Dr. Diane Mueller explains how chronic Lyme disease disrupts the brain-adrenal connection, causing cortisol dysregulation that leads to persistent fatigue. The condition isn't true adrenal exhaustion but a signaling breakdown between brain and glands triggered by chronic infection and stress.
Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane, your chronic illness expert here talking about, can Lyme disease cause adrenal fatigue? And the short answer is yes. But I'm going to talk a little bit about what adrenal fatigue actually is and is not. There's a lot of confusion and how Lyme disease actually can contribute to this picture. So Lyme disease very, very, very rarely is a standalone disease. And it's a standalone disease pretty much only in its acute situation. When we have chronic Lyme and that' we really get the adrenal fatigue picture coming online. There are so many more processes that get involved because you've had Lyme for a long time and the body's been trying to deal with it. So things get a little haywire. So essentially what adrenal fatigue actually is, adrenal fatigue is a bad term that's been circulated for a long period of time. And it's a bad term because it's not like the adrenals just get tired and stop working. It's not like the adrenal. Adrenals just wake up one day and they're like, I'm tired, I need to take a nap. Not what's going on here. What actually is happening with adrenal fatigue is where there is a disconnection between the brain and the adrenals. And in this disconnection, the brain does not appropriately see the level of the hormones, the hormones that the adrenals produce. It doesn't see the proper amount in the blood that the adrenals are producing. And so it does not send the right signal to the adrenals. So the adrenal secretes many things, but from a standard, how a lot of people think about the adrenals, the number one hormone people think about is cortisol. Cortisol is our stress hormone. Many people know it as the bad hormone because it's related to belly fat accumulation. But it's also super important. It gives us energy, and if we did not have cortisol, we would literally go to the hospital and die. So essentially, the adrenal hormone cortisol, we want, absolutely need. It makes us feel great. We just want the right amount and quote, unquote. Adrenal fatigue is essentially when the adrenals and the cortisol, the adrenals that. That the adrenals are producing. The brain does not see how much cortisol is in the blood. The brain doesn't see it as too little or too much or just right. And because that the brain sends the wrong signal, either tells the adrenals to make extra cortisol when it already has it. So then cortisol goes really high or does not see that cortisol is low, so is not telling the adrenal glands to produce of this hormone. And then we feel bad because when cortisol is really low, we are fatigued. So Lyme disease, one of the things that we will see is that anything that is a chronic stress can cause the brain to stop actually seeing what's happening with the adrenals. And Lyme disease, like many other illnesses and many other infections, are a chronic stress on the body. So part of healing from Lyme disease is actually going after the bacteria that causes Lyme, but it's also healing all of these other components of Lyme, like the subsequent, say, dysfunctions of the body, like this adrenal dysregulation picture. So I hope that's helpful. We will talk more about this and other things this month. Please do subscribe to make sure you get my next video, please look down also in the show notes for my upcoming masterclass where you can ask me questions about this and get educated even more on the relationship of adrenals and Lyme and make sure you're getting the proper testing and know what to ask your doctor about. All right, everybody, we'll see you in the next video.
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