Constant fatigue often leads to burnout. The syndrome of burnout has both psychological and physiological components which come about from continued stress at work. People who suffer from chronic fatigue have many stress related conditions. For many, job stress leads to job burnout and is the last of a long line of insults leading to constant fatigue.

Mental withdrawal in the job occurs during burnout because of:

* job dissatisfaction

* work strain

* demands of your job

Symptoms of burnout include the following:

* withdrawal from contact with people

* lack of energy

* drawing away from contact with people

* minimizing contact with people

Burnout in the workplace affects 25-35% of the workforce. Scientists have wondered what role the stress response system plays in the syndrome but the results have not been enlightening. The problem is that tests of the stress system cannot show any problem until the system has reached a level of dysfunction that is significant.

Our body’s functions range over a wide continuum and the tests we currently use aren’t precise enough to scan this wide range and detect a loss of function. Generally, they’ll only pick-up dysfunction when we reach a high level of breakdown.

The feelings and sensations that the individual experiences are real, but tests most often cannot detect why. The failure of the tests to find anything, leads to a poor outcome in patient care.

What confounds the situation even further is that most diseases arise because of multiple causes. This is clearly the case in constant fatigue. In burnout, there is often decreased immune system functioning.

Some of the other causes of burnout and chronic fatigue are the lack of exercise, post-viral syndrome, depression, cellular toxicity, muscle weakness, and poor diet.

As in all fatigue syndromes, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity, and all the milder, non-diagnosable fatigue complexes that millions suffer from, there are no known therapies within the framework of modern medicine.

Since modern medicine admittedly has no treatments for fatigue, many people are turning to alternative treatments to find help and relief for many conditions for which medicine has no solutions. In fact, out-of-pocket spending on alternative treatments now exceeds that spent on conventional treatments.

People are finding solutions to their health problems from the use of alternative therapies. They rarely mention this fact to their physicians for fear of a “dressing down” since doctors are generally against any treatments that they don’t control. Most doctors believe that nothing in the alternative treatments of health problems are of any value.

Medicine does not support the use of nutritional supplements even though it knows little about it. This fact doesn’t matter and it ridicules the use of supplements as untested. The medical community still supports the low-fat diet even though it’s well-known that it’s useless and even dangerous. It puts down supplements as a waste of money. Medicine does not research these topics, yet is uninhibited in condemning alternative approaches to the programs it supports.