A funny thing happened on the way to your order page...

[joeblow]

Was thinking about getting Lufeneron until I started reading some of the posts here. Please read my story, and if you're ever in LA, I'll buy you a beer.

I got Lyme disease from a tick in August of 2010. Confirmed this a month later via bullseye rash. Got high titres in the subsequent Igenex test, saw LLMD. Over the course of the next seven months and four doctors, I took high-dose Doxy, Amox, Plaquenil, Alinia, Biaxin and a bunch of supps. Dieted. Finally, one day, in May 2011, I just stopped taking the stuff. Strangely, I felt OK, not great, but OK, although I was left with a white-coated tongue. So I naturally thought Candida. I started on the diet, was pretty casual about it, went to some more doctors for the supposed candida. Went to a couple weddings over the summer, I cheated and drank booze-- I remember feeling very, very hungover afterward and had a grey tongue both times. Fast forward to the advent of winter on the West Coast and I started to really feel like shit. Decided I wanted to lick this candida thing for real, so I started on the Body Ecology Diet, went back to most reputable LLMD/ND, and am now taking the most high quality sups, and rotating antifungals. I feel alternately good and poor depending on the day, alternately clear and brain-foggy depending on the day, alternately optimistic and depressed, depending on the day, alternately energetic and (deathly) lethargic, depending on the day. My bowels don't work right, I am allergic to dogs when I wasn't before, and the brain fog business scares me. Recently, I had a colonic, and the hydrotherapist told me my lower intestine was in top shape. No impactions of any kind, and no evidence of candida. Which I didn't think much of at the time, as I was so steeped in full time job of researching a cure for this Candida.

I am a writer by trade, a researcher by necessity, and to say that I've been lost in the depths of Curezone is a vast understatement. There I read complaints of people who were convinced they had Candida, had horrible symptoms that sounded far worse and far more debilitating than mine. It is there that I stumbled across Lufeneron, and your page, then a post wherein you told someone their tongue symptoms are probably not indicative of Candida. My tongue is sometimes grooved, white toward the back, and fades into an overall pale pink as it gets to the front. It is pink on the sides. The whiteness is geographically symmetrical. Whatever's on my tongue takes on the color of whatever I have recently eaten. My mouth is bone dry in the morning, takes on a greenish-yellow hue, but turns into white after the first glass of water I drink.

Understanding that you are not a doctor, I am not asking for a medical advice, but the opinion of someone who seems to know her stuff and not trying to push a cure (God bless you for that, there are so many supposed cures floating around it makes me want to scream). If you think I have candida, I will stumble back to your order page. If not, the mystery deepens. Do you think I have candida?

Many, many thanks,

Joe Blow

[SarahVaughter]

Thank you for the offer :-)

I would need to see a high-resolution, well-lighted, sharp picture of your tongue to be able to say with any reasonable degree of confidence what I think the chance is that the white coating is Candida or not. And that would be the judgment of a layperson, and only an indication, percentage-wise, of my estimated likelihood that this is the case.

You have been at high risk for developing a Candidia infection. Supplements and diets have hardly an effect on either the yeast or the mycelial stage. The yeast can live off whatever it is that you've been eating, in fact it can live of nearly anything. That's why women can get yeast "over there". They do not eat carbs with their vagina, yet they can be a horrendous yeast problem. Just bodily fluids is enough, when there is a lapse in immunity (lack of probiotics, systemic lapse in immunity due to insomnia or chronic infection etc.)

It is not true that the Candida grows tremendously due to spikes in blood sugar, because spikes in blood sugar are of short duration and are suppressed by Insulin, otherwise the person would die rapidly of shock.

What promotes Candida is a combination of low immunity, bot general and local (resp. by having a systemic Lyme infection and by killing off the good bacteria onthe skin with antibiotics).
As a result, warm and moist places develop Candida yeast, and depending on how long your immune system holds out, mycelial Candida.

From what I just mentioned, it follows that neither against yeast, nor against mycelial Candida, it helps much to be on a low-GI diet or supplements. And we see that all the time in practice. People who live very healthily but just don't manage to get (fully) rid of their Candida issues.

The reason is that Candida can't be killed anymore, when it has become mycelial. It is my opinion that Candidiasis is an incurable infection. Only the yeast stage can be fully cured with meticulous oral hygiene, antifungal medicine, boosting the immune system and a diet with only small portions of low-GI food.

Mycelial Candida can only be suppressed, not cured. How my husband suppressed it was with various antifungal medicines and boosting his immune system with sleep and healthy food, vitamins, sunshine, stress avoidance etc. Eventually he became (nearly) symptom-free. But he still has the occasional problem.

Example: When we went on long walks, he sometimes develops thick, painful sores on his foreskin. The mycelial Candida is still there, dormant (visible by a slinghtly lighter skin color) and just waiting for a lapse in hygiene or immune status to rear up its ugly head. The places inthe body that are naturally the best breeding grounds for Candida will probably never be fully cleared of them, after it managed to breech the immunesystem.

That's very serious, because it means that when we get older and our immune systems weaken, that this semi-dormant mycelial Candida can, and in our opinion likely will spread. Perhaps even through the blood stream into heart valves and brain, causing heart attacks, brain hemmorages etc. Because that is what happens to people with nosocomial Candida infections as well, when they have impaired immunity.

So it is of paramount importance to do everything in your power to eradicate any mycelial Candida you may harbor before you lose immune function.

Unfortunately, Candida has been shown to secrete substances that attack those parts of the immune system (certain cells and their messenger chemicals) that fight fungal infections. This makes mycelial Candida able to remain in place, locally. The immune system just can't kill it fully, because the Candida colony pumps chemicals into your local tissues that kill off those immune cells that are supposed to mop it up.

Even worse: There exist no antifungal medicine that can kill 100% of a mycelial Candida infection. I'd say that at best, 99.99% or 99.999% can be killed. That is unfortunately about just as good as "none at all", when you have an impaired immune system. because out of one single Candida cell, infinitely many can and will grow if that final cell is also not killed or kept in check indefinitely.

I know this is controversial but I'll say it anyway: Diet is perhaps the most insignificant factor of all relevant factors in fighting Candida. Candida fungi are a major part of the population of microorganisms that contribute to the decay of cadavers. Corpses don't eat and yet they "have" Candida - they are consumed by it in fact. Their blood sugar level is pretty low. Dead people have no immune system - the immune system is the real reason people have Candida problems, not diet directly but at most indirectly (when it is so poor that the immune system suffers).

[SarahVaughter]

PS

Rotating antifungals is a recipe for failure. I have written about this before.
Please note that this is not some personal theory of mine, but that this is accepted fact amongst microbiologists.

http://forum.owndoc.com/showthread.php?258-Kinesiology-Muscle-Testing&highlight=multiplication

Lufenuron works on a different cell wall constituent than Fluconazole. It is known from antifungal experiments that when two different classes of cell wall agents are combined, the results are synergistic, meaning much better results using much lower dosages can be attained compared to a single cell wall agent. So Lufenuron plus Fluconazole would be a real killer, a very strong combo indeed. It would be a mistake to first try Lufenuron and then Fluconazole. They should be administered simultaneaously, otherwise the fungus will be able to develop resistance. It is extremely much less likely, statistically, for two different mutations to occur simultaneously that confer resistence both to Ergosterol inhibitors and Chitin inhibitors. When the antifungal treatments are administered sequentially, the statistical likelihood of both mutations occuring is additive. When administered concurrently, the likelihood is multiplicative and hence orders of magnitude less likely to occur in the same timeframe.

The same strategy is followed in the treatment of AIDS with antivirals. They always administer a cocktail of as many drugs that fit the budget. That is how they can keep them alive indefinitely nowadays. One antiviral alone would result in resistance in a year or so, making it lethal in approx. five years. It took the doctors years to figure this rather obvious thing out, and many AIDS patients died due to their their inability to understand addition vs. multiplication of statistical probabilities. The best and the brightest doctors were involved in AIDS treatment, yet it took millions of deaths before someone suggested not to administer antivirals one after the other or rotating them, but all together. Basic mathematics and basic understanding of how infections work. Lacking in virtually all infectious disease specialists. The problem is that Microbiologists have absolutely no influence. They should be ID specialists. There should be no distinction. All ID specialists should also be Microbiologists. It should be one discipline.

[astrosue]

Whoa! You know a lot! Is ketoconazole an Ergosterol inhibitor? thx

[SarahVaughter]

Yes. Every antifungal medicine that ends with "azole" is an Ergosterol inhibitor.
Itraconazole, Fluconazole (Diflucan) and Voriconazole are examples.