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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

#41
post #14

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…

The flip side of this is that doctors aren't infallible, and will often struggle with rare diseases that they don't deal with on a daily basis, or in some cases were never even taught about in medical school (such as recent discoveries).

It's true that doctors have to deal with a constant flurry of "I did my own research and think this bruise I got yesterday might be liver cancer", but sometimes people with legitimately debilitating illneses slip through the cracks and have to aggressively advocate for themselves to get any real testing done, particularly if they have a very "let's wait a few months and see what happens" type doctor who never seems to make any progress on their own.

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

#42

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.

I got pretty good results with the autoimmune protocol (pain-free plus no more brain fog after 3 months of the elimination phase.) I talked about it to my GP who told me to do an allergy skin test, because blood tests were not 100% reliable.

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

#43
post #24

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 su…

Which brand did you end up using for the enzymes and supplement? It's my understanding that there's sometimes significant differences between brands because it's unregulated so I'm curious about the ones that did work for you.

I've been diagnosed with IBS for 10 years but that's hardly any help, I did notice that reducing fat and reducing wheat seems to help with my symptoms. I've tried a lot of different probiotics but they've been no help so far

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

#44
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The flip side of this is that doctors aren't infallible, and will often struggle with rare diseases that they don't deal with on a daily basis, or in some cases were never even taught about in medical school (such as recent discoveries). It's true that doctors have to deal with a constant flurry of "I did my own research and think this bruise I got yesterday might be liver cancer", but sometimes people with legitimat…

> but sometimes people with legitimately debilitating illneses slip through the cracks and have to aggressively advocate for themselves to get any real testing done

Sometimes they do, but by definition it's likely not you. It's important to think here that everyone thinks "they are the informed one" or that they are the one that "might have the rare one". Same reason why most people have bought a lottery ticket in their lives or why everyone is of above average intelligence.

I like being active in my medical treatments by doing my own research but I censor a lot of what I say to a doctor, it's usually more to make sure I understand what's going on and that I can double check things.

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

#45
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…

[dead]

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

#46

I have this, how to kill it? I can't go to doctor, because they are all so difficult in my country when it comes to things like this. Does ivermectin help?

GPT and Drugs dot com both suggest individually trying these as needed: metronidazole/tinidazole, nitazoxanide, albendazole. I would try them only one at a time, not together. I fear that taking metronidazole and albendazole together might also risk SJS or some such adverse reaction. The doses of each are well known. Rifaximin is also commonly discussed in such circles, but it wasn't mentioned.

Even before these, I would try taking just 3g activated charcoal daily for up to a few days, but away from all medicines. It often (but not always) proves quite beneficial for me.

As for ivermectin, it won't hurt to try it, but we haven't established a connection of it to chronic giardisis.

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

#47
post #30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coll…

Where I live, microbiologists work the diagnosis by examining stool through a microscope. Nowadays, though, doctors are lazy and just prescribe antiparasitaries without a diagnosis.

I was taught to suspect worms only in children and immunicompromised adults. And I never found the exception.

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

#48
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flip side of this is that doctors aren't infallible, and will often struggle with rare diseases that they don't deal with on a daily basis, or in some cases were never even taught about in medical school (such as recent discoveries). It's true that doctors have to deal with a constant flurry of "I did my own research and think this bruise I got yesterday might be liver cancer", but sometimes people with legitimat…

> but sometimes people with legitimately debilitating illneses slip through the cracks and have to aggressively advocate for themselves to get any real testing done Sometimes they do, but by definition it's likely not you. It's important to think here that everyone thinks "they are the informed one" or that they are the one that "might have the rare one". Same reason why most people have bought a lottery ticket in th…

It is too bad most people don't like all the dull gray truth in your comment. Everybody thinks they are the exception, for good and bad.

On top of that, there are medical schools, not just one. A doctor might be following a [compulsory] guideline from his association / state / institution / college.

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

#49
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried probiotics, tonnes of different types, none of them worked, most made it worse. I tried fasting, a few days eating nothing and drinking only water with a bit of salt. It doesn't really work. The bacteria go into hibernation mode until you start eating again. I don't drink milk anymore and I tried a low FODMAP diet. The latter helped, but I found it so hard to keep up and it was stressful. I had every diagnost…

Thank you. I'm also on this road. Stress, and inflammation in the body. What helped me was extra hemp-protein powder, forest-berries (=prebiotic) and keeping away from milk, gluten, oat, sugar, alcohol, CITRIC-ACID (this is everywhere! and if you google it, you find that it is causing brain fog like hangover) And quite a lot of C-vitamin. keeping down the inflammation with tea made from ginger, tumeric and other herb…

Sounds like you've identified that histamine is an issue for you. Vitamin C will clear serum histamine, citric acid is bad since it's a fermented byproduct of black mold (likely triggers histamine release from impurities).

In my IBS journey I had a period where I had very strong histamine intolerance, and vitamin C (in the form of QBC vitamin, quercetin + bromelain + vitamin C) really helped stabilize me. Histamine intolerance often led to chronic insomnia, my heart just would not calm down at night.

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

#50
post #7

So this is actually shockingly similar to something that happened to me. I did a lot of back country travel with sketchy water and developed something close to dairy intolerant for more than 10 years to the point I wasn't sure if I had always had it. Eventually I got lucky on a test (for E. Coli not giardia) and the treatment was to go to nuclear on my intestines. That week wasn't fun. Now i can eat ice cream and dai…

By "go nuclear" I'm assuming you mean antibiotics? That's the standard treatment for methanogen overgrowth now, prescribing oral neomycin which is some really strong stuff but apparently the only thing that seems to wipe out archaea.
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