Candida Schmandida?

There’s regularly much mention in complementary/well being/alternative circles about troubles with candida albicans, its overgrowth and the many and varied symptoms it can create in humans. This post will be looking at just one strand of how to get a body working better by introducing how to see if it’s a problem for you.

My next post will go into greater detail about how to reduce it’s presence in the body. Have a look online there are many people who suspect it could be an issue for a great many people – not just those with MS or other auto-immune conditions.

  • Have you had what feels like fatigue out of all proportion to any exertion on your part?
  • Do you get aching joints not explained away by your activities?

These are just a couple of the symptoms attached to the actions of this opportunistic organism in your system. Fatigue and aching joints could be down to many other things so read on to find out how to rule this culprit out.

other beings

When I first started my ‘journey’ towards enhancing my wellbeing (soon after diagnosis) I spent the afternoon in a bookshop choosing which book to buy to tell me something about the condition, Multiple Sclerosis, a self help guide seemed to be the most positive in outlook and full of what appeared useful stuff.

This all happened in the days before I was introduced to the internet but it’s still a great book and the guidelines hold their own against many websites and blogs nowadays. I’m eternally grateful to the author Judy Graham for introducing me to an alternative way of looking at my condition before the tsunami of auto-immune journeys flooded the wellness side of the web.

I’ve hesitated to use the word empowering in previous posts but I think it’s an apt description of the book I read and how I felt after reading it.

Since then all the Ws have arrived and google helped the web become a place to go and find stuff out, whilst not even having to put your shoes on to leave the house… what progress!

Various candida cleanses are available so I thought I’d join in! Seems to me the best place to start is finding out if it might be an issue for you and could be contributing to existing symptoms you may have.

My thanks to Christa Orecchio for some of the detail collected from a talk given to Sean Croxton (I mention his JERFing mantra elsewhere on here). Just eat real food (his mantra) I mention in an earlier post and backed up by Dr Josh Axe and any number of naturopathic practitioners:

  • first off is candida albicans rampaging in your body?

After getting up in the morning, before you brush your teeth or have a cup of tea/coffee/hot water and lemon juice (helps alkalize your system, I’ll write about this in another post) pour a glass of water and work up some spit in your mouth then spit into the glass and leave it til after you’ve had some breakfast (not somewhere where someone might accidentally drink it!)

  • After half an hour or so has your spit stayed floating on the surface of the water or has it ‘grown legs’ and some or all of it has sunk to the bottom of the glass?

When everything’s in order and we haven’t been taking another curse* (sic) of antibiotics or been dealing with a range of different stressors on the body (including physiological stress from food intolerances as well as  emotional and/or mental stress) we manage to co-exist with an array of symbiotic hitchikers in our systems. These guys live in our gut and help to digest our food when all’s going well and communicate with other parts of us like our brains and fat storing departments.

*Don’t get me wrong, antibiotics have their place but it seems we, as a society have come to rely on them too much which has brought its own well reported troubles.

You may have noticed, as members of the western ‘developed’ world, most of us are pretty good at not allowing our bodies to reach calm. Buddhists consider our constantly gabbling brain to be a ‘monkey mind‘. this incessant internal noise can contribute to a poorly performing immune system which, in turn can pave the way for an opportunist bacteria to make a break for the big time in your belly.

Anway, I should stop showing you evidence of my monkey mind and get back to the detail of this particular candida cleanse.

  • Did your spit sink?

If it did that’s a sign there are too many things living in your digestive tract (the tube between mouth and anus). In earlier posts I’ve mentioned Hippocrates and him believing that all disease starts in the gut. Most, if not all functional doctors agree.

One of the first things to do is remove from your diet stuff that these rowdy inhabitants of our gut like to eat. Unfortunately it’s the same kind of thing we can be partial to, too:

  • sugar
  • vinegar
  • yeast
  • alcohol

Incidentally, this is how sugar effects our brain without any need for ‘outside’ help. Sugar it seems doesn’t do us or critters living in us much good.

There’s more to follow but try doing less of these things to start with and see if your body behaves a little better without their influence.

My next post will go into more about the symptoms and the 2+ month protocol involved in slowly removing this energy robber from your system.

I mention Judy Graham as she talked about candida and I read about it some 15 years ago and things might have progressed differently if I’d tackled this situation then.

I appreciate if, if, if don’t amount to a hill o’ beans suffice to say I’m two months in to the no booze or sugar protocol and I think it’s doing me some good but perhaps too early to tell?

 

 

Are doctors beginning to get it?

pleasing view of natureEverything is awesome! (apologies, I watched a movie yesterday, Lego related post to follow)

This piece of news came out on the anniversary of the start of the 2nd WW. One has no bearing on the other, I’m not big into coincidences and fate (I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that even though I use a word later on in this post I don’t knit my own muesli or believe in numerology). That’s not to say they don’t hold worth for some people but I’m not one of them.

Nowadays I spend my time researching or more precisely, wading through online ‘cures for MS’. For the record, I don’t think those words sit well in a statement and am highly wary of anyone who tries to jam them into a sentence together.

I’ve been building up to a post that was to be asking ‘Why Doctors Don’t Get It’. In it I refer to the Aesop’s fable of the wind and sun competing to get a man’s coat. We all know that the persuasive heat of the sun was far more effective than the brute force of the North wind.

Seeing this particular application of research based on dampening the allergic response in folk with troublesome allergies we have a sign that medical professionals are getting it. They may no longer see the words MS and choose to research treatments that, you could argue, are akin to using sledgehammers to crack nuts. It feels like doctors/consultants/experts don’t especially consider the bodies that carry the condition they’re creating a treatment for.

Does fear of this condition perhaps lie at the heart of why it’s been considered a perfectly acceptable treatment option to wipe out a fairly essential part of a human’s functioning? We need our immune system to defend against the many external assaults a body faces every day. Or is it that Western science practitioners, like small children are using a mallet to hammer a square peg into a round hole rather than examine the qualities of either component?

AIDS drugs and cancer therapies have been suggested and offered as a way to address our brain’s apparently self destructive tendencies. Let’s rush instead shall we to pharmaceutically punish the MSpatient/EMO self harmer by offering an already confused brain Lemtrada/alemtuzamab (a recycled cancer drug).

There’s nothing much binary about the human body so why has it been, until this recent development, that research has involved switching things off and on again?

Doctors can be so much more than IT support workers dealing with squashy cabinets!

I used to howl at the moon In an earlier blog and there I pondered on the difference between Eastern and Western medical practice. Both types seem to deal with the human body very differently.

From what I’ve experienced and read Eastern medicine considers our wobbling sacks of bones and processes holistically. I hesitate to use that word because I know it gets laughed out of a Western doctor’s waiting room (this is the word I was talking about at the beginning of the post). As if treating symptoms without addressing why a thing is happening has been shown to be a terribly evolved way of approaching the human body… please take a look at an earlier post I’d written about acupuncture at the beginning of the year in response to a frankly arrogant medical professional’s somewhat childish assessment of a science/methodology he’s chosen not to find out about. Like Western medicine has all the answers?