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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

#71

Post by dkga »

jancsika wrote: post #62
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…

> I even had a negative celiac antibody test. Note you can also check your genetic config.log to see if there was a -DALLOW_CELIAC flag in your source build. Unfortunately your body's settings dialog is shit and does not show you whether or not that feature is set to on or off. But if you were built without that flag then you lack the code for the Celiac algorithm altogether and are good to go. (There may be other se…

I just hope that when the time comes for my next version, I’m recompiled with the -ALLOW_GLUTEN_INTAKE flag

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

#72

Post by renewedrebecca »

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…

Gluten can also trigger certain thyroid conditions, which can wreck havoc everywhere in the body, including the intestines.

IIRC, the problem is that gluten is similar to thyroid tissue, and for some people, the immune system will then attack the thyroid as well as causing trouble in the intestines where the gluten was found.

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

#73

Post by Suppafly »

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 infection.

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

#74

Post by CobaltFire »

Well, this could be life changing for me.

22 year military career, avid backpacker, have non-celiac gluten sensitivity since the time I was deployed all over SE Asia.

I think I need to have a conversation with my doc! Thanks a TON for posting this!

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

#75

Post by throw310822 »

> No matter how much he ate, he kept losing weight. At one point, he logged his caloric intake for a college nutrition class and found that he had been eating seven thousand calories a day, despite looking sickly thin

Is this even possible? And- only half joking- if it is indeed possible, why isn't there a queue of people waiting to get the parasite installed in their body?

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

#76

Post by m_fayer »

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…

Why is it too much to ask for doctors to take sufficient interest in their patients to clock just how sophisticated they are, and react accordingly.

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

#77

Post by Miner49er »

itronitron wrote: post #19

>> the person has symptoms provoked by gluten, but they don’t have evidence of celiac disease Sigh, it would be useful to know what specific tests for celiac were performed that came back inconclusive or even just stating what doctors consider to be definitive evidence of celiac disease.

Sounds like a standard celiac blood panel.

Definite evidence is both a positive blood test and villous atrophy found by taking biopsies of the small intestine.

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

#78

Post by BostonFern »

ben7799 wrote: post #68
itronitron wrote: post #19

>> the person has symptoms provoked by gluten, but they don’t have evidence of celiac disease Sigh, it would be useful to know what specific tests for celiac were performed that came back inconclusive or even just stating what doctors consider to be definitive evidence of celiac disease.

If you're in an area with excellent health care any GI doctor should be able to explain that the blood test can be conclusive for a positive but not for a negative. If there is any question they should be doing an endoscopy and taking a biopsy of the small intestine. Celiac disease causes the body to destroy villi and they can see that under the microscope.

As does tropical sprue, Crohn’s, and a host of other infections and autoimmune diseases.

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

#79

Post by nickff »

nradov wrote: post #64
spease wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I understand, an antigen test is still a stool test, meaning they are only 50% accurate. “Accuracy” is too vague. You want to find out what the sensitivity and specificity are. https://ebn.bmj.com/content/23/1/2 For instance, a rapid covid test might have low sensitivity but high specificity. Meaning if it’s negative, you could still have the disease. But if it’s positive, you’re almost certainly sick. Ie…

Technically a "rapid covid test" only detects the presence of certain viral genetic material. This usually means the patient is or recently was infected with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) but it doesn't indicate anything about whether the patient has COVID-19 (the disease). Many infections are asymptomatic and thus not medically classified as a disease state. This distinction might seem pedantic but it's important to be pre…

If you want to be precise… There are different types of “rapid COVID test”, the most popular of which detect antigens, not ‘viral genetic material’. PCR tests detect genetic material. Both tests seem to have differing levels of sensitivity to each variant of the virus.

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

#80

Post by 93po »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #57
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…

Interesting, I have some kind weird dairy intolerance that isn't just lactose intolerance (I have that too), but some kind of sensitivity. When I cut out all dairy my weight jumped 25% in 6 months, and I was no longer underweight or feeling chronically sick. I had cut out lactose heavy dairy years earlier (soft cheeses, milks), but still would have hard cheeses and lactose-free products. I have no idea what is causin…

same - lactose free milk gives me extreme fatigue, has does lactose with lactaid pills.
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