Candida treatment effectiveness

Candida’s nature is that it is slow-growing, resilient, tenacious, resistant to medication and oxidation, able to adapt to change quickly (such as food source changes or pH changes), and existent in various forms (buds, branches or spores, depending on circumstances).  Fungi are sophisticated and resourceful microbes.  For these reasons, good treatment for Candida has been difficult to find.  If you don’t have each part of the treatment program right, it simply won’t be enough to kill Candida.

As stated on the previous page, there are many other approaches offered for Candida treatment.  What the other approaches generally lack is comprehensiveness; they attempt to kill Candida with a single agent which is reputed to have remarkable efficacy, or they rely on a number of medicines and lifestyle and dietary changes which simply aren't tested and effective enough to gain real control over Candida.  Study of these other approaches reveals that many were developed by people who have had no opportunity to test them in a clinical setting.  Dr. Humiston's Candida treatment was developed through testing and refining of the program in a medical clinic with over one thousand clinical patients, many of whom were seriously ill.

Medication is the first and most important factor in Candida treatment.  Prescription medications like terbenafine, the azoles (fluconazole, itraconazole, ketoconazole) and nystatin all attack the sterol chemical structure of fungal cell membranes.  These medications are designed to cause holes to develop in the membrane, causing the fungal cell’s contents to spill out.  However, fungi tend to find a way around that effect and become resistant to these drugs.  Also, most of these medications can have serious side effects.  In clinical experience, we have not found these medications to be effective against Candida in the long run, even when combined with proper diet and given at higher daily doses (we treated several dozen patients with fluconazole 300 mg once a day plus nystatin 1 million units four times a day for up to four months).

Many natural supplements, such as oregano, caprylic acid, olive leaf, pau de arco, silica and several others have been tried against Candida with similar disappointing results.  While these supplements do indeed have some activity against Candida, they are not sufficient as isolated compounds nor as groups of a few compounds to get the job done.  Nor do they attack yeast in the various phases of its life cycle (both branches and spores), which seems necessary to get it under control.

Diet is the second factor in Candida treatment.  In clinical experience, diet changes alone have never proven to be sufficient to truly get Candida under control.  Nevertheless, a diet that deprives Candida of nutrition is essential to treatment.  The complicating factor with diet is that many proposed diets contain significant flaws based on assumption rather than demonstrable facts and research.  The many versions of the low-carb, high-protein diet are essentially anti-Candida diets, which address symptoms not by correcting the acquired intolerance of carbohydrates which Candida causes, but by simply avoiding carbohydrates.  Many people truly feel better and see improvement on these diets, but the underlying problem remains — that’s why symptoms and excess weight return just as soon as those programs end.  Other types of anti-yeast diets exist.  They often put excessive emphasis on avoiding sugars, but allow foods such as vinegar, nuts and soy, which are assumed to be beneficial or tolerable but are actually much better avoided.

The third component of Candida treatment is probiotics.  The errors that are committed concerning probiotics are:  choice of bacterial strains (clinical experience seems to show that patients respond better to preparations with fewer varieties of bacteria), bacteria no longer alive by the time the probiotic is taken (proper delivery, handling and refrigeration are essential), and wrong choice of food source to keep the probiotic strains alive in the bottle (milk will feed yeast as well as bacteria, and maltodextrin is even worse in this regard).

We are always open to investigating any other Candida treatment program that may claim to work better.  The attitude of “Whatever works best, wins” is how every effective treatment modality is developed and is how science advances.  To date, no other Candida treatment program has even come in a close second.

NEXT ARTICLE:  A word of perspective on treating Candida

Updated: July 22, 2010