Making Sense of Adrenal Support

One of the questions we are asked is how to figure out if you need to support adrenal function. Parents are often unsure if their child actually has struggling adrenal function.

It helps to keep in mind that dealing with mercury poisoning often means it's affected many functions in the body including adrenal glands. That in turn affects symptoms and behaviors.  Many of our children suffer from sleep issues, anxiety, tantrums, meltdowns, mystery stomach aches, morning nausea, allergies, asthma-like symptoms and hyperactivity.

Adrenal fatigue is generally an imbalance in adrenal hormones or too little of some of them. It's more common for our kids to be low cortisol or to have disrupted cortisol cycles often releasing it at the wrong times. Many are stuck in "fight or flight" mode which is when the adrenal glands compensate for low cortisol by releasing adrenaline. We are simply not meant to live on adrenaline.

All that adrenaline drives anxiety, panic attacks which would only be useful in nature for survival like running from a predator.  We don't need this constantly in everyday life.  We do need adequate cortisol to get going in the morning and to get to sleep.

What we do need is balance and we do need reasonable levels of cortisol. Cortisol reduces inflammation, keeps the lungs from being over constricted (asthma), reduces allergies or over active immune responses and helps with our sleep/wake cycle. 

Not all children are going to have this of course but if they do you'd want to know.  This is why we have an entire chapter in the book with a symptom list and suggestions for supporting the adrenal glands naturally. It's part of the multi-faceted approach to healing from mercury.

Thankfully we do have tools we can use and I often receive questions about the use of adrenal glandulars.  Weston Price has an article about this that I found helpful. I found it very interesting that steroids were not always used too to treat low cortisol.  While they are often used for adults, according to Andy Cutler's it should be avoided in children because of how it can affect reproductive hormones. 

Many times you didn't even realize your child was struggling with this issue until you start supporting adrenal function and see the improvements.