Category Archives: Yeast Infection Diagnosis

Female Yeast Infection Diagnosis, Vaginal Yeast Infections, Yeast Infections and Women

Vaginal Yeast Infection Cure: Stage 1 – Antifungal and Antibacterial Douching

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The purpose of this first phase of the process is to reduce Inflammation and wipe out bacteria and yeast infections. You should give yourself about 30 minutes for this initial phase.

The Main Benefit of the Antifungal and Antibacterial Douche

The Manuka honey and fresh garlic treatment can give significant relief from the itching and burning of vaginal yeast infections. Manuka honey is native only to New Zealand, but is available in America and Canada, as well as many other countries and is the only true medicinal honey. This amazing honey reduces inflammation, wipes out bacteria and with the addition of garlic even yeast infections. Manuka honey heals cuts, burns and is now even being used in hospitals in various parts of the world.

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What You Need for the Douche

One to two tablespoons of New Zealand manuka honey, preferably with a high UMF rating. (Read below about UMF). For best results, add one or two finely chopped cloves of fresh garlic to the honey.

How to Complete the Douche

Warm the honey gently in a cup, jar or bowl suspended in hot water; this takes only a few minutes. For quick relief, I recommend that you try manuka honey and insert it vaginally, after warming it a little. After gently warming it, insert the manuka honey and garlic and let it sit on the skin in and around the vagina and pubic area for as long as possible. Lie down and relax for 20 minutes or if this is not possible, wear a sanitary napkin. After 30 minutes or longer (longer is better) have a warm douche with apple cider vinegar – (see Stage 2)

Why Manuka Honey?

Manuka honey comes from the white flower of the New Zealand tea tree oil tree named Manuka (Leptospermum scoparium). Manuka honey has been shown clinically to be strongly anti-inflammatory in addition to being anti-bacterial and anti-fungal by nature.

Some scientists and leading medical experts have rated manuka honey as one of the best skin healers because it heals without harming even the most delicate skin of your body, including your vagina. Many studies have shown that manuka honey not only kills bacteria but that it is great for yeast infections and any inflamed skin in general. What about the sugar, won’t it feed the candida yeast infection? No, it won’t, it will only do this if you eat the honey and let it pass through the digestive tract.

Where do you get Manuka honey from? You can buy it readily online at Amazon or in the whole foods section of your health food store.

What type of manuka honey should you get? You should get the one with the highest UMF® rating (Unique Manuka Factor) you can afford, which is essentially this unique honey’s non-peroxide antibacterial/anti-fungal activity level, the higher the UMF level, the more antibacterial and anti-inflammatory the honey is. A manuka honey with a 15 – 16 UMF rating is very good, but one with a 30+ rating is superb. The higher the UMF number the better and the higher grades are priced accordingly and may be harder to get.

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Yeast Infection Diagnosis, Yeast Infection Treatment

Understanding the Candida Crusher Symptom Tracker

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beauty woman faceAfter treating countless patients with yeast infections over the years, I found it pointless to ask them how they feel a week or two after treatment because I know what most are going to say. Doctor, I’m not feeling much better!

Chronic candida patients generally have been feeling bad for several months or even several years, and most will tell me at their initial follow-up visit “Eric, I don’t feel much better, in fact I feel even worse”.

People don’t generally recover in a linear fashion from bad to good, there are lots of ups and downs along the way. And, every candida patient I have seen has a different expectation of a recovery.

It is really handy to always test and measure the effectiveness of your treatment, just like it is when you plan anything in your life- whether it be an extension you are building on your house or an overseas holiday. Start by writing it down and planning it; the preparation and timing are most important.

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If you get things right and plan your course carefully, you will be able to track your rate of progress and make adjustments along the way to keep you right on target.

What is the point in recommending a treatment, and then having no system in place to measure the patient’s response with? What are the mini and major milestones a patient is making along the path to recovery?

If you are going off track it will be easier to get back on track if you have some method to help you guide the way. When you start to treat candida, you need to see what symptoms get better and which ones get worse. This will naturally allow you to understand which direction you are heading and will allow you to fine tune your treatment and get those positive results you are looking for faster.

I have found that some practitioners are just happy to adopt a “let’s just treat the patient and see what happens” approach. This is fine, but you may or may not get the results you are looking for. But by initiating a treatment and then tracking the patient’s responses over the course of several weeks, months or even years, you will really understand what is going on; and so will the patient. Their confidence will grow in their treatment program as they can actually see what is going on. This will increase compliance and keep somebody on track longer, rather than relying on a hit and miss approach. I have found the Candida Symptom Tracker to be an excellent motivational tool, and nothing is more important for patients to understand, experience, and witness for themselves that their symptoms are actually improving.

If you want to measure you progress and fine-tune your prescriptions and optimize your treatment program, then you will want to adopt some sort of system whereby you can measure and track your progress, and also your lack of it. And that is where my Candida Symptom Tracker comes in handy.

List you major symptoms on the left-hand side of the sheet. Now, enter a score in column A, ranging from 0 – 3. This is how the grading works:

  • 0 – No problem, you don’t experience any problems here.
  • 1 – Mild problem, something you may experience once or twice a week and is reasonably under control.
  • 2 – Moderate problem, it annoys you but is tolerable and you experience it several times a week or maybe even daily.
  • 3 – Major problem. This is really annoying you and you want it gone fast. Chances are the reason you bought the Candida Crusher book was to learn how to get rid of one or several grade 3 symptoms. This could be vaginal thrush, debilitating fatigue or it could be an itch or a terrible stomach pain and indigestion.

Just print the Candida Symptom Tracker and use it accordingly. This sheet has the common symptoms down the left column, and down the bottom there is a space for your own particular symptoms. At the top of each column, you enter the date and at the bottom leave a row empty so that you can add the scores up for that particular day to see how you are going. Scores increasing mean no improvement, scores decreasing mean improvement, simple.

Some patients also like to keep a food diary and others like to correlate a particularly high (or low) score with an event like going to a wedding (where they consumed cake, alcohol, etc.) that caused an aggravation. Here you can add special short notes like “menstrual cycle started” or “started to take probiotics” or “got a cold”, “my teen crashed my car”, “argument with husband”, etc.

These are the factors that influence the total scores and can give you a good indication of what influences the way you feel and how you have responded to treatment or lifestyle.

Keep the Candida Symptom Tracker on your refrigerator under a magnet so that it is always handy and learn to fill in the sheet for convenience sake at about the same time each week, fortnight or whenever you complete the test.

I cannot emphasize the importance of tracking your symptoms on the Candida Crusher Program; it is one of the most important aspects of your recovery. By tracking your treatment including any dietary and lifestyle changes you have made, you will be able to accurately judge the impact of your treatment on your individual symptoms by looking at the scoring as time goes by. If you are on track, you should notice that the grade 3 symptoms will eventually become 2, and then finally a grade 1 as the weeks roll by and turn to months.

This will tell you that as the candida yeast numbers decline, major symptoms are improving and will eventually turn to minor symptoms. Your self-confidence and compliance to the program will increase a lot which will help you improve even quicker.

On the other hand, the Candida Symptom Tracker is also a handy tool to let you know if things aren’t working out the way you had hoped for. If your scores are not declining, then this could well be an alarm signal that either your health problems are not candida related, or you are not committing adequately to the program or the treatments and/or products you are using are inadequate. You have invested your time and money into wanting to conquer yeast, and this is one powerful way to track your results.

I would like to mention again, at the risk of repeating myself, that you should not be expecting a miracle cure within a few months of starting the program if your condition is quite severe or of a very long duration. Your scores may even go from 1 or 2 to a 3 with some symptoms as you could aggravate initially with treatment, especially if die-off occurs and maybe with a detoxification you undertake as well.

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So remember, in an ideal world your symptoms are bad and getting better. In the real world however, your symptoms may initially go from bad to worse before they improve. I just thought I’d remind you again. There is nothing wrong with repeating myself. I just want you to understand this crucial point because at some stage you may become disappointed or disillusioned if your yeast infection is chronic.

I can remember on more than one occasion telling a candida patient to hang in there and that the light at the end of the tunnel does not necessarily signify the head lamp of an oncoming train, but rather a glimmer of light in the distance that will signify hope of an eventual full recovery! When you do recover, and eventually you should, you will have learned a few skills along the way, and one of them is not to give up that easily on yourself. This will hold you in good measure in the years ahead as you age and face and no doubt will then face plenty more health challenges to come.

Yeast Infection Diagnosis, Yeast Infection Testing

Your Candida Results, Beneficial Bacteria, and Microscopic Yeast

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The other thing I look for in a CDSA test is the actual level of other bad bacteria in the sample and in particular the level of beneficial bacteria. Is there a 1, 2 or a 3+ of good and/or bad? You may be concerned for example if you have a positive result with candida after a stool analysis, but have failed to look at the amount of beneficial bacteria, only to discover that you have a 3+ Lactobacillus acidophilus level. You should be concerned if there is NG (nil growth) in terms of Lactobacillus acidophilus, and some of the chronic cases this is exactly what I have found, yeast in all three stool samples and NG in terms of the lactobacillus species.

I want you to remember that it is not always about killing candida; it is about restoring digestive harmony, and by assessing your level of the good and bad bacteria as well as yeast you will be in a powerful position to restore this harmony. No other pathological or functional test can give you this incredible level of information, now you can see why I believe this to be the best test you can do if you are serious about getting rid of your yeast infection permanently.

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Microscopic Yeast in Stool Samples

A CDSA will reveal whether yeast will be in the stool samle or not, and microscopy will be most helpful in finding if fungi like candida are present. Yeast is commonly found in very tiny amounts in a healthy intestinal tract, and while small quantities which are reported as “none or rare” may be normal, any yeast observed in higher amounts, “few, moderate, or many” is considered abnormal.

In a healthy individual, any candida overgrowth will be prohibited by beneficial flora, the intestinal immune defence (secretory IgA) as well as intestinal pH.

Acids like lactic acid are produced by lactobacillus species which lower the pH and thereby create an environment which is unsuitable for yeast to thrive in, a good reason to have a 2 or a 3+ of beneficial lactobacillus in your stool counts. It is most beneficial to have excellent numbers of lactobacillus, because they also produce natural antibiotics themselves like hydrogen peroxide, acidolin and lactobacillin.

A significant and much over looked problem with culturing yeast from a stool sample is that they are colony forming agents and are therefore not evenly dispersed throughout the stool sample, so even though yeast may well be found microscopically, it may not necessarily be cultured successfully even when collected from the patient’s same bowel motion.

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Yeast Infection Causes, Yeast Infection Diagnosis

How Does Candida Impact the Immune System?

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Once in the bloodstream, candida acts as a typical allergen and is capable of creating typical various types of allergic reactions. There is no doubt, candida and allergies are commonly found together, and this is one of the major ways in which candida can cause many of the potential health complaints.

Not everybody with candida has an allergy, though most candida patients I have seen have food and environmental allergies or sensitivities to some degree. You will often see food allergy test (ELISA blood test) results in candida patients revealing an allergy to one or even several foods. Allergic sensitivities to molds and fungi often develop in those with candida overgrowth in their intestines, and for this reason, some have reactions in damp or moldy environments.

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Due to this, a response to liquor is most likely the outcome of equally a candida infestation as well as an allergic reaction towards the yeasts used to ferment the liquor, specifically if wines, beers, and ciders are being consumed. Alcohol is the most important thing to eliminate first from your diet, and it proves for most yeast sufferers also to be the most difficult. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again a few more times before you are through reading this book. Many people with candida have a strong desire for it, but alcohol must go.

Yeasty foods like breads need to be stopped for a while and sweet treats like chocolate and candies need to be stopped as well. These types of food products stimulate yeast expansion which in turn will trigger immune dysfunction.

Do you react strongly to alcohol? Then candida alone is often the main culprit, especially if your skin or digestive system flares up within a day. This problem is often compounded by the other sugary and fermented foods you consume, such as breads, cheeses, yoghurts, commercial (cheap) vinegars, and moldy foods like mushrooms, dried fruits and melons.

Most people know that drinking too much alcohol causes a hangover. But what about the many patients I have seen whom only drink small to moderate amounts and experience reactions the following day out of proportion to how much alcohol they consumed the prior day? In case you are getting progressively reactive to liquor, then simply you should consider going through the Candida Crusher Program.

You will see with the candida diet later on that it is not a good idea to eat left-over foods from your refrigerator the next day for the same reason I mentioned above, molds and spores can proliferate on these foods overnight in your refrigerator.

In my observation, the typical candida patient has multiple allergies and they can in addition also develop multiple chemical sensitivities as well as inhalant allergies. These allergies and sensitivities improve dramatically and eventually disappear as the yeast and sugar-containing foods and drinks are withdrawn. The candida population is reduced and balance is once again restored to the digestive system in particular. When the small intestine is healed, their immune system is healed as well and a person’s sensitivity to many substances drops.

Another common occurrence of elevated antibodies findings is with a stool test (CDSAx3), and I regularly find a reduction or an elevation of sIgA, (an antibody commonly found in the mucosa and digestive system) that also signifies an elevated immune reaction probably exposing an underlying sensitivity or allergy. Many patients with chronic digestive problems who have had a stool or blood test performed will often have increased antibody markers as part of their test results, more so the blood based tests though than with the stool tests.

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The good news is that a lot of your food sensitivities may go away as you cure your Candida overgrowth. As you go through the plan, you’ll be able to determine which cause reactions and which were just victims of your condition. You’ll soon be eating a healthier, immune-supporting diet you can trust.