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Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

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Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#21

Post by theshrike79 »

vasco wrote: post #14
jim-jim-jim wrote: post #8

I've been looking for relief from abdominal pain, bloating, poorly formed movements, and breathing problems for well over a year now. It started right after a round of antibiotics, which strikes me as a very clear cause-and-effect situation involving some sort of microbial imbalance. I don't think restrictive diets are a great idea, because I want to stay healthy otherwise and ultimately restore that balance, but cur…

You need to prove your knowledge to doctors contextually, and even then it's much easier if they are not actively giving you a consultation. Doctors don't respond well to randomly dropping theories on them. If you respond to something by dropping an inappropriate paper for the illness or ask about rare issues when common ones would fit they'll stop listening. Most of the people a doctor gets either almost can't read…

I actually had a discussion about this with a very experienced gastroenterologist.

They said that doctors love data. Don't come at them with theories or papers. Give them a food diary + symptoms, it helps a LOT more than "I think I have X".

Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#22

Post by itronitron »

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #8

I've been looking for relief from abdominal pain, bloating, poorly formed movements, and breathing problems for well over a year now. It started right after a round of antibiotics, which strikes me as a very clear cause-and-effect situation involving some sort of microbial imbalance. I don't think restrictive diets are a great idea, because I want to stay healthy otherwise and ultimately restore that balance, but cur…

You can get a blood test for indicators of celiac and gluten sensitivity, among other things.

Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#23

Post by theshrike79 »

Theodores wrote: post #18
jim-jim-jim wrote: post #8

I've been looking for relief from abdominal pain, bloating, poorly formed movements, and breathing problems for well over a year now. It started right after a round of antibiotics, which strikes me as a very clear cause-and-effect situation involving some sort of microbial imbalance. I don't think restrictive diets are a great idea, because I want to stay healthy otherwise and ultimately restore that balance, but cur…

I am not sure what to make about the increasing amount of people with a real or an imagined gluten intolerance. By imagined, I mean someone that has a generally unhealthy diet, for them to not see the doctor, but decide for themselves that wheat is the enemy, rather than the garbage they have in their sandwich, in their burger or on their pizza. Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded o…

> Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded on it. This bad name is coming along at a time when most of what most people eat is 'processed food' rather than 'real food'.

There's bread and then there is Bread. I can't tolerate "industrial" bread, the kind that stays soft and tender and doesn't get mouldy. It's something to do with the leavening agents they use (yeast or something other).

Basic Scandinavian Rye bread[0] works. Same with the COVID-popularised sourdough. Oat breads are good too.

But if I eat any of the delicious super-soft wheat breads or toasts... Whooo boy, I blow up like a balloon. Don't have celiacs, gluten intolerance or anything like that. For some reason my gut flora can't take some cereals.

There are some anecdotal stories of Americans coming to Europe and suddenly being able to eat bread with no symptoms.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruisleipä

Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#24

Post by davzie »

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #8

I've been looking for relief from abdominal pain, bloating, poorly formed movements, and breathing problems for well over a year now. It started right after a round of antibiotics, which strikes me as a very clear cause-and-effect situation involving some sort of microbial imbalance. I don't think restrictive diets are a great idea, because I want to stay healthy otherwise and ultimately restore that balance, but cur…

I also went through this for 6 years.

A guy on YouTube will help called Pain Free You. Recent studies suggest bad bacteria can continue to flourish if we are chronically stressed (which symptoms like this easily cause). Huge correlation between stress and flare ups for me.

In the short term whilst you work on the mind-body aspect, I recommend taking Digestive Enzymes with each meal along with a Betain HCL + Pepsin supplement. These are the only supplements that removed my symptoms (and trust me I’ve tried them all). They work by ensuring you have the right level of stomach acid to properly digest food, proteins, carbs and fats so that by the time it hits your digestive tract, there’s less undigested FODMAPs for the bacteria to feed off of.

There IS a light at the end of the tunnel.

Happy to chat about this and what I use since I know this can be hard to go through davzie at davzie dot com.

Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#25

Post by jim-jim-jim »

dcx wrote: post #17
jim-jim-jim wrote: post #8

I've been looking for relief from abdominal pain, bloating, poorly formed movements, and breathing problems for well over a year now. It started right after a round of antibiotics, which strikes me as a very clear cause-and-effect situation involving some sort of microbial imbalance. I don't think restrictive diets are a great idea, because I want to stay healthy otherwise and ultimately restore that balance, but cur…

Speaking as someone who went through this, running experiments with your diet is absolutely worth trying. It worked for me. There is actually a specific medical practice for this: look up "FODMAP". The idea is to temporarily cut out all likely suspects for a short period, see if that fixes things, and then gradually reintroduce them to identify the culprit. A gastroenterologist recommended this to me. It didn't help…

Sorry, I didn't want to turn my original post into an essay, but I've already done low FODMAP and various other restricted diets for diagnostic purposes, without any noticeable shift in symptoms. Only bread and sugar seem to be correlated, and not strongly. To me it's a curious symptom rather than the root of the issue.

Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#26

Post by jim-jim-jim »

Theodores wrote: post #18
jim-jim-jim wrote: post #8

I've been looking for relief from abdominal pain, bloating, poorly formed movements, and breathing problems for well over a year now. It started right after a round of antibiotics, which strikes me as a very clear cause-and-effect situation involving some sort of microbial imbalance. I don't think restrictive diets are a great idea, because I want to stay healthy otherwise and ultimately restore that balance, but cur…

I am not sure what to make about the increasing amount of people with a real or an imagined gluten intolerance. By imagined, I mean someone that has a generally unhealthy diet, for them to not see the doctor, but decide for themselves that wheat is the enemy, rather than the garbage they have in their sandwich, in their burger or on their pizza. Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded o…

This is good general advice, but for as long as I've been an independent adult, I've cooked three fresh meals a day. Even with breakfast I usually do fish and rice instead of something quicker and easier.

Like the individual in the OP story, I'm more inclined to suspect a specific undetected infection rather than a lack of dietary discipline. I just don't know how to explore this without having my sanity questioned.

Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#27

Post by fl0id »

dcx wrote: post #13

Oh wow, I have the first half of this situation. I went through a period where my digestion was so bad that it was affecting my ability to function from day to day. I didn't get anything useful from my gastro; I even had a negative celiac antibody test. Eventually I started rigorously tracking everything I ate against my symptoms, and after a few months I was able to draw a strong correlation with gluten intake. From…

For testing: As the article says, find a doctor that has experience with it and ask for an antigen test. The below capacity thing can be very real, supposedly a different parasite in the us is responsible for people in southern us having the stereotype of lazy. In that case it could infect you through your feet from tainted soil. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...

Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#28

Post by dbspin »

Theodores wrote: post #18
jim-jim-jim wrote: post #8

I've been looking for relief from abdominal pain, bloating, poorly formed movements, and breathing problems for well over a year now. It started right after a round of antibiotics, which strikes me as a very clear cause-and-effect situation involving some sort of microbial imbalance. I don't think restrictive diets are a great idea, because I want to stay healthy otherwise and ultimately restore that balance, but cur…

I am not sure what to make about the increasing amount of people with a real or an imagined gluten intolerance. By imagined, I mean someone that has a generally unhealthy diet, for them to not see the doctor, but decide for themselves that wheat is the enemy, rather than the garbage they have in their sandwich, in their burger or on their pizza. Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded o…

Your diet advice is great for people who don't have a food intolerance. I'm glad it worked well for you. As someone who has pretty serious - immediate diarrhoea, stomach pain etc - responses to certain foods (dairy, gluten, some alcohol sugars) cooking whole foods from scratch and supplementing with vitamins doesn't cut it. Lots of other people are in the same position. There's a lot of research about why these issues are growing - newer pesticide resistant crops seem one likely avenue - but they're real, and deeply disruptive for the people who have them.

Speaking for myself, I grew up in a home where all our meals were cooked from scratch, no fast food or 'candy', and was horrendously sick growing up due to the amount of (whole wheat, locally baked) bread and dairy in my diet. Had ulcers in my early teens, constant stomach upsets, and lots of secondary related issues.

Certainly eating poorly makes these issues worse, but I didn't grow up in a food desert, or eating an American diet, and they emerged none the less. And at a time (I'm 44) when there was zero awareness of them in the culture.

I was exposed to tonnes of antibiotics as a child - but its hard to deduce cause and effect here. The antibiotics were given because I had frequent gastric distress. Either way, I'm sure my gut bacteria are in a terrible state.

Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#29

Post by timeon »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #20
Theodores wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what to make about the increasing amount of people with a real or an imagined gluten intolerance. By imagined, I mean someone that has a generally unhealthy diet, for them to not see the doctor, but decide for themselves that wheat is the enemy, rather than the garbage they have in their sandwich, in their burger or on their pizza. Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded o…

> Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded on it. However, modern supermarket bread is quite different to what people were eating even 100 years ago. We've selected for wheat with very high gluten levels as it makes for fluffier bread and we've started adding wheat to almost everything as it's cheap. It's very frustrating to go to a shop and see that products that traditionally don't hav…

> onion bhajis, potato fries

These kind of foods should be home made. Wheat is lesser issue with them.

Even simpler foods like garlic-paste, if bought ready-made in store it contains lot's of unnecessary ingredients.

People buy junk food (pre-made meal) and blame wheat.

Re: Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

#30

Post by dcx »

fl0id wrote: post #27
dcx wrote: post #13

Oh wow, I have the first half of this situation. I went through a period where my digestion was so bad that it was affecting my ability to function from day to day. I didn't get anything useful from my gastro; I even had a negative celiac antibody test. Eventually I started rigorously tracking everything I ate against my symptoms, and after a few months I was able to draw a strong correlation with gluten intake. From…

For testing: As the article says, find a doctor that has experience with it and ask for an antigen test. The below capacity thing can be very real, supposedly a different parasite in the us is responsible for people in southern us having the stereotype of lazy. In that case it could infect you through your feet from tainted soil. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...

Thanks, I'm certainly going to try that. I was more asking if anyone has experience getting tests done properly in light of their low accuracy. From what I understand, an antigen test is still a stool test, meaning they are only 50% accurate. As a commenter on this post shared, managing the health system is challenging in this area. I just did a bit of googling, and found a couple of leads here:

> CDC recommends collecting three stool samples from patients over several days for accurate test results. Commercial testing products for diagnosing giardiasis are available in the United States. [1]

Perhaps running three tests is the standard of care, or if not one might advocate for this based on the CDC recommendation. And if dismissed, perhaps there are commercial products available at the consumer level.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/giardia/hcp/diagnosis-testing/index.html

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