Re: Candida

I've written about research papers that discuss SIBO and fungal candida. Universities such as Aberdeen and Montana State have a dedicated fungal groups. There are almost 60,000 research papers on candida listed at PubMed. Being a researcher doesn't mean they've seen everything or know everything. If SIBO is their area of specialty, then candida isn't.

Finding any pathogen in the body can be difficult, even when you're looking for it. If you're looking in the gut, you miss the rest of the body. How you test for microbes is another factor. Some 95-99% of them won't survive outside the gut.

Candida is microscopic and most the pictures posted on Curezone are not candida.

Candida can cause, maintain, or contribute to many, many conditions. It can play a role in creating a problem, but then that problem takes on a life of its own. After that, candida may have little to do with it. Diabetes is a good example of this, as well as neurological conditions and others.

Numbers are a factor. Only when it shows above a certain count do you consider a factor in most testing. Those numbers however, are very misleading. Typical testing is only looking at the yeast form of candida, not the beneficial form.

Science is not as a scientific as we tend to think it is, or hope that it would be.

If antifungals are effective, then you can consider that as a positive test for fungus. If an antifungal diet helps, you can consider that as another positive test. If SIBO is present and there is a past history of antibiotic use, you can consider those as positive signs.

You have listed his symptoms, past health history, etc, so its difficult to say more about him.

Consider what two former Editors-in-Chief of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association have said about research:

Marcia Angell, MD

...Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine .

- The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion) [in 2002]... Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.

Catherine Deangelis, MD

- Sadly, the reality is that today far too many physicians have violated or ignored the true meaning of the Hippocratic oath. Specifically, many, if not most, physicians practicing today have, or have had, conflicts of interest that clearly do not result in their patients’ best interest.

- What about academic physicians who do research or write practice guidelines or review papers funded by Big Pharma? Here the association between research sponsorship by pharmaceutical and medical device companies and pro-industry conclusions is clear. Most Americans are surprised to learn that the clinical research funded by Big Pharma dwarfs the annual investment by the National Institutes of Health. Moreover, much of this industry-sponsored research is tainted by bias that is not always clearly stated.

- As I discovered by doing a search of PubMed while I was editor-in-chief of JAMA, since the late 1980s the number of articles in the medical and population health literature on conflicts of interest has risen substantially. From 1975 to about 1990, there were no or very few such articles cited in PubMed. But by 2007, the number had risen to 600 and has remained at that level every year since. Not surprisingly, this rise in number corresponds all too neatly to a period when many pharmaceutical companies merged their scientific and marketing divisions. Tweet