Metals and Yeast

[colleendonny]

I'm curious as to how you test for these? Anyone experienced in this area that could fill me in?

Also, my dauhter went off her 15 day steriod burst and 30 day Augmentin on Saturday pm. This morning, before starting more Augmentin and now Zithromax, she complained of being itchy in her vaginal area. I used Aquaphor and she was fine after.

Related?

[LNN]

There are two ways to test for yeast. One is a spit test - before getting out of bed in the morning, you spit into a glass of water and watch - maybe an hour. if you see stringy stuff or cloudy water, suspect yeast. if the saliva just dissolves, probably no yeast. The other way to to do a blood test for candida albicans IgM and IgG. You can also do a poop test to check for many gut bacteria - including but not limited to yeast. But it takes time for the results, so more for chronic gut issues IMO.

 

As for metals, there is no "good" way to check - just degrees ranging from way unreliable to kinda sorta reliable. The least reliable is a blood test. Heavy metals only stay in the blood for a short time - they can be detected immediately after a large exposure - let's say you play with a broken thermometer. Then you'd see blood levels of mercury right after that. (But then, you'd already know you'd been exposed, so you wouldn't need a blood test).

 

The second way is from urine tests. Lots of controversy here, with "conventional" medicine (the people who tell you there's no harm from thimerasol) totally dismissing "provocation" urine tests and integrative medicine saying it's the only way to see what's in there. The basic idea is you do a urine test of regular urine. Measure it for metals. This is your "baseline". Then you take a metals chelator - usually DMSA, but you can also use DMPS or EDTA depending on which metals you want to "pull" out - and then do a second urine test to measure what the chelating agent pulled out of the soft tissues and drew into the kidneys for excretion. Some practioners skip the baseline test, arguing that if a chelator can pull stuff out of the soft tissues, then metals are there. No need to waste money on measuring prior to that. You need to research and decide which you feel comfortable with.

 

The final way I'm aware of is hair testing. You snip a certain length of hair for analysis. Hair is like rings on a tree. It gives you a timeline and can show metal excretion. The argument against how reliable hair testing is - or urine either - is that sometimes, if your detox pathways aren't functioning properly (which is often the case with chronically sick people and is at least in part the very reason they're sick), then you can have metals in the soft tissues 9esp. the liver and brain) that the body isn't strong enough to excrete. So you can have a metals problem that doesn't show up in a urine or hair analysis.

 

For this situation, some argue that you should do a chelation protocol - either by taking DMSA et al on a schedule (not every day - generally twice a week, every weekend or every other weekend, depending on whose protocol you feel comfortable with) or by supporting the body's own detox pathways (liver detox like milk thistle, bowel detox with clay or charcoal or chlorella, using antioxidant supplements like glutathione or alpha lipoic acid, supporting the immune system to battle metal-hoarding microbes by taking zinc/B6). Once the body's own detox conveyor belts work properly, the body will naturally chelate.

 

There are entire forums devoted to various protocols. If you want to pursue, PM me and I'll send you links. In the autism, chronic fatigue and lyme worlds, it's widely believed that metals play a role in chronic illness. But like may things in these worlds, testing/proving/measuring these things can be very difficult. Clinical symptoms then become part of the analysis.