 There's something that's often underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed called chronic fatigue syndrome. Now in this video I want to share a little bit about why chronic fatigue syndrome develops from a traditional Chinese medicine point of view, not from a modern biomedical point of view as well as some of the ways that we treat it and honestly how we clinically view it. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and author of the health book, Master of the Day. So before we jump into this video, there's two very important links I've put together right below the video. The first is for a free guide, four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. And the second is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can reach out and contact by practice in my clinic right below this video here. So before we jump into the chronic fatigue syndrome, really the etiology and the origin of it from a traditional Chinese medicine point of view, I want to point your eyes towards a little piece of literature that actually describes it. So chronic fatigue syndrome is described, first of all, also as myalgic encephalomyelitis is a complex multi-system disease commonly characterized by severe fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, sleep problems, autonomic dysfunction and post-exertional malaise, severely impairing activities of daily living. So it's multi-system, which is important because it's not just fatigue. A lot of my patients that come in may have issues with memory or brain fog or thinking. They may have dizziness or POTS-like symptoms, my palpitations, nervous system related symptoms, et cetera. But I thought this would be an interesting video to shoot because the way we view it and treat it in traditional Chinese medicine is very, very different. And this is typically one of those things that is very poorly treated in conventional medicine, frankly, like most chronic issues, and is very effectively treated by some alternatives like using traditional Chinese medicine formulas. So let's talk about this a little more here. A few of my patients that have developed chronic fatigue-like symptoms or have actually been diagnosed with chronic fatigue have been in one of the following scenarios and situations. So I want you to sort of plot the journey and the life path, right? Look at the patients, the person's whole history and whole life to see how they arrived at this diagnosis. I've seen many patients who were, for example, CEOs, Wall Street executives, startup people working 100 hours per week, and after five, seven, or 10 years, they eventually reach a crisis point where, as they say, my body freaked out and they were never the same since. That is something I've very commonly seen in people who have worked 80 or 100 hours a week, and they said, I could do it for a while, and then they reach a crisis point, and after that, they're sick literally for years. And they have chronic fatigue, anxiety, depression-like symptoms, lots of insomnia, and many other symptoms associated with basically dysfunctioning of the nervous system or the HPA axis. So most commonly, they end up morphing into a chronic anxiety or chronic depression with insomnia sort of pattern. And it lasts for years if it's untreated. Second box is people who develop chronic infections or acute infections, like COVID, that then progress to being something chronic when, in reality, the acute phase never resolved itself. So these people, the most recent and salient being they catch COVID, after a few months, they're still experiencing some chronic low to moderate-grade symptoms, but a year or two later, those symptoms have not improved. So their body has not healed and there's been no progression really. It's sort of been frozen and stuck in time. So in some cases, getting an acute infection like that will progress to a chronic fatigue-like pattern. Now it's interesting because this has been documented historically for sure in the literature for a long time, but a lot of the time, people like this have been dismissed as being hypochondriacs or it's just anxiety or depression, but there is research on basically commencing of this chronic fatigue-like pattern. So that's bucket number two and bucket number three is let's just call it traumatic events, right? I've seen quite a few people that have gone through divorces and following that have developed chronic fatigue burnout-like symptoms, right? They've had the POTS symptoms, the dizziness, the heart palpitations. They've had the chronic exhaustion that has gone on for years. They can't get out of bed. Clinical anxiety, clinical depression symptoms and other nervous system symptoms as well. So why does this happen? One of the analogies and one of the metaphors I tell my patients is that there is a battery. Let's just say we take the life force as a concept, right? Vitality. Vitality is something you can recognize. Vitality is something you feel, but it is not measurable in a lab or some kind of imaging. Vitality, your energy, how you feel, your mood, how well you sleep, overall raw vitality, like a kid that's healthy. Bright eyes running around the playground, a healthy child. That charge, Chinese medicine, views as sort of the gate of life, right? The Mingmen is this area supposedly historically located between the kidneys. The kidney is like your battery charge, right? Your life battery, your vitality. And one thing that I've seen clinically is that once this charge drops below a certain level, people develop chronic symptoms that don't respond in the way that normal symptoms develop. For example, when you catch an upper respiratory infection, typically your body will deal with it for three to seven or 10 days, and then you're fine, right? Everything goes away. But in some people, you get sick and you stay sick. And that's a problem because it looks like your body is not healing and it's not doing what it is designed to do, right? There's something with the immune system, there's something going on that is preventing the body from actually permanently healing. Now what I often describe in my patients is that when that battery gets below a certain charge, your body does not have enough resources to mount a permanent healing response. It's like a car battery that needs to be jumped or else no matter how many times you insert that key, it just winds, right? You literally have not enough juice in that battery to start the car. And there is a point that I see with my patients where they get chronically ill enough or through their own mismanagement of their resources like the startup and the CEO executives, reach a point where they have chronically exhausted the batteries to the point where it can no longer jump on its own. And these people are either chronically ill forever or chronically medicated forever, typically with anti-depressants and sleeping pills and things like that. Within my profession, that is treatable. That is something that is most of the time reversible. But below a certain battery charge, your body cannot mount the normal healing response that it does to fatigue or ordinarily you sleep and then you feel better or you catch an upper respiratory infection and then a week later, you're about 95% good. But for many people, once the battery charge goes below a certain level, they even see the reactivation of old viruses like they see Epstein-Barr, for example, begin to show up again. So there's some immune system dysfunctioning going on there. The battery metaphor, I think, has been the most useful to my patients to understand that they've been taxing themselves, taxing, taxing, taxing, to a point where now we need an external source to jumpstart that battery. Now within the field of traditional Chinese medicine, a lot of the organs that we associate these issues with are what are called the heart and the kidney. Now the heart and the kidney are considered an organ pair, effectively. And they're some of the deepest pathologies that correlate to the heart and the kidney. For example, issues with the heart are said to be issues often psycho-emotional in nature, anxiety, depression, sleep problems, for example, or actual physiological issues, physical issues with the heart as well. Issues with the kidneys can be literally reproductive, they can be urinary, they can be all kinds of things, but because the kidney is viewed as the battery with a capital T and a capital B, when you deplete that resource, very often issues that are some of the deepest and the most chronic and the most life-threatening from a chronic point of view, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue, severe clinical depression, severe clinical anxiety, autoimmune disease, we often treat from the kidney. So again, this is weird because this is a very TCM-oriented diagnosis and really sort of pathophysiology lesson. And we treat those from the heart and the kidney as an organ pair. Now lots of these issues, if we had to correlate them biometically, would relate to, for example, the HPA axis or it would relate to chronic issues with the nervous system or even hormones and neurotransmitter production. I mean, a lot of how we're treating severe clinical anxiety and severe clinical depression are from what we call the heart and the kidney, right? Heart and kidney axis there, how they connect. So my experience treating this is that traditional and classical traditional Chinese medicine formulas, internal medicine is extremely effective for treating chronic fatigue, whether it is an actual diagnosis of chronic fatigue or you have chronic fatigue, that is clinical, right? That is not just I'm sleeping six hours a day and I'm not eating well and I don't exercise, but really unrelenting fatigue can have multiple different origins in the body. And internal medicine, these formulas tend to be extremely effective for treating it. So that's just a general overview, not jumping too much into the literature or the research on this, but chronic fatigue is one of those things that is often misdiagnosed or is a diagnosis of exclusion or I mean, objectively chronic fatigue can accompany many other patterns and symptoms. So that's my two cents for you today, guys. Don't forget to check out those links right below the video and I'll see you soon.