cover image Tired All the Time: How to Regain Your Lost Energy

Tired All the Time: How to Regain Your Lost Energy

Ronald Hoffman. Poseidon Press, $20.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-78139-2

Hoffman ( Seven Weeks to a Settled Stomach ) is quick to point out that most doctors take a conventional approach to fatigue, attempting to rule out serious diseases that can be detected by blood tests, X-rays and other diagnostic procedures. Although these means will help patients suffering from serious diseases, they don't serve many who are suffering from fatigue due to less obvious causes. The typical physician's attitude: if it's not physical in origin, it must be psychological. Not so, Hoffman says, citing numerous examples of patients suffering from long-term fatigue owing to allergens, poor diet and other bugbears well known to his New York City-based holistic practice. He devotes a chapter to the chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome and the special problems that this constellation of symptoms causes to those who are ill with it. To overcome fatigue, Hoffman provides mainstream advice such as calls for exercise, diet improvements and stress reduction. But he emphasizes alternative therapies. For PMS, for example, he recommends taking herbs such as black cohosh, chasteberry, licorice, ginseng and others containing natural estrogens. Hoffman, though, does not suggest appropriate doses. Instead, he recommends that we take herbs with low doses and build slowly until they improve our well-being. One might expect such diffuse advice from a friendly health-food store clerk, not from a physician. Better Homes and Gardens and Literary Guild alternates. (Feb.)