Do I have candida or something else?

A few years ago I had persistent diarrhea that a couple doctors spent 6 months trying to diagnose without success. I had stool and blood tests, a colonoscopy (that showed inflammation), some fancier machine test (I think an ultra sound), and even a DNA test. One of the docs suggested probiotics. I took them without improving. Finally, because I also experience various skin rashes and had a flare up, I was given Sporanox. Lo and behold, as soon as I took the Sporanox, my diarrhea went away too. My docs were mystified.

My inference was that the source of my diarrhea was the same as the source of my skin rash, and while my biology isn't that great, I think that source is some kind of bacteria imbalance and/or fungus inside me. Further, since my diarrhea started shortly after I took a regime of strong antibiotics, I deduced that the antibiotics had probably kicked off the imbalance, which once started my high carb diet wasn't able to re-balance. However, since a short regime of Sporanox (a week or two) solved the problem, I stopped worrying about it.

Fast forward to now, some years later, and I'm once again dealing with persistent diarrhea. Remembering that Sporanox worked the previous time, I took it again. This time it didn't work. Maybe it didn't because I didn't take a large enough dose for long enough. Since I forgot the dosage I took the first time and am leery of self-prescribing medicines, I only took a low dose for a week. However, soon thereafter I got sick with two other ailments, almost back to back, that each required antibiotics, so I just resigned myself to living with the diarrhea until I was off the antibiotics. As for my skin rashes (that I've had off and on since I was a kid) I just use some anti-fungal cream, and for the most part that works.

Now though I'm wanting to focus on the diarrhea, and not only because it's an inconvenience. It can't be good for my overall health to have persistent diarrhea. Unfortunately, I'm in a public health system where the front line doctors aren't very good at dealing with difficult to diagnose ailments and have to follow the system's logic tree even if they are. Thus, my doctor said that the first step has to be a stool test checking for parasites and I guess other normal problems. I knew this would be a waste, and it was, since my stool test came out fine. What I didn't expect was to have a substitute doctor tell me that the results were fine, only to smile and say that we don't have to worry about that anymore. Actually, we do have to worry about it, since I still have the problem, and the whole point of the first test was simply to rule out the most common causes of diarrhea. The substitute doctor didn't seem to understand this, and I wasn't sure it was worth it to try to make her understand. If we follow this diagnostic logical tree, which I've climbed before, we're probably looking at spending a year or longer (it's a slow public system)repeating a bunch of tests that I went through the last time and didn't help.

Right now I've started trying Nystatin, which Google suggests is probably the first medicine to try for intestinal candida, and isn't particularly dangerous. I also read that trying Nystatin is a good way to diagnose intestinal candida, since if I improve with the medicine I can assume that this is the correct diagnosis. However, I wonder if I may actually have systemic candida, given how long I've dealt with both diarrhea and skin rashes, as well as the success I once had with Sporanox. Meanwhile, I wonder if I may not even have candida. Many other possible diagnoses were ruled out a few years ago, but not all of them, and my understanding is that candida itself is just one common version of a spectrum of similar ailments.

To round this out, I should add that I'm mildly diabetic, meaning that I just take pills (no insulin) and my blood sugar tests are usually fine. However, my blood sugar was veering a bit high prior to my first bout of persistent diarrhea and it's once again testing a tad high (most recently an A1C of 7.1). I wonder if my diabetes is related to my candida, if candida is what I have.

Any advice on how to nail down a diagnosis? I think I probably have candida or something similar, but I'm uncomfortable experimenting with treatments without being sure what ailment I'm trying to treat. Tweet