Yay Or Nay - Adrenal Fatigue

Because I have spent more hours than should be considered healthy (unless one has actually been diagnosed with it) researching Addison's, I have come across quite a few articles and forum postings on adrenal fatigue, which is basically the adrenal glands are not functioning up to par.

A lot of what I read on it comes from webpages that promote naturalistic approaches to medicine and many state that mainstream medicine brushes it off. It's kind of a tough call. It's almost like the whole aspartame debate. I imagine if you do enough research, EVERY goddamn thing under the sun could be considered dangerous to your health in some way or another.

A couple of responses to it being unreal were why do doctors only think in black and white, with Addison's and Cushing's, but not that a problem can't exist somewhere in between? Which is a good point. The only problem I see with adrenal fatigue is when you read through the symptoms, it seems very vague. And I'm sure I could find plenty of people who experience them. Hell, I could check off a pretty decent chunk of the list. So do I actually have it? I don't know.

I took a quiz out of curiosity and it asked many questions, not anything difficult to answer, but a little difficult in rating. I scored an overall 1.5, which considers my adrenals to be mildy fatigued.

If adrenal fatigue does exist, hell, I couldn't blame my adrenal glands for not wanting to function up to par. Poor diet, easily stressed out, high caffeine intake, etc. All this time I was more concerned about the stress I was putting on my cardiovascular system by being so stressed, and I certainly know first hand that stress can affect many parts of the body, but I never realized all of the specific organs it could affect. In fact- despite countless hours spent in medical books, one course of anatomy (and countless hours reading through the books outside of school, although to be fair, I do not recall the endocrine system being a part of Anatomy 1 at my school) and medical terminology- I don't even think I ever heard of the adrenal glands until recently. And if I did, I obviously pushed it to the back of my mind. After all, my mind has more important things to do, like slowly kill me by driving me nuts. But never mind that. Something needs to be done about my stress levels. It's ridiculous. And obviously very unhealthy.

I already took one stupid, but small step in easing the stress on them (and hopefully my overall stress in general) by stopping with coffee. No more two cups for me. But my digestive system isn't happy with the decision. I'm still drinking soda, but I am trying to cut back on that as well. Eventually I'd like to try to switch to decaf for the majority of the time.