Adrenal Fatigue

[Jeannie]

adrenaline fatigue

My son is 12 he has been seizure free for 1 1/2 years. He reacently had a gran mal but we have been slowly reducing his depakote. I feel like there are no answers for him so I took him to a natuopath. He did an adrenaline test saliva test and he is in stage three adrenaline fatigue. Now Im not sure if I should trust this test and give him supplements. Im not sure if they could make him worse. He is always tired. The past few month he was doing way too much. This is what happen 1 1/2 years ago when they started. He has a lot of the adrenaline fatigue symtoms. Wondering if this could be the cause of the seizures.

The naturopath gave him Vitamin C with rose hips, not sure if rose hips is safe also something with rhodiola extract (in and adrenaline support supplement) and vitamin B

Im so confused. I don't want to mess him up.

Thanks,
Jeannie

 

[epileric]

Jeannie, I would highly suggest not reducing your sons meds without the advice of a neurologist.

You have to remember that the reason your son has probably gone without seizures for so long is because of the medication. Sadly, epilepsy is not something that is cured like the cold. Even though it has gone away in some people it is usually something that we live with all our lives. Even in those that have not had seizures for long periods of time have to stay on their meds to control their seizures. Even then it can come back, as many people on this site will attest to.

It seems to me that the depakote was doing a good job of controlling your sons seizures since he only had one since you reduced the dosage. I would highly suggest that you put him back on the dose he was on before and be aware that supplements (vitamins & herbs) can interact with various medications & also have side-effects.

Hopefully you can break your sons record of 1 1/2 years being seizure free.

 

[kirsten]

Jeanie, I agree with Eric. I've watched my mom go through the absolute mill with a naturopath who was trying to cure her illness for five years. She went through complete hell with what he gave her and what he failed to do. In the end, a fall led to a PET scan, which showed she had had breast cancer all those years, which the naturopath didn't even consider. And because she'd been wasting time with the naturopath for so long, her cancer was found too late. She was already in fourth stage. After she was diagnosed, he gave her herbal 'remedies' that interfered with her chemo, and gave her acupuncture, when she had lymph metastases, which is very dangerous and can very easily make cancer spread all through the body. This is only one story, but if you go to http://whatstheharm.net/naturopathy.html you will see that these guys can be very dangerous, especially when dealing with serious diseases like epilepsy. They tend to prescribe extremely high dosages of vitamin C, which can cause kidney failure. Also:

Last month the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced it was no longer supplying supplements, and would discourage patients’ families from their use. Why?

’Because vitamins and dietary supplements are essentially unregulated, there is no sound information about adverse side effects, drug interactions, or even standard dosing for the vast majority of them,” said Sarah Erush, CHOP Pharmacy Clinical Manager and a member of the hospital’s Therapeutic Standards Committee, which recommended the policy change that was rolled out over the summer. “Administering these medications — particularly to children with serious health complications — is unethical when the risks are unknown, and when there are alternative treatments that have been proven in clinical trials to be safe and effective,” Erush said.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org...and-quality-of-herbal-supplements/#more-29140

The adrenal test he gave your son is questionable:

The public education arm of the Endocrine Society, representing 14,000 endocrinologists, recently issued the following advisory :

“Adrenal fatigue” is not a real medical condition. There are no scientific facts to support the theory that long-term mental, emotional, or physical stress drains the adrenal glands and causes many common symptoms.

While laboratory tests are advertised for identifying adrenal fatigue, there’s no persuasive data to demonstrate that blood or saliva tests provide any meaningful information, or are correlated with any underlying pathology.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/fatigued-by-a-fake-disease/

Also, please do some reading into SUDEP and status epilepticus. I'm not wanting to scare you--these issues are rare, but they are a very real risk with epilepsy patients who are not on AEDs and who are having seizures. Naturopaths study for four years. Neurologists study for 14 years.

He did an adrenaline test saliva test and he is in stage three adrenaline fatigue.

I just have to emphasise: this is what naturopaths often do. This is a bogus test that diagnoses a bogus disorder. Nothing about it is real. The same thing happened with my mom. They gave her one of those bogus tests, diagnosed her with an illness that doesn't exist, and then treated her for it for five years when she actually had cancer.