Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Specialist, Robin A. Bernhoft, M.D. treats Chronic Fatigue Syndrome using an integrative and functional medicine approach that is tailored to each unique individual and focuses on overall health and wellness.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is condition that challenges your immune system and presents symptoms that often mimic flu-like indicators. Factors that may contribute to Chronic Fatigue include overwork, high stress, poor nutrition, long term exhaustion, or a weakened immune system. People that have chronic fatigue are often unable to carry out daily activities, such as going to school or working, and the fatigue is often both mental and physical. Usually, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is only diagnosed if four or five of the indicating symptoms are present, and only after more serious conditions are ruled out.

Robin A. Bernhoft, M.D. specializes in treating men and women that are dealing with the effects of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Our non-invasive therapies have helped numerous clients to improve the symptoms of chronic fatigue and get to the root cause of their health issues. Robin A. Bernhoft, M.D. believes in boosting nutrition in conjunction with balancing hormones using bioidentical hormone replacement therapy are the primary modalities for healing the effects of chronic fatigue syndrome. Many Ojai, California clients that have come to seeking help for chronic fatigue have been able to increase their energy and improve their overall quality of life.

Robin A. Bernhoft, M.D. uses safe and natural BHRT to relieve you of your Chronic Fatigue symptoms. Call (805) 586-3432 to speak with Robin A. Bernhoft, M.D. and schedule your consultation today!

Symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Chronic Fatigue can be tricky to recognize because it shares symptoms in common with several sleep, mental, or physical conditions. In fact, many people who are diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue have also had a history of health conditions. Some of the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome include:

If you have been pushing your cognitive function to the absolute limit for longer than you can remember (because memory is also negatively affected by unrelenting and high levels of stress), you may have noticed that your mental and emotional bandwidth has experienced a tremendous decrease. You may now be battling with inability to sleep or focus on tasks or maintain your interest in people and activities, the constant nagging of irritation, apathy, cravings for unhealthy foods or substances, and you may just feel like you’re on autopilot, zoned out from the moment you wake to the moment your head hits the pillows.

Motivation is separate from discipline: discipline is getting up and going to work or the gym because you have trained yourself to do it, even when your mind and body are working against you. Motivation is the excitement and purpose that propels you forward and can make discipline (and working towards your goals) easy and enjoyable. Even the most determined workers and athletes have days where they lack motivation, but go anyway, and even the rare days where the lack of motivation prevents them from accomplishing their task.

But if you notice that your lack of motivation is keeping you from seeing your goal, and more often than not you are not accomplishing your to do lists, then you may benefit from changing things up.

Some days we wake up and just know that something is off, we can’t always put our finger on it, but we’ve lived in our body long enough to know when we feel unwell or sick, even if there are no other indicators. That general discomfort is known as malaise, and it’s your whole being sending you signal that it needs something.

Lymph nodes are the little clusters of cells behind your ears, around your neck, and in your armpits, chest, abdomen, and groin. Chances are, you have a relationship with one or more of these areas due to a past experience: maybe the back of your ear was swollen, or under your chin, letting you know that you were about to be sick.

If you are experiencing this familiar swelling but it isn’t followed up by the usual illness, your lymph nodes may be trying to tell you something else is wrong.

You know what a sore throat feels like: the itch, the burn, the constant need to cough or the awful scratch when you speak up, and swallowing simultaneously makes it better and worse. If you are experiencing a chronic sore throat and don’t feel the usual cold or flu symptoms, it might just be chronic fatigue.

It should come as no shock that force-feeding your brain constant stimuli and stressors may cause your mind to physically ache in lieu of relaxation and relief. Meditation can be a wonderful tool for quelling that pain, but trying to force yourself to think about nothing may also contribute to your headache.

Theoretically, it’s simple: we wake, we live, we sleep. But what if that sleep isn’t restful, and we keep waking up at night, or are only lightly asleep, unable to delve into the healing bliss of a deep slumber? Then we wake up tired, and living isn’t quite as easy or fun, and then we have to try to sleep again, but once we enter that vicious circle, it can be hard to get out.

Maybe some people wake up puffy, but get their first cup of coffee and are up and running until the night comes. Others may be complete rays of sunshine in the morning, then hit a slump around lunch or maybe they’re good until after dinner. With chronic fatigue, it may feel more like waking up tired, dragging yourself through the day, dragging yourself through the afternoon, and barely scraping by in the evening, and any ideas of going out with friends or family? Forget it. Don’t let chronic fatigue keep you from living a full day.

There is a feeling of accomplishment when you’re sore after a hard workout, it can be an indicator that you trained well and your muscles are ready to grow. But if you’re waking up and your muscles ache like they would after a heavy workout that you didn’t do, that is not only uncomfortable but a major indicator that something else is wrong.

Are your fingers aching when you flex and bend them? Do your knees and hips experience bouts of stiffness and you’re constantly rolling your wrists and elbows around, looking for a pop or some relief? Chronic fatigue can cause your joints to throb and ache without the redness or swelling you would normally look for in a joint condition, leaving people stumped and wondering what exactly is causing them to feel this way.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Explained

While physicians are unsure as to what the primary causes of chronic fatigue syndrome are, they do agree that it is related to a dysfunction of the immune system. Hormones work to improve the endocrine system and immune function, so supplying the body with hormones that are equivalent to human hormones can help women to boost their energy and immunity in a safe and non-invasive way. High levels of stress for an extended period of time can weaken both the immune and endocrine system, and this is because high stress forces the adrenals to pump out adrenaline, overstimulating the sympathetic nervous system, which is the body’s fight or flight system.

The sympathetic nervous system causes the pupils to dilate, intestinal contractions to slow down, blood flow to remain constricted, and your heart rate to increase. When the modern person does not physically utilize the adrenaline pumped out into the body, it sits there and must be processed in the liver. Then, the adrenals pump out cortisol, which is the hormone that deals with the inflammation caused from stress to smooth over the damage created in the body from the stress response. As a result, cortisol must utilize B vitamins, Vitamin C, and several minerals to actively do its job, and this leaches nutrition out of the body. Over time, the body will actually convert sex hormones into more cortisol to meet the body’s demands for this anti-inflammatory hormone.

Sex hormones such as DHEA, testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, and pregnenolone all contribute to immune function and the overall health of the body. When they are deficient, women cannot produce enough energy for proper immune function. Hormone imbalances greatly contribute to a strong and healthy immune system, and if the body is dealing with both hormone deficiencies and doing damage control for chronic stress, the immune system may become overactive, which causes it to attack healthy tissues, as in the instance of chronic fatigue syndrome.

Balancing hormones with Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy can help women to overcome the effects of chronic fatigue syndrome and boost their immune function and energy.

Integrative, Functional and Environmental Medicine

It is generally agreed that a majority of all chronic illness, including cancer, is caused by the interplay between our genes and various environmental factors (the impact of smoking on lung and vascular disease is an obvious example). Twenty-First Century Medicine shows us that our personal state of health is a balancing act between the genes our parents gave us and what we eat, drink and breathe, and where and how we live. Our genes might protect us against certain factors (we all know people who smoke like chimneys and live to be 90), or make us vulnerable to things other people can tolerate (e.g., chemical sensitivity). But whether our genes are strong or weak, they may lead to health in a healthy situation and life style, or to illness in an unhealthy one. And if they lead us to illness, that can often be reversed. Our genes seem to be biological tendencies which are influenced toward health or disease by what we consume and do.

Almost any disease in the textbook of medicine is potentially an environmental illness. Most people who seek an environmental doctor have already failed conventional medicine. This includes people with conditions like chronic fatigue, chemical sensitivity and various “psychosomatic” conditions, but also includes more common diagnoses, like high blood pressure, vasculitis and other cardiovascular conditions, allergy, asthma and immune conditions, endocrine disorders including diabetes, thyroid, adrenal and other hormonal disorders, neurological and behavioral problems including autism, and a wide range of gastrointestinal conditions, including chronic hepatitis and inflammatory bowel disease.

Not all of these conditions can be cured, but many of them can be made better through finding causative factors (toxins, heavy metals, etc) and treating them physiologically and biochemically.

ojai chronic fatigue bernhoft

Restore balance to your cycle, feel in sync with your body.

With safe and non-invasive therapies and cutting-edge technologies, men and women are regaining hormonal balance and wellness. Call (805) 586-3432 today to start your Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Journey with Robin A. Bernhoft, M.D..