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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

#81

Post by maxerickson »

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…

If flour and machine made bread are not processed foods, it's obviously a meaningless bogeyman.

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

#82

Post by LorenPechtel »

hansvm wrote: post #54
vasco wrote: 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…

A technique I have a lot of success with is asking why doesn't change their opinion. It leaves the doctor in a position of expertise and authority, so they're usually happy to spend the time teaching you. Normally I learn a lot about some gap in my medical knowledge, and sometimes the additional reflection changes the doctor's opinion and gives me better outcomes.

Depends on if their mind is made up. Yeah, I failed the food challenge test because you used the wrong thing! No, you can't use pork in place of ham--the trigger was something that gets added in the process of making it ham.

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

#83

Post by DoreenMichele »

“If forty thousand dollars of student loan debt paid for anything, it’s to be able to eat chocolate chip cookies again,” he says.

That's sort of how I felt about my student loan. Doctors who didn't take me seriously as a mostly bedridden homemaker went full nuclear and put me on like 8 or 9 prescription drugs when I told one "I took out a student loan for this summer program. I cannot afford to drop out."

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

#84

Post by LorenPechtel »

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…

I wish the medical world would not consider a "syndrome" as a diagnosis. No, it's a symptom! Maybe that's all the information you have, but it's not an answer.

As for FODMAP--I've gone that route and gotten a few surprises. The origin of something can matter. The storage can matter.

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

#85

Post by tstrimple »

mayneack wrote: 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…

My wife developed gluten and dairy intolerance quite rapidly a couple years ago. I’m wondering if something like this could be related.

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

#86

Post by consumer451 »

throwawaygluten wrote: post #11

Anecdotal, but this (likely) happened to me. For a year, my body could not digest gluten. My doctors tested me for celiac antibodies and all tests came back negative. A gastroenterologist asked if I had taken anti-biotics at any point. I had: 12 months prior I had gone swimming near a landfill, gotten sick, and my primary care doctor had prescribed antibiotics (suspecting giardia). This final GI doctor asked if I had…

This is entirely anecdotal, and n=1, but I have seen a sailing YouTuber who claimed that she was unable to tolerate gluten in the USA, but once in Europe there was no problem. She assumed that it was related to agri-chem in the USA.

Does anyone know which grain related agricultural products are used in the USA and not in the EU?

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

#87

Post by LorenPechtel »

Suppafly wrote: post #73

Reminds me of a reddit thread I saw years ago where someone mentioned they got malaria or something while traveling and it was treated with IIRC Ciprofloxacin which also cured a bunch of other issues they were having. The thread was full of people mentioning that random rashes or other ailments that they assumed were just normal to their bodies for years were cured when they took Ciprofloxacin for a different infecti…

My mother had a cough of five years that everyone thought was just her allergies. Cured by unrelated antibiotics. (Not that they did anything about the underlying allergies, just took out what she thought was a symptom she had to live with.)

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

#88

Post by hansvm »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #82
hansvm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A technique I have a lot of success with is asking why doesn't change their opinion. It leaves the doctor in a position of expertise and authority, so they're usually happy to spend the time teaching you. Normally I learn a lot about some gap in my medical knowledge, and sometimes the additional reflection changes the doctor's opinion and gives me better outcomes.

Depends on if their mind is made up. Yeah, I failed the food challenge test because you used the wrong thing! No, you can't use pork in place of ham--the trigger was something that gets added in the process of making it ham.

Kind of. Even when their mind is made up, they're likely to try to answer (since the framing places them on a pedestal). Both you and the doctor will notice anything obviously wrong with the answer. I've met a few young doctors who would dig in their heels (different from explaining why they're right; if they're actually right and teach me why then I think that was an incredibly valuable opportunity), but you ought to, in most parts of the world, be able to fire them and find somebody actually willing to talk to you. Almost all of the time I meet doctors who handle the framework I set out exceptionally.

Your pork/ham comment is interesting. For other toxins/allergens/..., I see doctors very explicitly examining every possible extra ingredient/factor before even deigning to consider that the bulk solid might matter (e.g., most chocolate allergies are actually to soy lecithin or one of the other mixins). I'm surprised anyone would rule out a ham problem just because they tested one kind of pork.

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

#89

Post by trhway »

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'm treated like a paranoiac for merely inquiring about certain possibilities like so-called SIBO

Yes, as my GE dismissively smiling told me "we all would like to chug burgers like we did in our youth, wouldn't we?". So talking and describing in details doesn't help much. What helps is if you're on PPO or similar insurance, so the doctor is easy to order tests, whatever you like from like the 20-items list - CAT, genetics, ... . The tests are the key. For SIBO you may get the hydrogen breath test - it is a very simple one - and watch the numbers that the nurse will record from the machine - it will help you understand the situation better. And just like with many other GE issues, getting diagnosed is just half of the journey though. Second is getting it to treat which is again can be a long one (there is a lot of recommendations in this thread - i've tried many of them and they do improve the situation somewhat, nothing though completely solves it for me. I though found some regimen for me which so far made it almost gone. Like many describe - observe and act accordingly.) Btw, just to illustrate the complexity/interdependencies - kind of like in large enterprise software - one of the side effects of SIBO i've got is anemia, discovered accidentally by looking at blood tests results done for something else (again looking into specific numbers yourself seems to be the key as the doctors said nothing) - as SIBO impedes B12 intake, and with B12 and iron supplements i've got my physical abilities back which at the time strangely went down when i started to get tired and running out of breath somewhat quickly for no apparent reason.

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

#90

Post by LorenPechtel »

bsmirnov wrote: post #60

If you're interested in this topic, look up Dr. Kevin Cahill and his work in tropical medicine. Sadly, situations like these are far more common than people think. My wife studied abroad in India in 2004 and returned with persistent stomach issues. After seeing multiple doctors (gastroenterologists, infectious disease specialists, etc.) and undergoing countless tests (stool samples, endoscopy, colonoscopy), no one co…

Very, very interesting--I have always assumed I inherited my mother's issues. Docs have done stool tests, nothing--but as it says they are prone to false negatives. The labs aren't good with the rare stuff. I almost certainly came down with malaria but made the "mistake" of going to the doc my wife worked with. GP, but he did work with DWB and had plenty of clinical experience with malaria. Labs come back a week later--they weren't set up to do the simple swab he ordered and substituted the closest thing they had which wasn't close at all. Came back "negative" so I'm not in the CDC data. The thing is I'm pretty sure of the initial infection point--20+ years earlier. At the time, three rounds of it before I got back to the states and talked to a tropical medicine guy. No symptoms at the time so he wasn't sure what he did would get it all. Never actually lab-diagnosed by the fever pattern is obvious and it responded to chloroquine but I was in an area with some resistance and couldn't take the right drug.

Do you know anybody else who does this sort of thing?

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