The best way to heal from a flare-up of Candida is to address the illness that’s the real cause of your symptoms.
That said, if you have no other mystery illness symptoms, no system imbalances, no autoimmune issues, or any other health problems, and you’re truly confident that you’re one of the rare cases in which Candida is an isolated issue, then follow the advice in Chapter 17, “Gut Health.” The information there will benefit anyone, including those who just want to address Candida as a side issue to an underlying health problem. Your goal in addressing your Candida is to increase levels of hydrochloric acid in the digestive fluid, rebuild the intestinal tract, and strengthen and detoxify the liver.
Also keep in mind that you should avoid both antibiotics and antifungal medications. These wipe out all bacteria in your gut—including good bacteria—which severely weakens your immune system. An impaired immune system is a trigger for viruses, bacteria, and/or fungi that are lurking in your body and highly resistant to these drugs, so they may start reproducing and reducing your quality of life.
CASE HISTORY: Not Candida After All
Margaret was a 42-year-old kindergarten teacher when she started to experience extreme fatigue. Even if she got a full night’s sleep, she’d wake up unrested and feel tired for the remainder of the day.
Soon her elbows, knees, and ankles began to feel tender and achy, and she had trouble getting up and down from the floor for circle time with her class. Foods that used to give her no problem were
now causing gastrointestinal distress, and she constantly felt bloated. On top of all this, Margaret periodically ran hot or cold, and started to dress in layers so she could adjust at a moment’s notice to her sweat spells or freezing fingers.
When Margaret returned to school yawning and with dark circles under her eyes after a long weekend of doing nothing, her assistant teacher suggested she get a checkup. At Margaret’s visit to her regular MD, he took a blood sample to test for thyroid issues. After the doctor got the results, he called to say that nothing was wrong. “You’re perfectly fine.”
Unsatisfied, Margaret asked her sister for the name of the functional medicine doctor she’d raved about. As Margaret sat fanning herself in the doctor’s air-conditioned exam room, he smiled knowingly. “The problems you’ve been experiencing are hormonal,” he said, and added that it was possibly a disorder or the initial stages of perimenopause. Either way, the doctor insisted that the issue had coupled with Candida to cause her symptoms.
Margaret was so relieved she had to fight the urge to hug the doctor. She finally felt she had an answer. She bounded out of his office with prescriptions for bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) and antifungal medication, as well as a printout explaining the need to clean up her diet and eliminate processed sugar, processed oil, and fried food.
After taking the ten-day course of the antifungal drug, she didn’t feel better. She returned to the functional medicine doctor to say that, in fact, her gut felt worse. He sold her a probiotic and assured her that it would take care of the discomfort. A week later, even with the probiotics, the BHRT, and her new diet, Margaret was doubling over with stomach cramps during show-and-tell at school.
This time, Margaret decided to go to a naturopath. The naturopath nodded as Margaret recounted her story, then agreed that hormonal imbalances and Candida were to blame. To address the Candida, the doctor put her on a round of colon cleanse supplements and directed her to remove all carbohydrates from her diet. Margaret was to eat mainly animal protein and vegetables.
School was out for the summer by now, so Margaret devoted herself to applying the naturopath’s recommendations, even cutting out her favorite balsamic vinaigrette and nightly glass of wine. Her aches and pains, she estimated, felt about 15 percent better from the changes. It seemed like she was on the right track . . . but she couldn’t improve past that initial uptick.
The naturopath put her on another cleanse program, but now Margaret watched her progress dissipate. Her tenderness and achiness were back, she developed extreme gas, and she was more fatigued than ever (which I would later tell her was because she had no carbohydrates to carry her). Margaret longed for berries, grapefruit, and bananas—but the naturopath had scared her away from even going near fruit. Through sheer determination, she kept sugar out of her diet for another 30 days and didn’t consume carbs of any kind.
Now, she feared that she was worse than before she’d sought help. She felt hopeless and sequestered from the world, completely unsure how she’d function once school started back up in a few weeks. The Candida she’d been diagnosed with, she felt, was destroying her quality of life.
At this stage, Margaret found me. Spirit quickly gave me the reading that Candida wasn’t the problem at all. In fact, it was nearly nonexistent in Margaret’s body. The real reason for her suffering was an undiagnosed case of the stomach bacteria H. pylori, coupled with the cytomegalovirus (in the herpes family). Her liver was sluggish, functioning at only 40 percent, versus the 65 percent typical for a woman her age. And she had very low hydrochloric acid in her gastric fluid, as well as a moderate amount of mercury-based heavy metal poisoning.
When I brought this up, Margaret recalled that she’d had her metal dental fillings removed six months prior to the onset of her condition. I explained that during the removal process, mercury had
been released into her system, saturating and overloading her liver. This had fed and grown the cytomegalovirus and H. pylori and diminished the hydrochloric acid she critically needed.
To address the situation, I made a quick adjustment to Margaret’s diet plan. We reduced her animal fat and animal protein intake, and allowed certain fruits back into rotation, including wild blueberries, apricots, and even dates. The rest of her diet consisted of vegetables, including leafy greens, potatoes, avocados, various additional fruits, and wild salmon—with an overall emphasis on low fat. With this change, her body was able to drive out a large amount of mercury from her intestinal tract and liver. It also shut down the growth of H. pylori immediately and lowered the cytomegalovirus load.
By September, Margaret had gotten better enough to greet her new class in good spirits. Within three months of our first call, she’d lost all of her symptoms—which were never Candida or hormone issues to begin with—and completely recovered her health.
CHAPTER 10