief that modern medicine does that is what drives so many people to alternative medicine. Shouldn’t we hold alternative medicine to the same standards though? Manufacturing a condition serves no one beyond the people trying to sell us something. Adrenal fatigue is just another example of something with intuitive appeal that ultimately has no basis in reality when we look closely enough at it.

The people who believe in and advocate for adrenal fatigue as a real condition are, for the most part, well-intentioned. They want us to be healthy. Unfortunately, these desires do not somehow make the condition a reality. All of the symptoms they tend to highlight are able to explain themselves with one another or are so scattershot that they don’t make any sense. While we cannot agree that adrenal fatigue exists, we can at least agree that remembering to eat well, exercise, and get enough sleep will go a long way to helping us all feel a lot better most of the time.