Missing Tests for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane, here in this video, we're going to talk about chronic fatigue syndrome and what tests you should run if you have chronic fatigue syndrome. So if you have chronic fatigue syndrome, you want to consider making sure you're doing a full thyroid panel. First of all, that's the most obvious thing, but oftentimes it's missed. And one of the things that will happen is that people will just have TSH run and they're told their thyroid is normal, but they haven't done a full thyroid panel. You see, TSH is a brain hormone that comes down and tells the thyroid hormone to work. So if we just test for tsh, we're missing some of the underlying other things that are really more accurate markers for our thyroid health, things like free T3 and free T4. So our whole thyroid panel looks like TSH, free T3, free T4, reverse T3, and thyroid antibodies. As you want to get all of those done to know for sure if thyroid. Thyroid is. Is causing a problem, I would also recommend that you get your labs read by a functional medicine doc, because the reference ranges for determining normal or not normal from a functional doc is going to look a lot different. The reference ranges from a functional doc are going to basically analyze the values from the lab that you have run to analyze them for optimal health, not just for disease. And this can make a huge difference with if you are needing thyroid support or not. So it's not just about the right test. It's about the right person to evaluate the test. We also want to make sure you are doing some basic adrenal help. The adrenals are glands that sit on top of your kidneys. They regulate the stress response. Now, the thing with adrenal glands is you want to make sure that you have the right amount of cortisol and the right amount of dhea. Cortisol has been getting a huge, huge, huge knockdown in the press these days because people are talking about how it's associated with belly fat. So a lot of people think cortisol is bad. Cortisol is neither good nor bad. It's actually could be either in the right amount is that it is essential. If you did not have cortisol, you would literally be in the hospital if your cortisol plummeted too low. It's that essential. We need it for things like energy. We need it for things like move. We also need it for things like blood sugar stabilization. Right. So there's a lot of good things. Cortisol does, of course, too much cortisol that's where the reputation with belly fat comes in. So it's not about good, it's not about bad, it's about being the right amount. Too low is bad, too high is bad. The right amount is real good. So that's a huge thing you want to consider with chronic fatigue because if you don't have the right amount of cortisol, you might have low energy. DHEA is another hormone that the adrenals produce. DHEA is another hormone that gives us energy. This hormone we make testosterone out of it, which also helps us with energy and vitality. So testosterone. So DHEA is another hormone to make sure you get tested. The best form to test DHEA in the blood is called dhea, S as in SAM or S as in sulfate, for which it really stands for. So make sure you get that tested as well. You want to consider iron. One of the problems that we're seeing with iron testing that I'm seeing a lot these days is a lot of times people are just running ferritin for an iron marker. Ferritin is a marker that oftentimes people are using to determine if somebody has enough iron. This is a non specific marker. There's a lot of things that can change ferritin levels, such as inflammation in the body. So we want to use a more specific iron panel that's looking at iron, that's looking at things like transfer and saturation, that's looking things like TIBC and uibc. So I know these are a lot of things. I would invite you to basically take notes on this because the idea of this is to give you information about what lab test you should be asking for and to let you know about, hey, if I'm saying iron, I want to make sure that you are informed with. Just because somebody said you had had iron tested, for example, if it was just ferritin, it's not going to be very good. So we want to make sure you're informed with the right test to make sure you are getting for yourself to know for sure if it's truly a problem or not. So that's iron. Beyond that, we want to make sure that we are also considering things like vitamin D, nutrient deficiencies such as B vitamins and vitamin C can make a big difference with energy. And those are a lot of the basics, right? The another major basic is sleep and a lot of people wind up having mild sleep apnea and it's not being properly evaluated and checked for. So you want to make sure you check for that. There's some great companies out there that do that. You can use home sleep studies called a nocturnal oximetry. That's going to be very important as well because oftentimes people aren't considering sleep apnea unless people are overweight. There's a problem where the tongue, the tongue can, like, slide basically too far down the throat. If the tongue position is too, say, in the wrong place, then that can actually lead for the tongue to slide down the throat and cause a some breathing problems. And then you won't get as much oxygen at night. Guess what? You'll get tired. And if all of those things do not wind up working, then there's. There's toxic metals, there's toxic mold, there's chronic hidden infections of all sorts. There's gastrointestinal infections, small intestinal bacteria, overgrowth parasites. So all of these other things are things that you should also consider. But the top things I mentioned, adrenal thyroid, iron, vitamin D, some of those types of basics are really good places to start because oftentimes full panels are not run and they haven't been evaluated for very thoroughly. And somebody thinks, for example, that their thyroid's normal and their thyroid's actually a problem. So you want to make sure that we're not just getting so bogged down by, like, the strange, rare and peculiar and we're forgetting about the basics. All right, everybody, please subscribe if you like this. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one. It.