1613. Too Alert to Sleep, Too Tired to Think

Join Dr. Martin in today's episode of The Doctor Is In Podcast.

 

TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE

Announcer:  You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.

Dr. Martin:  Well good morning everyone. How are you? And once again, welcome to another live this morning. Hope you're having a great start to your day. We appreciate you coming on. Always a lot of fun and so this morning we're talking, I was asked the other day about chronic fatigue and I just got to tell you, in my practice there were sort of phases and the very first phase where I think it was a real breakthrough, started writing books about it and that was a real big phase and that was on chronic fatigue. Okay? So if you guys remember any sort of medical history, it became a real big topic. I'm going to say late eighties, early nineties, lasted for quite a while. And then the next phase in my practice was metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance. I was always, always, my treatment always primarily was with food. And that's my specialty in the sense that my PhD is in clinical nutrition.

So I talked about food all the time in these conditions, but I want to talk to you about that phase and chronic fatigue and we still see it today. It's not like it's people generally, they're overfed and undernourished. That causes a big, big problem in our society. The biggest being metabolic syndrome. We talk about that a all the time and how that leads to chronic disease, cancer, cardiovascular, Alzheimer's, diabetes, I even put autoimmune in that category. Metabolic syndrome and chronic fatigue and I think I was the first guy to ever say this. It was adrenal. The biggest thing that happened in the body was at the adrenal gland level. It was stress. So go back and I used to have an expression, or at least a lot of patients had this expression, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. Just walking around like zombies almost with no energy. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. Wired but tired. How do you like that one? Wired but tired. They were wired alright, but exhausted, okay?

So, here's generally what I saw. Here were the symptoms, obviously exhaustion. And many patients used to say, okay, because I said, okay, energy levels, if 10 is high and one is low, I asked that question. I think the first question I asked to tens of thousands of patients that came to see me in my office. If 10 is high and one is low, give me a number. And a lot of people, it was amazing to me. A lot of people said, I don't even register on the Richter scale. It's not even zero, it's below zero. That's how exhausted I am. So it wasn't while I'm a five out of 10, although I did get some of that. But most people, when they had that chronic fatigue wired but tired, they would hardly register in terms of subjective energy levels, I got none. Okay?

Brain fog. It just felt like there was cotton in the brain, just trouble focusing. Trouble even with short-term memory, trouble with just brain fog. Anybody ever experienced that? Brain fog? Yeah, anxiety. Wired, but tired and depression, no motivation, down in the dumps. A big problem was sleep. One of the major symptoms, even though they were exhausted, they never got a good sleep, never got a recuperative sleep, and that's no fun. And some people, they literally were passed out the whole day, but they never got that. Okay, I had a good night's sleep. And a lot of us are like that, right? You might get really tired. I find now if I travel, I don't do near as well as I used to and I get tired, but you give me a good night's sleep and I'm back to full bore, I get a recuperative sleep and I'm back in business.

People with chronic fatigue, they're not back in business. They're done like dinner for a long time, like anything exhaustive where they don't even have much energy. I tell people, you got little wee wicks and your candle won't burn very long with little wicks or you got battery packs, they don't work very well. It doesn't hold the charge very long and you're not recuperating with sleep. And often one of the symptoms usually wasn't always there, but in well over 90% they had symptoms of fibromyalgia. Now, I know a lot of people over the years have put fibromyalgia on its own, but I always said it was a two-sided coin and chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, just flip the coin, doesn't matter. They're part and parcel of each other. And I saw so much of it, and that's why when I wrote books on chronic fatigue, one of my books was called energy robbers, and the other one was chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, the curse of the modern woman. I wrote that in the early nineties.

So wired but tired, brain fog, sleep disturbances, pain and depression symptoms, anxiety, depression symptoms. Now, what I want to talk about too is what I saw, because I didn't guess I tested. So in clinical nutrition, I really liked the fact that I didn't have to guess. I tested and therefore I was able to come to some very strong conclusions because of testing. It was testing that generally like if you had chronic fatigue or anybody you knew that had chronic fatigue, they didn't get tested properly because they went through the channels even to see, for example, an endocrinologist. Well, your thyroid numbers are all right. I talked to a lady the other day and I said, well, your thyroid is slowed to a crawl. Look at all your symptoms. You got all the symptoms of it, your hair is falling out, your eyebrows are thinning, you're gaining weight. You just look at food, you got dry skin, you slowed to a crawl. Well, that's thyroid.

We always talk about thyroid having lots of strings attached and it's almost unbelievable. But here we are today and still an endocrinologist, and I used to treat a few endocrinologists. They come to me for a workup and they were shocked. I remember telling one endocrinologist, I said, well, you got thyroid problems. What? I got tests. They're normal. Well, I said, remember lab, I'm not against labs, but you better, symptoms trump the lab, especially when you're looking at lab results. What is so-called normal? Like thyroid let me just give you TSH for a minute. The numbers of TSH between what they call normal in the normal limits is from here to eternity. There's such a huge range of what's called normal and symptoms are not taken into consideration. Oh, it's normal, your TSH is normal as if that's the only test.

And because I looked at tens of thousands of numbers of TSH, I said, well, what's normal for medicine's not normal for me? And you got the symptoms, you got all the symptoms of your thyroid slowing to AC crawl and your TSHI got a sweet spot for that TSH number. That's one of the reasons I talk about the eight blood tests that I want you to get. And you can interpret your own blood work. You don't have to be a doctor to do it, okay? Wired but tired. So what did I see? What were the tests that I did in my office that was pretty well consistent in every case of people that were exhausted? Okay, so let me go over them. One, they were low in vitamin D, almost invariably, okay? And there's hardly any doctors that ever look at vitamin D and energy. They don't look at it that way and it's not the first thing they think of. They'll certainly look at the thyroid, but they're not looking at vitamin D. But I'm telling you, vitamin D is a biomarker for chronic fatigue. People were extremely low in vitamin D.

Now again, they might've been normal. Oh, it's normal. But the range of normal again in vitamin D here to eternity and what we know today about vitamin D compared to what we used to know, I bet you there's not five people that have studied vitamin D more than I have over the years because I've been talking about it for a long, long, long time, 20 years on the radio in every one of the books I've written, I think we're at 24, 25 books. I've always talked about vitamin D, sun, the importance of it. Doctors think bones. I think immune system. I think energy. Your body is a solar panel, extremely low, and they were never optimized in vitamin D needs to be optimized. B12, B12, B12. And I know I probably bore you to death on why I am always talking about B12. Well, nothing works without B12 either.

Nothing works without B12 and one of the problems in the eighties, okay, guys, I just got to tell you about vitamin D and B12. In the eighties was the big shift away from meat. Started a little earlier than that, but women especially, they were buying the salad thing. I heard it every day. Salad. That's where I got where I do this voiceover salad. I heard it in my salad. I eat Well, doc, I'm eating salad. I said, that's for rabbits. Cows eat salad, so you don't have to. Look you can have a salad, okay? I heard a comedian the other day. He said, salad is a down payment, a promissory note that something better is coming on your plate. Look, you want to have a salad, guys enjoy. Okay, all I'm saying is don't live on it. But that's what was happening. People were living on, women especially living on salad. They were cutting out their red meat. They were very low in vitamin D. You don't get no vitamin. Look, the best place to get vitamin D is from the sun. But the second best place to get vitamin D is a supplement. And the third best place to get vitamin D is food. And it's only found in the animal kingdom.

That's why the Inuit who don't take vitamin D, well, they're not sunbathing. Let's put it that way. Okay? We used to call 'em Eskimos. They're not sunbathing, but they weren't low in vitamin D. You know why? They ate it every day? And by the way, you need to eat it every day. If you want to get vitamin D from food, you got to have it every day. You got to have the fat. It's a fat soluble vitamin and only animal fat, dairy fat, egg fat, meat fat. Will bring it to you. There are not a lot of vitamin D in chicken, okay? I'm not against chicken and guys, by the way, on B12, okay? Just by the way, okay, Dr. Martin, my B12 is too high. What does that mean? It's a water soluble vitamin. It can never be too high. It can't be. And by the way, all that's doing is measuring your B12 in your blood. It's measuring your B12 in your tissue. It's like magnesium. You get a blood test of magnesium. You know what that tells you? Not much. Why? Well, because magnesium is not in your blood. There's very little in your blood, it's in your tissue, it's in the cells.

So I never relied on B12 when I saw B12, in a sense, I did my own testing, but people were extremely low in B12. A lot of it was diet. Any kind of digestive issue, any medication by the way, just about any medication will zap the B12 out of your body. You need to take it guys. B12 is essential. Your brain, your nerves don't work without B12. You can't have good levels of energy if you have low levels of B12. And you know what, B12 you can hardly get today. It's crazy, but you can hardly get a physician even to look at it. I'll tell you doctors in my dad's day, there wasn't a doctor that didn't give B12 shots at one time. It was the go-to for low energy. Today, people are walking around, they're like, Casper the ghost, and they don't even know they're low in B12 because nobody's told them. I shocked people in my office. They said, well, you're extremely low in B12. What? Do you eat red meat? I was told not to. It's acidic, leaky gut, okay? They were low in vitamin D, low in B12. They had leaky gut. Did I ever see an exception? I don't think so. They always, always had leaky gut. And leaky gut allows the Trojan horse to come in.

And you guys have learned this on this program. Leaky gut, one of the biggest problems with it, first of all, it's microscopic, but leaky gut allows garbage to get into your bloodstream, toxins. And the worst toxin that can get into your bloodstream, in my opinion, is the Trojan horse yeast candida fungus. It spreads. It's a carrier, it carries. It carries heavy metal. It ain't good. Leaky gut. They all pretty well had leaky gut. Of course, we look at the adrenals and was I the first guy to say this? Adrenal exhaustion, adrenals, guys. That's where wired and tired comes from. Okay? Adrenals, cortisol. Cortisol is part of your life. If it follows the circadian rhythm, it's up in the morning and then it follows there. And then by nighttime it's down to almost zero. And that's all right. You need cortisol. It's the stress hormone. But when you're exhausted, when the cortisol has been over firing for a long time, what happens? Your cortisol is either extremely high or extremely low.

And people, although I'm going to get some feedback today, Dr. Martin, my cortisol is low. Well, that's not good. Doc, my cortisol is high. That's not good. It's not balanced. And when you get adrenal exhaustion, when your adrenals have been attacked by stress, like I say it's an attack because stress who isn't stressed, but it's not if you're stressed, it's whether you're always stressed because a certain amount of stress you live on the planet, the environment, family, relationships, right? The Bible, Job, probably the oldest book in the Bible, you know what it says? Life is short and full of trouble. True or false? Maybe not for a kid, but you got to agree with that. Life is short, full of trouble. And I'm not even negative. That's just a reality. Well, that's stress.

And then we live in a different world today. I talked about that in my first book. Okay? I have it right in front of me. I'll just point it out to you. This is my very first book, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. You know what I pointed out? I said women, when I wrote that book, I said, women are going through what they never went through before in life. And I'm talking about in generalities. You know what it was? Women their day became 24 and seven. Look, my mom had 11 children. I get a migraine. I love kids. I love kids, but I love my grandchildren more. If I'd have known grandchildren that much fun, we'd have had 'em first, but my mom had 11 kids. Holy smokes. How did they do it? But life was different. I spent a lot of time in this book talking about that, how women, especially because chronic fatigue was more of a woman. Not that it didn't happen to men, but it was 90% women, if not 95. Well, I said the world has changed for them.

And one of the things I talked about is that stress in their lives, they're expected to compete with men in the workplace and have children, take care of the home. And who worries more? Let me ask you a question, ladies. Okay? I know my audience. You guys know this, okay? Who worries more? Someone's sick in the family. Who worries more? You ladies or men, guys? Okay? And I know there's all these genders and all that, but come on, it's common sense. Who doesn't? Women worry more. Women are the ones that get stressed more than men. Okay? Men, we're dull. We're dumb. Health. Who worries more about health? Women or men? Here's a man coming into my office. What are you here for? I don't know. Why did you come? My wife. What's wrong? Nothing. How do you feel? Good. And I hardly would allow a man to come into my office without their wives. Why? Because a wife will tell the truth and the husband's a liar, liar, pants on fire. Oh, I'm feeling all right. I feel good. No, you don't. I got all your test results. It's true.

So we consistently saw adrenal gland exhaustion, and either cortisol was through the roof or it wasn't registering at all. Very low. And that's an adrenal burnout. Saw it a lot. Wrote about it, talked about it. Talked about it on the radio. People would come from all over North America and even Europe to see me. I was talking their language. If they heard about me, they wanted to be tested. They wanted to confirm what they pretty well knew. You know how many boxes of Kleenex we went through at the office? You could ask anybody that worked for me. People finally, someone listening. Finally, someone giving me answers. Finally, tears have come down their eyes. Doc, I've been so exhausted. I've been so unwell, I can hardly think. And I say, well, that don't surprise me. Look at your results. You're a complete mess. Your adrenals ain't working properly. You're not firing on any cylinders at all. Your battery packs are down to zero. You got no charge left. Your mitochondria, your battery pack. They're not putting out any ATP. Tears coming down their eyes. Wired but tired.

So higher or low cortisol, like I already talked to you about the TSH, the very sluggish thyroid. The thyroid was crawling and usually the numbers were medically within normal limits, but they were off big time. And insulin resistances. I often saw it. And you can understand why. When you don't feel good, guess what you reach for? Crap. You were trying to get a quick fix. So I get them to put their hand up. My name is Susie and I'm a carboholic. I said, well, you're eating carbs and your battery packs are asking for something different. You're not fueling your body at all. And I said, but anyway, we're going to send you home with a plan. We're going to send you home with a very strict regimen to take care of yourself and build that body back up.

And guys, by the way, this is where if you're wondering about the story of Navitol, that's where this comes out of that, where I stumbled, and I mean it stumbled upon pine bark extract because it crosses the blood brain barrier. And that's probably the number one reason why it's so powerful with extremely low functioning persons was Navitol. And of course, they were put on B12. I didn't care what their numbers were because they were extremely low and vitamin D given high doses of vitamin D, high doses of B12. They were put on Navitol. I put them on a broad spectrum probiotic, but I just wanted to give you what people went through. They're still going through it. Cortisol is a huge, well, I wrote a book 2011, okay? Tony Jr. and I wrote a book in 2011 at the 100th anniversary of the Martin Clinic. 1911. 2011 wrote a book, Serial Killers: Two hormones that want you dead, insulin and cortisol. They'll kill you. You need them. Absolutely need those two hormones, but when they get out of whack, they'll kill you.

And today, has anything changed? Nope. Two hormones that want you dead, insulin and cortisol. And by the way, these women, almost invariably, okay, when I saw them and tested them, were dominant in estrogen, very dominant in estrogen. And that will slow your thyroid to a crawl too. And men that had it were very low in testosterone. While they're extremely low in vitamin D, men need vitamin D for testosterone. Wired but tired. Okay, what's tomorrow? Q and A. Send your questions in. Okay, we enjoy Q and A. I enjoy it. I have more fun with that. We love it. So send you questions in for Q and A. That's coming tomorrow. Guys, we love you dearly. Talk to you soon.

Announcer:  You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!