Bedridden for 11 years, he discovered a surgery for his adrenal condition

I’m curious what sort of stresses are thought to cause adrenal issues. Can they be environmental/situational vs. chronic hereditary?

About 5 years ago I was fairly healthy, eating great and CrossFit 6 days a week. Then my body started to become tired all the time. I had pretty high work stress at the time along with what might be considered frequent physically stressful workouts. I suddenly found myself sleeping most of my Saturday and Sundays. Struggling during the week, just enough energy to get myself to work and back to crash at night. Eventually dropping exercise altogether. Along the way I started feeling weak, shaky and would have almost tremors in my body. I had read about adrenal stress at the time and suspected it might be an issue.

It’s hard to tell what’s related but I eventually developed prostatitis, a few rounds of cipro and no help. Then almost a year later some pretty severe digestive issues developed and they thought I had Crohn’s disease, then hospitalized due to reaction to medicine. Then kidney stones, gallstones, gallbladder removed. The last few years have been hard but so many people have it worse.

After the gallbladder removal I’ve finally starting to feel meaningfully better, digestive significantly better and prostatitis issues resolved.

I don’t work out like I used to, I’ve had times that I try to get into a running regime but eventually I start to feel sick and pain around my kidneys. I’m able to do extended hours of yard work and be outside for long hours. I’m lucky that my health appears to be coming back. I have no idea the ultimate root cause of all this but I’m counting my blessings.

When I read about stories like this, it’s inspiring and relatable. When doctors and specialists can’t figure it out they send you to someone else or suggest psychiatric issues. It’s disheartening and easy to lose faith in the medical system.

No. Adrenal fatigue is little more than alt-med jargon for what the average HNer would call burnout. The invocation of adrenal dysfunction is, to put it politely, poetic license.

For my money it was just an ordinary cock up.

For reading, maybe, but it's a lot harder to contribute something meaningful if you don't know the context to start with.

Medicine, as an applied science, consists of a spectrum of fields between areas that are largely ‘engineering’ and areas that are largely ‘art’. Surgery, for the most part, is something more like engineering/science, where we have most of the answers and don’t have to modify practice too much in response to new knowledge; Psychiatry is still largely art. Frankly, making an argument for the failings of medicine based on psychiatry is like blaming a 2 year old for not being toilet trained.

I agree that people are drawn to alternative medicine when they can’t get answers from doctors. And I am a vocal advocate both inside and outside of medicine for the failings of the system. For example, if I turn up to the GPS office and sit in a room of sick kids with paint peeling off the walls to be seen by a disinterested doctor for 15 minutes who sends me away without giving me a deifinitive answer to my questions/concerns; then later go to an alt-Med quack with a water fountain in the waiting room, incense burning and she spends 45 minutes with me listening to my problems, who am I going to come back to, especially if I derive benefit (there are studies showing that practitioner engagement and active listening are for many common ‘modern’ presentations highly effective)

Part of this is the modern world has produced people who are so healthy and generally well off compared to our forebears that the moment they develop an ache or pain they fear the sky is falling and demand an answer.

And medicine doesn’t have answers, or maybe not the answer these people want, because most of these things are just the process of growing old in and of itself - people are externalising their existential angst on a system that was designed to treat sick people, not the walking well.

For example, of the 17 patients I treated in the emergency department on my last 2 shifts, 9 of them should have never even turned up to the department. They had nothing wrong with them, or nothing that staying at home, resting and using some common sense wouldn’t have fixed. Yet there they are demanding answers to questions that our forebears would have considered part of life; and which in any regard we can’t fix anyway.

I don’t work in the US but the system there is so fucked that I wonder how long until it contributes to a broader breakdown in society; healthcare is a basic human right and you’re right the wealth transfer aspect of it is disenhartening and concerning.