Do you think it’s your relationship with another person or persons that play a role in your fatigue?
This blog was sparked by a recent number of patients who booked in with me for a functional medical appointment. I must admit, the demographics of the clients that I work with are usually between 20 – and 55-year-old women.
But lately, I have been seeing older women in their late 60s to 70s and I look at the reason they come to see me, I always ask ‘when they first started to become unwell’ (you can ask yourself that too!) and ‘why now, why seek to address the root causes of their symptoms now’ (you might wonder too, if you happened to google and stumble upon me and the work that I do in functional medicine)
Fatigue, body aches, brain fog. Almost always the 3 main big complaints that patients present to me with. Some are quite acute, triggered by an obvious event like post-partum or other significant events in their lives e.g. recent death of a loved one after battling cancer for a few months. Some are more chronic presentations, and they come to me, as they ‘have seen other practitioners and specialists’ and ‘they are still tired’ and ‘every investigation seem to be ‘normal’’.
So, again, why now?
A multitude of replies, from a multitude of personal experiences that each and every one of my patients has gone through.
And sometimes we forget about ‘relationships’.
Could dysfunctional relationships with your family, friends, work colleagues, business acquaintances, and people in general be an issue?
A bit too non-scientific?
Some people will take a step back when I approach this subject and say ‘So, are you going to say what other doctors say to me when they find that everything is ‘normal’, that it’s all in your head’???
The short answer is ‘Maybe!’
Long winded answer is – ‘Yes, what do we do next?’
Because you don’t just want a diagnosis, but you want a solution to the problem right?
There have been studies to show that:
- Increased loneliness and isolation have been shown to lower measured levels of cognitive function.
- marital distress and hostile behavior among spouses correlate with increased biomarkers of leaky gut.
- Patients of doctors with greater empathy had better sugar control.
- Living alone is associated with a flattened 24-hour cortisol slope.
- Non-supportive relationships cause greater risk of mitochondrial defectiveness.
Need I say more?
Ok, then what?
Well, if this short write up has piqued your interest, I’ll have more answers in my next blog post!
This was just to put it out there that, if we have issues with our interactions with other people in our social network, maybe it is time that it’s looked into properly and addressed because you could be on the best supplements in the world, eat the healthiest organic food, but still feel F*** tired and nothing seems to work!