My Journey with life-threatening Candida.(Brief Article)

"I don't know what to do for you," the doctor finally admitted, after watching me unintentionally lose close to 20 pounds in just a few months. After sending me for test after test, which all came back "normal," and hearing of my daily nausea, weakness, chills, digestive problems and extreme fatigue for nearly a year, he was at his wit's end. And frankly, so was I.

This primary care physician suggested everything from "just being in those menopausal years" to suffering from manic depression. I had endured countless insults from specialists who told me to "chill out, go out and enjoy life," or see a psychiatrist. My husband was, by this time, convinced that I was a total hypochondriac who had let a "little flu bug or something" turn into an imaginary catastrophe.

Then, one day at a birthday party, I watched a young lady, Kristin, refuse a piece of cake. She said she couldn't have sugar. As she began describing her illness, I recognized some of my own symptoms, and asked her what it was. She said "candida."

She went on to explain that overgrowth of candida, also known as Candida albicans causes "candidiasis," or in severe forms, "systemic candida," and is an intestinal invasion of a yeast fungus. As I began to research this problem, Kristin told me to "step out of the box" of traditional medicine and see an alternative care doctor, which she believed saved her life.

I found an alternative-medicine physician who explained to me that regular laboratory testing does not take into account an individual's chemical balance, lifestyle, weight and other things that compose a person's entire makeup, so candida is almost never detected.

He sent my stool sample to one of just a few special laboratories in the country. They sent back an analysis of everything going on in my "gut." My test came back with "4+ candida," which I was told is the highest count you can have, plus some other bad bacteria. It was determined that a course of antibiotics I had been taking, off and on, for 3 years, resulted in the killing-off of most of the "good" bacteria inside my intestinal tract, thereby weakening my immune system. Although everyone has candida in their bodies, the candida can explode and take over when the immune system is weak.

MY UNDERSTANDING OF CANDIDA