Functional Medicine and Fatigue

Functional Medicine and Fatigue

Hi, this Dr. Emily Parke with your Health Minute and today, I’d like to talk to you about a very common symptom I hear about all the time, fatigue.

Lack of Energy

So, this is lack of energy. There are many root causes, many reasons as to why you may be experiencing fatigue. Let me break it down for you into some categories for you to start thinking about. Number one that gets blown off all the time is not getting enough good quality sleep. Not getting enough good quality sleep is one of the biggest stresses on the body and, of course, you can’t expect to have good energy levels if you’re not getting enough good quality sleep.

On average, most of us will require somewhere between seven and nine hours of sleep. How you can figure out your optimal sleep number, it’s the number of hours asleep where you wake up and you feel pretty refreshed, ready for the day. And you’ll have to play around with that a little bit and experiment to find out what that feels like for you.

Nutrient Deficiencies and Hormone Imbalance

Another big factor contributing to fatigue are nutrient deficiencies and this can be a wide variety of nutrients. It can be iron, it can be vitamin D, it can be vitamin B12, it could be folate. A wide variety of other nutrients can also cause fatigue and decrease in energy levels.

Another huge category of dysfunction that causes fatigue is hormone imbalance, and hormone imbalance is a big category of things. There are thyroid hormones, there are sex hormones, and there are adrenal hormones. And disturbances in any of the three categories of those can also cause fatigue.

Other factors

Then there are other factors that can contribute to fatigue. For example, if you have an autoimmune disease and have antibodies floating around, that can also contribute to fatigue. If there is heavy metal toxicity, for example, or environmental toxins, that can also contribute to fatigue.

There is a pretty large list of things that contribute to low energy levels. So, I would highly encourage you to seek out a practitioner that can really dig into finding the root cause of fatigue because I see very commonly either prescriptions being given out or supplements being giving out without really knowing the real why, the root cause as to why energy levels are low.

This is Dr. Emily Parke with your Health Minute.