Re: Candida: Got sick and tired of it, decided to nuke it all-out with meds for a month (ketaconazole tabs + nystatin tabs + natamycin tabs + terbinafine tabs) and weather the sidefx. Curious about what I'm feeling though.

Well, I'm not turning yellow, my urine looks quite normal, and the liver's really just feeling it, not screaming pain at me or swelling up all over the place... Plus, it seems to be growing accustomed to it. Or maybe it just wasn't a good idea to start this treatment on the last days of a week of fasting, and now that I'm eating again, it's easier on me...

As to why stack, instead of alternating, or even just living the perfect anti-candida lifestyle alone? The real problem with candida isn't that it's so incurable, it's simply that it is too damned resilient - even the most disciplined human mind cannot wait it out in a war of attrition. Sure, 2-3 years of perfect diet, no bad habits, ideal vitamins, a couple of herbs, absolutely NO stress, and massive probiotics probably WILL heal you completely. But, other than at a monastery, I really don't see how that is humanly possible... Some dumb slip up, a bad choice of groceries, or just random life stress will knock you right back to square one. Every single time.

Also, it's not the pharms as much as the one pharm, ketaconazole, that worries me. It's the only one really associated with liver problems in people without hep or cirrhosis, and it's being phased out by the medical community for that very reason. However, its replacements, fluconazole and itraconazole (can't score the others here) aren't exactly great. Fluconazole is prohibitively expensive, highly ineffective, and judging by the amount of advertising it gets on TV and how much of it the female population consumes, it is a safe bet that the majority of candida in my country are highly resistant to it by now. As to itraconazole, took that for several weeks a while back. In average recommended dosages, it does little to nothing, and high dosages turn you into a paranoid depressive, with some positive effects, but nowhere near enough before you quit to avoid going batshit crazy. Might alternate in a week of itraconazole between bottles of ketaconazole, to ease up on the liver, but my mind wouldn't take much more than that! Also, the simple fact that no pharmaceutical company here sells an itraconazole one-high-dose "magic bullet" pill for vaginal yeast suggests that it is even weaker than fluconazole. Tweet