One of the things that bothers me most about medicine today is the willingness people seem to have to treat their symptoms rather than the root causes of their conditions. It happens with just about any condition, but it definitely happens very frequently when it comes to Candida – especially since Candida can manifest itself in so many different ways.

In 1965, a pioneering doctor named Jack Geiger helped to start America’s first health centers in the Mississippi Delta and in Boston for the lower income population. Dr. Geiger treated many children who were ill and so malnourished that his prescriptions were not for pharmaceutical drugs, but “prescriptions” for basic healthy foods like meat, fruit and vegetables. These prescriptions were funded by his community center pharmacy budget, and once word got out to Washington, a government official was sent to reprimand Geiger for his “reckless spending.” The point was made to Geiger that his pharmacy’s budget was for “medical purposes” only and was not intended to cover foods. Geiger’s reply was simple: “The last time I checked my textbooks the specific therapy for malnutrition was in fact … food.”

The point here is that even in 1965, American government health officials did not recognize nutrition as having much bearing on human health. Having a poor and impoverished diet was not seen to be a contributing or causative factor in poor health and disease, and the sad fact is that even today there are doctors and governments who still believe that nutrition plays little role in human health, and that ill health in people can be attributed to some kind of “deficiency of a pharmaceutical drug.”
The interesting thing I find with conventional medicine is that it has developed an elaborate system cloaked in science aimed at treating the patient over a prolonged period of time, for the same complaint, and in cases like yeast infection – without much expectation of any complete resolution, for years on end, even decades. It reeks of profits for big pharma to me; there is no profit in health, only in ill health.

There is no doubt about it, Western medicine has given us many fantastic advances, but are medical doctors really looking for the actual causes of our illness or merely addressing the symptoms with potentially toxic drugs?

Like many different types of infections, yeast infections can lead to a host of chronic diseases. If you think about it for one minute, did you wake up one morning and have irritable bowel disease, ulcerative colitis, arthritis, psoriasis, heart disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome or any one of a number of other chronic health issues? Chronic problems most always have their origin in small beginnings, like a small infection. A house that needs demolition from rot starts with the tiniest amount of rot, but it remains hidden and undetected for years, sometimes decades until one day it was exposed and then it was too late, demolition was called for. This is just like cancer – no symptoms or pain for years, yet the same contributing underlying factors which are often hidden and then one day, “OMG, I’ve got cancer.”

We’ll continue to explore the thought process behind treating symptoms vs. cures and I hope I’ll be able to help you open your eyes so that you can at least ask your doctor the right questions – moving away from unnecessary medications and procedures to the ones you really need most.