My magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You was born from a bad case of Candida. When I was in my early 30s, after an extraordinary patch of bad choices, I underwent a prolonged bout of stress. In every important area of my life, green lights I’d always taken for granted suddenly began turning red.
In quick succession I struggled under an impossible book deadline, married Mr. Wrong, divorced Mr. Wrong, bought the wrong flat, accepted the wrong job, suffered the death of a close friend, and spend a prolonged period of intense isolation in a foreign country.
If I had taken one of those tests in women’s magazines to add up your stress quotient, my sums, which included every last heavy hitter on the major-life-crisis league table—death, marriage, divorce, financial pressure, unfulfilling work, lack of social support—would have rocketed off the chart.
My magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You was born from a bad case of Candida. When I was in my early 30s, after an extraordinary patch of bad choices, I underwent a prolonged bout of stress. In every important area of my life, green lights I’d always taken for granted suddenly began turning red.
In quick succession I struggled under an impossible book deadline, married Mr. Wrong, divorced Mr. Wrong, bought the wrong flat, accepted the wrong job, suffered the death of a close friend, and spend a prolonged period of intense isolation in a foreign country.
If I had taken one of those tests in women’s magazines to add up your stress quotient, my sums, which included every last heavy hitter on the major-life-crisis league table—death, marriage, divorce, financial pressure, unfulfilling work, lack of social support—would have rocketed off the chart.
Strange brew
Shortly after emerging from the eye of this personal squall, I began to experience strange symptoms and, as time wore on, they began to multiply: hormonal imbalances and increasing food intolerances; diarrhoea and an irritable bowel; insomnia and night sweats—all under a vague fog of mild depression. I had felt powerless for so long that my body seemed to be reacting in parallel, caving in under any sort of microbial onslaught.
For nearly all the three years that I was ill, I made the rounds of medical circles—starting with the standard ones before moving on to an array of alternatives.
I had the emotions Rolfed out of me. Someone tried to diagnose the problem by subjecting my hair sample to radio waves. I ploughed through autogenic training, colonic irrigation and even a form of psychotherapy—a mixture of Wilhelm Reich and what felt like being tickled on the face.
I learned something about my relationship with my mother. But I did not, at any point, get better.
A new illness
The reason all these therapists had so much trouble working out what was wrong with me was that my problem at the time was just too new. Thirty years ago, most practitioners had little appreciation of the subtle balance of the human microbiome, and all the things that can make a gut go awry and present with a host of seemingly unrelated symptoms.
What I had inside of me was simply thrush of the gut. Most standard doctors at the time vaguely understood that Candida albicans was a yeast that lived in the upper bowel in most of us without doing either good or harm, as it’s kept in line by the immune system and the friendly bacteria that coexist with it.
But in 1983, American internist Dr C. Orian Truss audaciously proposed that when the immune system is weakened and the good-guy bacteria fall in numbers, those yeast can start multiplying out of control, producing toxins that eventually interfere with a range of bodily functions.
When I finally came across Truss’s discovery, it was a lightbulb moment: the symptoms matched almost every one of mine.
Nutritional pioneering
After figuring out what I thought I had, I searched out a renowned nutritional pioneer specializing in allergies and nutritional medicine, whose battery of tests confirmed my own suspicions and also rooted out a few other contributory problems.
The treatment at the time for me would now be considered rather severe: large doses of a well-tolerated antifungal drug like nystatin for many months (now known to cause a leaky gut), plus a batch of specially tailored doses of supplements and a year on a highly restrictive healing diet of fresh, unrefined food.
No matter—it worked. A month after I’d started, my dry cleaner asked me if I’d had a face lift.
Back in the 1980s, I had to do my own exhaustive detective work to get better; Bryan and I launched our publication What Doctors Don’t Tell You so that patients like you wouldn’t have to.
I’ve experienced first-hand that people can recover their health just by altering what they eat and how they live. But my own plan included possibly the most important lesson of all, which I discovered during my own journey: healing isn’t simply a matter of finding the right drug or right operation, but a complex process of accepting responsibility for your own life.
Facebook Comments
Wow. Thank you for this. I've been suffering from Candida for over a year +. As well as an array of other seemingly unrelated - but connected issues. I have been under tremendous stress because of major life changes that I have initiated - all good, but taking its toll.
I am finally realizing that I need to shift my thoughts, emotions and attitude. I am a hypnotherapist and talk about this all the time, but its time to do this for myself.
I am so tired of Candida, and, tired of everything else effecting my body. its like my thoughts are holding me prisoner inside my of body. Now my body is becoming my teacher, telling me its time to boost my immunity and my attitude.
Thank you so very much!
And many blessings.
PS: A few of us are going to create our own Power of 8 in 2019 - and can't wait!