Common Symptoms For Chronic Illness
Everday I treat patients who come in with a variety of different symptoms. What most people discover is that these symptoms don’t always give them a clear idea of what the problem is or the solution.
What I care about is the CAUSE.
Knowing how you are feeling is essential and even having a name for your problem can be helpful, but none of those things will help you get better unless you know the CAUSE of your disease in the first place.
6 Most Popular Symptoms For a Chronic Illness
- Low Energy or Fatigue
- Digestive Problems
- Hormonal Imbalances
- Chronic Pain
- Immune System Imbalances
- Brain Fog
Common Labels/ Diagnosis For These Symptoms
LOW ENERGY
- Hypothyroid
- Adrenal Exhausted
- Chronic Fatigue
DIGESTIVE PROBLEMS
Proper digestion depends on adequate amounts of stomach acid and enzymes necessary to break down foods. Food sensitivities, intolerances, and allergies can interfere with digestion and create inflammation throughout your body. Ninety percent of chronically ill people have some type of gut inflammation.
- Gas and Bloating
- Constipation
- Diarrhea
- Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
- Ulcerate Colitis
- Celiac Disease
- Chrones Disease
HORMONE IMBALANCES
Adrenal, thyroid, and sex hormones are all coordinated and monitored by your brain. An imbalance in any of these hormones will impact your brain and nervous system function.
- Symptoms of a hyper/hypothyroid but lab tests can come back normal
- Adrenal fatigue and exhaustion which does not show up on any medical tests
- Sex hormone imbalances – painful menstruation or hormone replacement therapy pre or post menopause
CHRONIC PAIN
- Joint problems
- Back pain
- Neck pain
- Shoulder pain
- Hip pain
- Knee pain
- Elbow pain
- Wrist pain
- Sprains and Strains
- Carpal Tunnel and Nerve Impingement
- Chronic muscle aches
- Migraine headaches
- THE LIST GOES ON…
IMMUNE SYSTEM IMBALANCES
The job of your immune system is to respond to everything that enters your body, to evaluate it as friend or foe, and to eliminate the things that do not belong. Chronic infections, environmental stressors, food reactions can keep your immune system chronically active. An immune system that is always fired up will fatigue and become imbalanced. Most of these symptoms aren’t taken very seriously because there is no conventional treatment for them.
- There are more than 140 Autoimmune diagnoses out there
- Allergies
- Hypo or Hyper Thyroid
Brain Fog
The main job of your metabolism is to convert food into fuel for your body. Your nervous system is the primary user of this fuel. Your brain weighs approximately 3 pounds, yet uses up to 20 percent of the fuel produced by your metabolism. Therefore, if your metabolism breaks down, there is a decrease in the amount of fuel for your brain.
- Typical responses for brain fog are that a person is just lazy or has ADD
- Character issue
Why Labels Can Cause Problems
When people get a specific diagnosis, it helps them to understand that what is going on and lead them down the right path for treatments. The downside of labels is that people think they have to treat the disease when they should be focusing on addressing the CAUSE that is giving them this disease.
A lot of the time the treatment for these diseases is not about curing or healing; instead, they are about symptom modulation. Conventional medicines best remedy is to calm the symptoms down, so you don’t suffer as much. I think medicine has a very noble role. Their philosophy is to relieve pain and suffering which is a beautiful goal, but alleviating pain and suffering is more about making the symptoms go away than helping people to heal and get stronger.
When I look at patients for a chronic illness, I am looking for the cause. Finding the cause helps me to address the underlying problems so they can be supported and your body can heal. You may not be able to recover completely but your body will get stronger and a lot of the time people will heal enough to get off of prescription medication completely. At the end of the day, drugs won’t make you better, but they may make your life less miserable.
Self-Assessment Form
If you have identified with some of these common symptoms or even been previously diagnosed with a Chronic Disease, I highly encourage you to fill out our Metabolic Assessment form below. This is a form that we give all of our patients as a self-assessment so they can see a breath of what is going on in their body.
