[00:00:23] I passionately believe that just about every disease can be prevented or reversed. If you are struggling with fatigue and adrenal dysfunction, or you have patients or clients who are struggling, this episode is just right for you. Before we get started, I want to remind you about the Adrenal Resource Guide that we created for you. If you download it at reinventhealthcare.com/adrenals, you are going to have tools, and you're going to have herbalists and all kinds of things to help support you in adrenal recovery.

[00:01:27] As we talked about in a previous episode, the metabolites are super important to measure, and the metabolites can only be measured in the urine. The cortisol awakening response is something that we track in the saliva. We're going to look at the patterns, and I'll explain to you exactly what it is and how you can go about interpreting it, and what causes this cortisol awakening response to go out of queue. It's part of a DUTCH test, when you do the DUTCH Plus, you're going to get the cortisol awakening response, which is a salivary test. Plus you're going to get the cortisol in the metabolites, the urine part of that test and the combination of that gives you such a beautiful picture.

[00:02:25] The up and down pattern reflects a natural response to stress and the way it's theorized for this test is that that first awakening is a mini stress. How do you respond to stress? And so what's measured is the percent difference between the awakened cortisol, the first morning cortisol and the 30 minute and then 60 minute response, and we can detect this HPA Axis disturbance, even if the free cortisol is normal. You can be looking at the test and the free cortisol is normal. Maybe the metabolites are even normal, but the cortisol awakening response is off. It's either too high or too low.

[00:03:55] And then you do it again later, so we're comparing it to what's your salivary cortisol pattern, 4 to 5:00 PM. 10:00 PM to midnight, and if you or your client awakens during the night, we want to get another one. We're going to see if there's any problems with cortisol. When you're awakening, what does it mean to have an elevated cortisol awakening response?

[00:04:43] It could also be blood sugar dysregulation. When the blood sugar is dysregulated, you're going to see it go higher. And guess what? Cortisol stimulates the blood sugar. It could be a problem with somebody who has a blood sugar dysregulation problem, insulin resistance, diabetes, pre-insulin resistance, or something.

[00:05:23] The HPA Axis is sluggish. It's not responding to that mini stress at the beginning of the day. It could be psychological burnout. Somebody's just been through a really big ordeal. Sometimes we see this in business people who have just gone through a merger, an acquisition, or a project that causes them to get stressed and then they burn out.

[00:06:03] It might be sleep apnea, waking up breathing problems throughout the night, poor sleep, and it can also be PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Any of these things need to be investigated further. If you run a cortisol awakening response test on somebody and you see that it's depressed, it's not going up as high or it's going up in a weird way, we'll talk about that in a moment. Then what you want to do is ask a lot of questions, try to determine the underlying cause, and then address the underlying cause you always want to address the underlying cause. If somebody has an elevated cortisol awakening response, you're not going to give them licorice root as an adaptogen, because that will help keep the cortisol active more throughout the day.

[00:07:01] I said a little bit earlier that we have a response, so I'm going to use my hands. If you want to see my hand motions and you're listening on a podcast app, go ahead and shoot on over to YouTube and find this video.

[00:07:30] You can have a cortisol awakening response where it looks the same. It's a nice up and down, like it's a ski slope and then down. But you can also have one where it's higher first thing in the morning than it should be, and then it goes to where we kind of expect it to be at 30 minutes later and then stays high, or it comes back down. There's a lot of variations and there's some good resources on the Precision Analytic site where you can look, and they'll give you pictures and give you some help with what really might be going on.

[00:08:33] If we see that we're favoring one or the other in terms of our metabolites, because I like to do this in combination with the DUTCH test, which does the metabolites, then we can ask a lot of questions. If we're favoring cortisol, then what's the body trying to do? It's trying to muster some new response. Is this person on licorice? Does this person have high blood pressure? Are they taking Hydrocortisone cream? And sometimes that can contaminate the sample and you get a poor response. If we're favoring cortisol over cortisone, we want to ask the question, “Are you taking licorice root?” Licorice root, you can take as a tincture, you can take it as little concentrated extracts, you can take it as a tea. And we think a lot of times, like teas are innocuous and we can just take a lot of tea. But one of my mentors decades ago, shared about a guy who had low blood pressure and he put him on licorice tea to bring his blood pressure up, and the guy liked the licorice tea, so he started drinking a lot of it, and he was drinking like a quart of licorice tea a day.

[00:10:07] Sometimes when we rush people to the hospital with high blood pressure, we want to make sure that they're getting asked these questions. And allopathic medical doctors don't ask that. ER docs don't ask those questions. “Are you taking licorice? Are you drinking licorice root tea? Are you taking a tincture that has licorice in it?” All of these things can contribute and when we see in the elevated CAR, that could be because they're taking licorice, and they took a licorice dose before they went to bed, which, by the way, I don't recommend.

[00:11:15] And then there's people who are doing a lot of the right stuff and they're not getting results. You want to dig and go underneath the hood to figure out what's actually going on with these people. Testing is part of the process, we've been talking about adrenals. I would highly recommend that you download my Adrenal Health resource guide at reinventhealthcare.com/adrenals and get more information, get lists of the various tests in the labs that do them, get lists of various herbs and when you would use them and when not, so that you're educated about this.

[00:12:12] We share, we give samples and examples and case studies and so much more that you can learn to go deeper and deeper with how to handle these hormonal imbalances. You have the power to change people's lives. We are the ones that are going to go out there and reinvent the system, make the broken disease management system into a true healthcare system so that everybody gets the right, everybody gets the privilege, everybody gets the ability to be healthy and happy.