Kirsty is a young female student, age 19, who came to our clinic about two years ago complaining of chronic fatigue. She was absolutely exhausted and found it hard to concentrate at university. Kirsty was falling asleep during her afternoon lectures and was becoming increasing anxious at her inability to concentrate. Her main complaints were foggy thinking, anxiety and depression, occasional thrush, intermittent pains in her tummy, nausea, and small whitish spots on her body.

Her mother had been a patient of our practice for some time and referred Kirsty to me. When I questioned her about her daughter’s diet and lifestyle, she said that she was tired of receiving phone calls from her daughter several times a week complaining about her health. One of the most notable points was that she told me Kirsty liked to have a drink on Friday and Saturday nights, which was of concern to her.

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I have occasionally found it invaluable before the consultation to (discretely) make enquiries about a patient through their relatives, especially regarding younger patients and alcohol. You can learn a lot about the patient’s case history this way, and may miss something the patient may be not willing to tell you – the practitioner.

Kirsty finally came to my clinic and showed me her arms. I immediately identified a fungal skin complaint I have commonly seen on the arms, legs and torso of many chronic candida patients over the years.

I knew this was another chronic candida sufferer. Her doctor ran all the tests and found nothing wrong, including a skin scraping which was sent to the pathology lab and later deemed “inconclusive.” I have even seen similar skin rashes diagnosed by some doctors as psoriasis, eczema, and vitiligo, when in fact it was a fungal skin rash.
How can I be so sure? My experience after carefully noting hundreds of cases is that skin conditions such as psoriasis, eczema and vitiligo may temporarily improve but do not disappear when you don’t treat for candida.

Kirsty loved white wine, but also bread and two-minute noodles.We had several consultations, and I had to really convince her that alcohol just had to go. She was so sick and tired of feeling sick and tired that in the end she complied. This was Kirsty’s tipping point, but Kirsty’s case proved to be quite difficult indeed and took almost one year to come right.

The problem here was that Kirsty is an extreme person, and after I told her to go “real easy” with treatment initially, she disregarded my advice and tripled the dosage of all the supplements as well as going rather extreme with the diet. She avoided just about everything except for meat proteins, green leafy vegetables and brown rice. The result? She felt totally awesome for the first seven days, but then felt absolutely terrible. This is due to the Herxheimer reaction, which I’ll discuss later on.

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The good news is that Kirsty did recover – and you can, too. My point today is two-fold. Kirsty’s case shows us that a) it’s not good to be too extreme with your treatment plan and b) alcohol is a huge contributing factor that absolutely has to go. Trust me on this one.