By Dr. Sachin Shah and Dr. Glenn Foss
A couple weeks ago, two new patients who worked for the prosecutor’s office came into our office. They were telling us how normally, when these there’s no homicide or any kind of significant workload, they’re doing OK. They eat well. They sleep well. But as soon as their workload increases, they start eating like crap. They don’t get enough sleep.
One of the officers said, “It just becomes my new normal until I just snap out of that cycle.” And that’s the hardest thing when you realize, “OK, enough is enough. I got to start cutting out on this. I got to start cutting out on that.” And when there’s a significant issue, that’s when people realize, “I’ve got to wind down. I can’t do this. I can’t follow this kind of lifestyle. It’s not sustainable.”
When you go to a doctor and say you’re tired, or you just feel like crap or things are not the greatest in the bedroom, the most common things a physician would consider is that maybe it’s your thyroid. Maybe it’s your kidneys. Maybe look at your electrolytes.
So we look at the most common things. We’re constantly looking at disease and illness to explain why you are feeling like this. Is it because there’s something wrong with you, as opposed to what can we do to prevent it from getting worse?
Our practice looks at the more natural ways. And how to focus on the health and wellness aspect of it and other potential issues that are causing fatigue.
Fatigue is a great place to start looking at how to improve your health and wellness.
There’s lots of caused of fatigue. One of the biggest things is interrupted sleep. When you have low testosterone – low T – you tend to lose that depth of sleep, that REM sleep. That’s really where you get your restful sleep. And when you’re in a deep sleep like that, that’s when you have the most release of your hormones.
So testosterone is really released in your body and produced in your body while you’re in deep sleep. It’s kind of a double-edged sword. If you have low testosterone, you can have an interruption or loss of depth of sleep. And if you don’t have deep sleep, you can’t produce testosterone efficiently.
And then we can talk about the other aspects of fatigue. You have fatigue because you don’t eat well. You have fatigue because you don’t exercise enough. You have fatigue because you have an overabundance of stress.
It’s a vicious cycle. One week becomes a month and then it becomes even longer for law enforcement officers because of the stress and the challenges to pursue proper nutrition they have to endure.
That’s what starts all their issues. And it’s not like you’re just working 16 hours or a double shift just today or next Wednesday. It becomes one thing after another. And your bodies just kind of say, “You know what, I have to deal with that.” Whether it’s a financial reason, whether it’s you’ve got to cover for your coworkers, it just becomes chronic.
And when that becomes your new normal, that’s the problem. And once your body gets used to that, that’s when your hormones become imbalanced and your whole body kind of just gets a jolt to it.
These are all cumulative components of why someone may feel mental or physical fatigue. It can go both ways. A lot of times people feel more mentally fatigued than physically.
So you need to get a full sort of assessment of what’s going on in your body. We’re always so habitual and that we don’t realize what the cumulative effects are. And then you look in the mirror, and you’re like, “Holy smokes. Look at me today. I can’t believe what I look like today. This is not the way I was three years. What happened?”
What can you do going forward? Most officers seem healthy because they get traditional or standard lab work from their primary care physician. Your testosterone range could go from 250 to 1200. So if you’re 251, you’re considered normal by a primary care physician.
But you feel like crap every single day. Try a doctor who does more specialty blood work to really do an analysis, to see how your body’s responding to daily stresses, rather than just traditional blood work that really doesn’t give you in depth information from a day-to-day basis. That would be a solution to be more conscious of how your body’s responding on a daily basis.
You’ve got to come to terms that if your fatigue is related to low testosterone, your body is no longer making the amount needed to function well. So you have a choice to supplement your testosterone and experience feeling great. And the commitment that goes along with that is to live that lifestyle that includes balanced hormones, good diets, exercise and good quality sleep.
When you achieve that, the most common feedback that we get is that when you wake up in the morning, you’re energized. You have a foot on the ground and are ready to really start the day.
When officers walk into our office, most of these guys feel like every day is a Monday morning. But when you have that extra push, that extra oomph in your day and your mood, you want to pursue the day in a more positive way.
Dr. Sachin Shah, co-founder of Advanced Anti-Aging in Riverdale, earned his medical degree from the State University of New York in Syracuse and was trained at New York University Langone Medical Center. Following his extensive training, Dr. Shah began expanding his interests in pain management, venous medicine and, most recently, stem cell application for regenerative medicine. Dr. Glenn Foss is a graduate of New York Chiropractic College. During his 19 years of clinical experience, he has seen how musculoskeletal dysfunction relates to nutritional and dietary deficits, physical deconditioning and hormonal imbalances. For more information about Advance Anti-Aging’s Low T treatment, go to advancedantiaging.com.
