Candida & Biofilms - Theory & Protocol

[MAF14]

I got stomach pain from the Oregano and no real response to Monolaurin

Didn't get any real benefits from either

(just adding to let you know that I am reading your messages as well)

Hah, well thank you.

Headaches seem to have subsided, only happened the first few doses.

 

[MAF14]

I added in Grapefruit seed extract and Oregon Grape Root. Been doing four days of that then rotating to four days of monolaurin/Oregano Oil. Also started taking Black Walnut Wormwood extract daily.

I still dont have much improvement in symptoms but I'll probably just take these until they run out.

UNRELATED: For anyone with fatigue, I've been using one of those "sleep apps" that wake you up during the phase of sleep that keeps you most alert/energized through out the day. I can honestly say it helps... Not a cure-all by any means but has helped me from crashing in the afternoon.

 

[Violeta]

I am trying the method from this site http://www.mold-help.org/content/view/411/ along with a few other things. I started taking biotin and it cleared up my flaking skin so quickly and then someone told me that was because the biotin helps with candida and the candida causes the dermatitis.

I found that taking lysine helps me to not have headaches from the biotin, although I also reduced the dosage of the biotin.

I am also taking some borax in water.

Yesterday I got some saccharomyces in the mail and I took it before bed. I suddenly felt as though I was awake for the first time in days.

I took some again this morning in between breakfast and lunch and unfortunately didn't have the same result, but my gut feels so much better.

Keep posting, @MAF14.

 

[MAF14]

I am trying the method from this site http://www.mold-help.org/content/view/411/ along with a few other things. I started taking biotin and it cleared up my flaking skin so quickly and then someone told me that was because the biotin helps with candida and the candida causes the dermatitis.

I found that taking lysine helps me to not have headaches from the biotin, although I also reduced the dosage of the biotin.

I am also taking some borax in water.

Yesterday I got some saccharomyces in the mail and I took it before bed. I suddenly felt as though I was awake for the first time in days.

I took some again this morning in between breakfast and lunch and unfortunately didn't have the same result, but my gut feels so much better.

Keep posting, @MAF14.

Due to the biotin?

 

[Violeta]

Due to the biotin?

The biotin has been helping with some symptoms, but I'm thinking the noticeable improvement in the way my gut feels is from the S. boulardi.

 

[Sugarboo]

I don't know if this will help anyone but I dicivered that taking 500mg Quercetin on an empty stomach first thing in the morning, keeps me from having a herx reaction to another kind of supplement that could cause one. For me I use it so the within the hour of taking it, I can take 1 tablespoon of APPLE CIDER VINEGAR OR Great Lakes gelatin. It also helped me tolerate NAC and quite a few others.Nothing else worked. Quercetin acts as an anti-histamine, anti-allergy and anti- inflammatory for me.

 

[thetis]

Any one use quercetin as aromatase inhibitor?

 

[heyitisjustin]

I eliminated dietary capsaicin a while back to see if it helped with chronic neck/shoulder pain while sleeping. I assumed it was intolerance (nightshade) but perhaps it was causing an increase in toxin production or inflammation?

I think peppers are linked to leaky gut (which could cause inflammation) and stomach irritation

 

[jack blogs]

By the time I started eating more carbs and resistant starch, I had already started some anti-candida herbal formulas and seen some excellent benefit from them. But, if I could do it over, I would have added the carbs in immediately, because it was quite clear that my Candida had already adapted to ketones by that stage.

So, if I had to do it all over again, here's how I would do it:

Step 1: Start the Perfect Health Diet — be sure to weigh your food for a few days to make sure you are getting the proper amount of carbs. It feels like you are eating a ridiculous amount of carbs because when you cut out sugar and refined carbs — which are extremely carb dense — you have to eat a huge volume of "safe starches" (complex carbs) in order to just get to a moderate level of carb consumption, which is crucial. So, weighing your food and entering it into a calorie counter like cronometer.com is a must when you start out. The diet is fantastic because you get to eat lots of real food. Butter, eggs, mashed potatoes, rice, etc. If you are trying to lose weight, you just avoid the extra dollops of fat (as explained at the very end of the book). Many people will see a reduction in Candida symptoms just by going on the PHD — so it's a great place to start.

Step 2: Take some form of anti-fungals or bio-film disruptors for a few weeks. Preferably something that doesn't kill your liver. (I used Byron White's A-FNG formula, which is a bio-film disruptor, through a knowledgable practitioner — and only available through approved practitioners — and I felt an immediate improvement).

Step 3: After a few weeks of anti-fungals, it's usually time to begin taking probiotics. And that's when you want to take the extra resistant starch (it's a powerful prebiotic). Why? Because by that point, you will have already been getting ~8 grams of resistant starch per day from all the "safe starches" in the Perfect Health Diet. In other words, you've already been getting more resistant starch than you've ever gotten in your life and that's probably why you're feeling so good on the Perfect Health Diet. However, taking supplemental resistant starch, on top of a diet rich in resistant starch (like the Perfect Health Diet), is usually necessary to get to the doses of resistant starch that have proven to give the greatest benefit in clinical studies over the past few decades (~35g—40g/day). The resistant starch super-foods (highly specific bulbs, corms, tubers, cattails, cactuses, and medicinal barks) aren't in our modern food supply, so supplementation is necessary unless you want to start digging up a specific breed of cattails that are safe to consume raw.

Additionally, most probiotics don't really work that well on their own. Most of the time, the probiotics die in your stomach. But, if you eat a fermented food or take a probiotic with resistant starch it latches on to the resistant starch granules and carries the beneficial bacteria safely through the stomach and small intestine, to the colon, like it's riding a bus. Anecdotally, people are finding that a good Soil Based Organism (SBO) probiotic (like Prescript Assist, Body Biotics, Primal Defense or Primal Flora) works best with resistant starch. That makes sense since resistant starches are naturally found in the soil in roots, bulbs and tubers. I used Prescript Assist in my recovery.

I think those are the basic steps for most people.

However, I have a few other recommendations because I discovered that my Candida was also linked to heavy metal contamination. And here's the simple steps that worked for me to get the heavy metals out of my brain.

Heavy Metals: Step 1: Acupuncture. This was the first thing I did even before dietary changes. And it was a huge help. Whether you believe in it or not, acupuncture has been shown to increase blood flow to the brain. Redirecting blood flow to various parts of the body is basically how it works. This can dislodge the heavy metals that are stuck in the brain. I saw tremendous reduction in brain fog and cortisol/blood sugar disregulation within minutes of having my first acupuncture session (and I was convinced it was a waste of money upon showing up for my first appointment). My recommendation is to find an acupuncturist who has a Masters level, or higher, which means at least 3,000 hours of training. Don't settle for the doctor or massage therapist who only got 300 hours of acupuncture training.

Heavy Metals: Step 2: One or two drops of 400mcg Nascent Iodine on the forearm once a day. That's a very low dose of transdermal iodine, but I rapidly noticed a reduction in brain fog. Within a few days my throat began to feel tight, as my body began to detox. But, that soon subsided after a week or two. My brain fog was noticeably reduced within an hour or two of taking Nascent Iodine transdermally. If I missed a day of transdermal Nascent Iodine, the brain fog would return with a vengeance. For some reason, taking oral Nascent Iodine or other forms of oral iodine did not work as well as a simple drop or two of Nascent Iodine on the forearm. No idea why that was. In any event, it became clear to my doctor and I that I was detoxing and seeing a significant benefit.

Heavy Metals: Step 3: A dose of Bentonite clay once or twice a week, on an empty stomach, taken with 1 Tbsp of Resistant Starch instead of the recommended psyllium husk fiber.

Heavy Metals: Step 4: By this point, hopefully you are already seeing benefit from resistant starch either from food or supplementation (when ready), as outlined in the first part of my post. Resistant Starch seems to help detoxing by keeping the colon working well and sweeping away some heavy metals through your bowels. Resistant Starch took my brain to another level as the serotonin receptors kicked in to high gear.

Heavy Metals: Step 5: If after a few weeks/months you have seen tremendous benefit from the Heavy Metals steps, outlined above, try rubbing some Magnesium Oil on your neck, forehead and your underarms before bed. If you are taking resistant starch, you will have some very vivid dreams. I wasn't able to do this step until the end since Magnesium Oil initially made my brain fog worse at the beginning of this protocol.

All of the steps above, (acupuncture, the Perfect Health Diet, transdermal Nascent Iodine, and resistant starch), seemed to work synergistically in that I was detoxing and the resistant starch was likely sweeping some toxins out of my colon. For me, I saw a huge benefit from detoxing through iodine/acupuncture and taking resistant starch through food and supplementation.

Hope that's helpful, but that's how I fixed Candida over a few months time. It was a big deal for me, because I now feel better than I've ever felt at any time in my life. I honestly didn't know it was possible to feel this good.

Wow! I wonder if this approach would suit sibo

 

[jordanevolves]

Wow! I wonder if this approach would suit sibo

I followed strict PHD for several years beginning in 2012 but continued to deal with symptoms such as abdominal pain, brain fog, and fatigue during this time, specifically when eating fermentable carbs (removing carbs from my diet entirely or almost entirely made these symptoms disappear temporarily). Experiments I did with supplemental resistant starches during this time made the symptoms much worse. A trial of Xifaxan didn't do much either way.

It was only after doing a month of herbal antimicrobials (I used GI Synergy and Lauricidin along with biofilm-buster Interfase Plus) late last year that I started to be able to eat the substantial amount of starches and sugary fruits that PHD calls for without significant negative symptoms. Although breath tests I did for SIBO were negative, symptoms were always present, which, along with the substantial benefit I've noticed from the herbals (but not the Xifaxan in isolation) has led me to believe that I had an overgrowth of hydrogen-sulfide-producing bugs. I've now added in a cocktail of probiotics (including SBOs) and a few herbal and supplemental prokinetics to enhance gut motility (I tended toward SIBO-C). After a few weeks with the probiotics I plan on slowly ramping up the resistant starch, beginning with cooked and cooled rice and potatoes.

I think going for PHD as a first step is still advisable, mainly because it'd be great to be able to avoid antimicrobials if you don't actually need them - and even if you do, you may notice substantial benefit from the change in diet alone, as Ripley mentions above. Overall, I think PHD is close to an ideal dietary template for those that can tolerate it. That said, I wish I had started the herbal protocol sooner, because that's what seems to have covered the most ground for me.

 

[me/cfs 27931]

Any one use quercetin as aromatase inhibitor?

My doctor recommended quercetin. It's had no noticeable effect.

 

[Foggydog]

cocktail of probiotics (including SBOs) and a few herbal and supplemental prokinetics to enhance gut motility

Can you share what these were ? I strongly believe I'm SIBO-C. I also had a negative breath test.
Thanks

 

[vaer]

Can you share what these were ?
Thanks

herbal/ natural prokinetics :

iberogast [mixture of many different herbs, this is more like what they call a digestive 'bitter']

Motil pro [ a mix of B6, ALC, 5HTP etc..)

Ginger


Pharmaceutical/ prescription based:

for example...
low-dose naltrexone [LDN - i'm pretty sure we have a big thread]

 

[ChrisD]

I've been on the ketogenic diet for almost a year now as I have had many benefits from it in terms of stamina and energy, but one nuisance thing is persistent dandruff on my scalp that can become painful when eating certain fibres like psyllium, coconut, flaxseed etc. Recently I have had an itchy patch on my genitalia and have read that all of this could be Candida so I am looking into a treatment protocol.
I already have Olive leaf, Oregano oil, Zeolite, digestive enzymes so I will start using these and hopefully find out what else could be useful for breaking biofilms - hopefully this helps my ME a bit.

 

[Wayne]

so I am looking into a treatment protocol.

Hi @ChrisD,

You may want to look into iodine. Here's quite a remarkable account that explains my thinking...

Dr Orian Truss
In 1953 Dr Orian Truss discovered the devastating effects of antibiotics in an Alabama (USA) hospital. During a hospital round Truss was intrigued by a gaunt, apparently elderly man who was obviously dying. However, he was only in his forties and in hospital for four months. No specialist had been able to make a diagnosis. Out of curiosity Truss asked the patient when be was last completely well.

The man answered that he was well until six months before when he had cut his finger He had received antibiotics for this. Shortly afterwards he developed diarrhoea and his health deteriorated. Truss had seen before how antibiotics cause diarrhoea. It was known that Candida was opportunistic and thrived in debilitated patients, but now Truss wondered if it might not be the other way round, that Candida actually caused the debilitated condition.

He had read that potassium iodide solution could be used to treat Candida infestation of the blood. So he put the patient on six to eight drops of Lugol's solution four times a day and soon the patient was again completely well.

Soon afterwards he had a female patient with a stuffy nose, a throbbing headache, vaginitis and severe depression. To his amazement all her problems immediately cleared with Candida treatment. Some time later he saw a female patient who had been schizophrenic for six years with hundreds of electroshock treatments and massive drug dosages. He started treating the woman for sinus allergies with a Candida vaccine. Soon she had recovered mentally and physically, and remained well.

From then on he treated his patients against Candida at the slightest indication of its presence. Many of his patients made remarkable recoveries from most unusual conditions including menstrual problems, hyperactivity, learning disabilities, autism, multiple sclerosis and auto-immune diseases such as Crohn's disease and lupus erythematosus.

Every experienced naturopath can relate similar success stories. Ironically, antibiotics are usually not necessary in the first place. In a few per cent of the cases in which they are necessary their serious after effects could easily be avoided using fungicides and lactobacilli.

Many people doubt the effectiveness of natural therapies against apparently serious infections, but my experience leads me to believe that frequently natural therapies are more effective, without causing the repeated and chronic infections seen after antibiotics. I have seen patients who have been unsuccessful on long-term antibiotic treatment recover within days or weeks with natural therapies.​

 

[Carl]

Quorum Sensing Inhibitors are very helpful when dealing with biofilms. Taken before the enzymes they can significantly reduce the micro-organisms ability to send chemical messages to re-enforce the biofilm when you are disassembling the biofilm with enzymes. This gives the enzymes more chance of eliminating the biofilm.

Until I used these I did not successfully eliminate the biofilms that I am attempting to destroy.

There are two commercial QSI called BFB 1 and BFB 2 so look at those for ideas. The only trouble with these is that they do not appear to be organic essential oils and they are recommended for external usage only. Not really all that helpful if the biofilm is internal. Applying the oils to the skin is meant to influence other parts of the body but I doubt it will be enough.

EDTA, a small amount is contained in Interfase+ but not really enough. Making some EDTA capsules might be helpful but do not use large quantities above 1.5-2g. I did read that EDTA can affect blood cell membranes but I have been unable to find that reference since.

Biofilm inhibition by Cymbopogon citratus and Syzygium aromaticum essential oils in the strains of Candida albicans
Full paper
BTW Clove is part of the BFB essential oils and I have had success using this for bacterial biofilms even though the type I have is not identical.
Essential Oils and Antifungal Activity - this looks pretty decent. It does also show additional effects such as anti-biofilm, cell membrane effects etc. It does not list Lemon grass as being antifungal but other research does.
Antifungal activity of the lemongrass oil and citral against Candida spp.
Also try and find Efflux Pump Inhibitors which work for the efflux pumps of candida because that will make anti fungals more effective.

There are also natural substances which can alter the cell wall permeability of bacteria and yeast/fungi which can help get more antimicrobials into the cells. Some are mentioned in that 2nd article but there are many more. I know of some but I am looking at destroying bacteria and the substances I have notes on might not be active against candida.

BTW if anything causes stomach discomfort then continue, do not stop what you are doing because it is having positive effect against stomach biofilms which should not be there. You do need to combine something to destroy the micro-organisms and that is the difficult part, finding something which is effective.

 

[ahmo]

After a number of rounds of cleansing regimes, my last one was using pine oil (turpentine). I found it very easy, no switching between different substances to prevent resistance. A couple references here:

https://www.docdroid.net/urKBc1k/the-candida-cleaner.pdf.html Daniels turps protocol pdf

 

[leokitten]

I've been on the ketogenic diet for almost a year now as I have had many benefits from it in terms of stamina and energy, but one nuisance thing is persistent dandruff on my scalp that can become painful when eating certain fibres like psyllium, coconut, flaxseed etc. Recently I have had an itchy patch on my genitalia and have read that all of this could be Candida so I am looking into a treatment protocol.
I already have Olive leaf, Oregano oil, Zeolite, digestive enzymes so I will start using these and hopefully find out what else could be useful for breaking biofilms - hopefully this helps my ME a bit.

Florastor (S. boulardii is excellent at suppressing Candida in the gut)

 

[nsdn]

Try Cistus Incanus for biofilm.

 

[stetson28]

Try Cistus Incanus for biofilm.

Do you have a source and dosage suggestion for cistus incanus? Thanks