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[tenured_feminist]

No, I'm just realizing that any intervention will likely be futile. I suppose I can try to persuade her at least to see a trained alternative medicine practitioner and to take a good multivitamin. I'm also concerned that this may lead to other completely unsupervised and possibly unsafe fasts and cleanses.

I guess I was kind of hoping that someone would chime in and say, "Oh yes, of course! This is terribly underdiagnosed, but it's a real condition and here's how it works and why people try to cure it with dietary manipulation. It's just because you're a stupid social scientist that you don't understand immediately why this would work."

[inthelab]

Now I see.

I'm afraid I don't think a trained alternative medicine practitioner will be able to do much more for your friend; I don't believe he/she can prescribe (I mean prescribe FDA-approved drugs requiring a scrip) or order most lab tests (unless the person is an MD or DO).  That may be state specific, and I've not checked all 50 (I know about my own).

[spork]

Not my health issue but someone I know. I'm somewhat concerned because this person is several weeks into a cleanse primarily using dietary manipulation. I'm somewhat open to alternative medicine, but I can't find much reassuring information about candida as a disorder that established alternative traditions have recognized and treated effectively.

1) Does anyone out there believe that candida overload can genuinely cause problems outside of the context of really severe immunosuppression? and if so, 2) can you give me a quick credible explanation of how the diet would possibly solve the problem, given that my very basic understanding of the human digestive system is that the point is to break things down into . . . well . . . sugars? Good links appreciated.

The person is a complete loon.  I hope she hasn't had the chance to pass on her stupidity to future generations.

[sikora]

At the risk of offending people with real lactose or glucose intolerance (which are very real), this candida thing seems like what I've seen about "low grade wheat allergies" or similar.  The symptoms listed, so damn vague that they can all easily be caused by low-grade sleep deprivation, are also listed by "spas" as reasons to get a high colonic cleansing.  Colonics are bulls***. 

[msparticularity]

Candidiasis was all the rage back in the early 80s as an explanation for all kinds of things--the vague and pervasive symptoms others have pointed to above. It kind of overlapped with the initial cases of chronic fatigue, as those began to surface and gain attention, and I thought it had kind of vanished as CFS and fibro began to be studied and described systematically.