Chris: This is a real Pandora’s box, but I think the first thing I would say is that in this situation, if the complaint is fatigue and there’s a history of overtraining, that’s really dialing in diet and lifestyle is the most important thing in most cases. So that means making sure that he’s getting enough calories and enough carbohydrates given his activity level. You might be surprised to know how often, even with men, but especially with women, that that’s not the case that they’re either undereating or they’re not getting enough carbs given the level of activity that they’re doing, especially if they’re doing highly glycolytic exercises and activities like CrossFit, mixed martial arts, or something like that.
You want to make sure that they’re getting enough sleep, which is often not the case. You want to make sure that they are using some heart rate variability monitoring to gauge their recovery and that they’re not overtraining and training too hard on days that they need more rest and recovery. I’ve found this especially with men that there is a strong tendency in certain groups of people to overtrain and to not even be aware of the importance of recovery. I mean, certainly they know it intellectually, maybe, but whether they’re actually taking steps to improve to make sure they’re getting enough rest and recovery before the next workout is another question. Most people are not doing that adequately. And then, using some of the things that you’re learning about in this unit, too, like adaptogens, glandulars, and other nutrients to help support the HPA axis. It takes a long time, usually, to come out of a depleted state or a metabolic reserve, and resilience is significantly depleted.
It’s hard. It requires a lot of diligence and focus and it doesn’t happen overnight, and a lot of people just lose patience with it and get frustrated, or what happens is they start to feel a little bit better, this is even more common, and as soon as they start to feel just a little bit better, they go up to their full training regimen again and then they deplete their metabolic reserve right all over again and they’re back where they started.
And so, this requires a very significant shift in mindset. It often requires some coaching type of work with patients to help them to make this shift in mindset and to continue to do it because it’s not just like a one-time shift. They usually have a pattern associated with it that has to be worked out, so referring to a health coach, if you have a health coach that you work with on staff, that this is an ideal kind of patient to be working with that health coach.
Now going back to the Epstein-Barr question, that’s a little more involved than we can get into this in this Q&A and it’s not really part of the course, but I’ll just say the antibody testing for most infections including Epstein-Barr definitely leave something to be desired because as you probably know, most people have been exposed to Epstein-Barr and thus will produce IgG antibodies on an EBV test. However, if the IgG antibodies are very high, even when the IgM is normal, that might indicate a current problem, a reactivated infection. There are some other labs like ArminLabs that are looking at T-cell reactivity to various pathogens that you can use to further assess whether there is a current immune activation against that pathogen and whether thus you may want to treat it.
In terms of treatment, we will typically do things that support the immune system, so all of the various nutrients that you know about—zinc, vitamin C, selenium, iodine, vitamin D—but then also herbs like astragalus and others I’ve written some articles about treating upper respiratory infections and other viral illnesses, and a lot of those same tonics or that I mentioned in those articles can be used to address chronic viral infections, and then you can use certain antiviral botanicals. We’ll talk, I think, a little bit more about that in the blood chemistry section and then there’ll be a future course on treating chronic infections where we’ll go into more detail there.