​Socially, you may call it IBS or Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  In private you know it as the urgency of untrustworthy bowels. 

It can range between diarrhea and constipation and be joined with pain, bloating or gas.  You may only notice soft, messy poop for a very long time, but it all has the characteristic of being  unpredictable and unfriendly.

These are symptoms of trouble that should never be disregarded.  This is not “just your system acting up,” these are signals for you to pay attention.  Something is wrong and your gut wants a change.  

These conditions that haunt so many are so common that they have a designer name and a list of designer drugs.  We call it IBS, but what is it really?

Of course, it could be a number of things but the easiest to identify at home on your own would be candida.  Most of us have candida overgrowth because of our diet.  We are never introduced to it because Western medicine does not treat it, as there is no pill for the cure.  The remedy is an improved diet and nutrition, neither of which is in the arsenal of traditional, Western medicine.  The symptoms of candida are precisely the symptoms of IBS, so why not investigate it as a source of the problem?  

What Is Candida?

Candida is an overgrowth of what we fondly call the “bad” bacteria in the gut.  We actually need both “bad” and “good” bacteria for the gut to function properly.  When the gut is not in balance and conditions are bad and we say you have candida.  

Candida flourishes easily because our diet promotes it.  It lives on sugars, dairy and flours and is put in check by vegetables and alkaline foods.  Candida likes an acidic body, produced by sugars, and does not do well when the pH is appropriately more alkaline.  Disease also thrives on an acidic body and so the two connect naturally.

Taking medications can promote candida growth.  Even medication prescribed for IBS symptoms can work precisely against you, while reducing symptoms.  If you take an antibiotic you have definitely set the stage for candida to go wild as the job of an antibiotic is to kill bacterial, all bacteria.  Once the good bacteria is gone, candida can easily flourish.

What the body needs to combat candida is an alkaline diet, live foods or probiotics that will grow good bacteria, to balance the gut.  Learning a bit about them can change life.  Live foods, also called fermented foods, include cultured yogurt, miso, sauerkraut, kombucha, kimchi, raw vinegar and more.

Let’s Connect the Dots…

There are endless products for IBS, diarrhea, constipation, gas, bloating and abdominal pain.  There are also endless products for fungal infections, vaginal infections and nail fungus.  All of these are signs of candida overgrowth.  You might find that after years of a fungal infection you begin having bowel troubles or the reverse.   You might also find that you experience fatigue, sleeplessness, lethargy, pain, rashes, skin conditions, autoimmune disease, headaches, inflammation and a foggy brain.  These can all be manifestations of candida overgrowth.

If you medicate continually while continuing to feed candida, you exacerbate the problem.  Your medications are limiting symptoms, but they are not curling your problem, causing your body to continually fight the issues.  Until you treat the gut and allow it to become healthy again, it is likely that your symptoms will linger.

A simple saliva test, taken at home, can tell you if you need to investigate candida as a source of your IBS.  There are more sophisticated tests you can take through a medical professional who understands natural healing, but the home test will give you a good idea of what might be going on in your gut.
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Attacking candida should be from all fronts and all at once.  Cutting down on foods that promote it’s grown is usually not enough.  Small amounts of sugars or white flour can be enough to maintain an unhealthy balance. Making a complete and concentrated effort to promote good bacteria and starve candida is the best and quickest approach.  It will take some research to understand the process thoroughly, but basically you will need probiotics, fermented foods and a diet void of sugar, dairy and white flour.  For some it is necessary  to give up all flour, but you will know.  There are good alternatives that might work.  You won’t need to purchase products that claim to be candida cures.  The remedies are simple and natural.  

Using Western Medicine’s Approach

The explanation of IBS by the Mayo Clinic is not unfamiliar if you have attempted to get help from traditional medicine.  The Mayo Clinic claims, “Because it's not clear what causes irritable bowel syndrome, treatment focuses on the relief of symptoms so that you can live as normally as possible.”

If that is not good enough for you and you prefer wellness, Searching for the Cause, Not Just the Cure is the way to go.  Take the home test and get armed with the information you need to cure IBS and gut issues.  Link to your own candida testing steps at https://www.searchforthecausenotjustthecure.com/blog/candida-testing-a t-home

The Candida Saliva Test 

A diagnosis of cancer is a crisis.   No one thinks clearly after hearing “it’s cancer.” It is probably the worse possible time to have to make the decisions you are facing, but decisions must be made.

If like most people, you falter and pause to think, a “team” of professionals is gathered within minutes of your diagnosis.  Your life is now in the hands of an oncologist, a surgeon, a radiologist and others you have never even met.  This team will guide you down the path they have designed for you because they do it everyday, but you haven’t.  It is all new.

In one moment you took your seat in the waiting room and the next you are signed up to take the ride, with an “E” ticket in your hand. The problem is, this is not Disneyland and it is not the “happiest place on earth.”

The urgency with which a treatment plan is made would make you believe there is seemingly no time to waste.  The truth is, there is time.  Cancer takes years to grow. Certainly one could take a few days or weeks to do the proper research to learn the vast possibilities for treatment.  More and more, people are opting to use alternatives or a combination of treatments, because of the failing statistics and harshness of chemotherapy. 

The time to make decisions about cancer are not best done from a gurney, or in a gown.  You are useless at that point.  Fear makes bad decisions.

Your best research is done now, before a crisis and without a threat.  There are some wonderful things being done, beginning with diet, that can assist a traditional or non-traditional  treatment plan. 

The options for cancer treatment run from whacky, to reasonable to horrifying.   To be sure there are proponents for all of these possibilities, but it is you that must decide.  The days of following into traditional cancer treatment have passed.  We now know there are options, but they take a bit of research to find what is best for  you.  

Your body is your responsibility.  Allowing strangers to decide what treatment is best without some research is irresponsible.  You wouldn’t let the painter choose the color of your house.  Why would you jump into a failing cancer machine and just cross your fingers?

This is a simple test for candida that you can do at home.  It's not science, but it can give you a good idea of what is going on in your gut.  As your diet changes, you can see the progress in changing indicators.  

​Don't worry about getting it "right."   You will see patters that change with you and at some point you will guess your results before testing.

Click Here to Download Printable Version 

If your mouth is holding silver,mercury fillings, you have been lied to by a government and a dentist, without regard for your life.  The dangers of mercury are basic.  It's poison.  There is no amount of mercury that the body can encounter without damage.

For those who claim, "it hasn't hurt me yet," your body is not different than anyone else on the planet.  It is not successfully managing the poison released every time you chew.  If you feel unharmed by your mercury fillings you are fooling yourself.  Your body is working overtime to keep you alive and one day it will, not might, falter.

Pain, autoimmune disease, kidney failure, depression, palsy, arthritis, neurological disorders, nerve damage, TMJ, candida, IBS, multiple sclerosis and many other common conditions have roots in mercury poisoning.  If you have silver fillings, which are 50% mercury, your body is working overtime to keep you functioning.  When it collapses, your symptoms will vary from fibromyalgia-like pain to Alzheimer's Disease.

Removing the mercury from my teeth removed crippling pain within hours.  I am not a miracle.
Many who safely remove mercury with a biologic dentist have lost symptoms of debilitating conditions including multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue very soon after removal of the poison.  To be sure there can be lingering effects and many do not report improved health for weeks and months.  Even though there can be permanent damage, healing cannot begin until the on-going source of poison is removed.

If you have mercury fillings the time to remove them is before you become symptomatic.  There is no advantage to causing your body to process or store toxicity needlessly.

Almost anyone can come home from a traditional doctor with the diagnosis of fibromyalgia.  The criteria is rather flimsy.  Even the Mayo Clinic has a weak explanation of the condition, claiming fibromyalgia is a condition with a variety of symptoms that are incurable.  If that is not acceptable to you, use caution before you accept the diagnosis. Buying into a condition that cannot be cured is a life sentence.  

I believe what is more truthful is that the diagnosis of fibromyalgia is a dumping ground by the medical profession for people who complain of a variety of aches, pains and symptoms that seem unfounded or random.  Although all who have fibromyalgic-like pain have similarities, our sources of pain vary.  Instead of searching for the cause of our issues, we are categorized into the designer condition called "fibromyalgia" and offered drugs to mitigate symptoms, but we are never expected to be cured.  

If you have fibromyalgic-like pain, your pain is real.  The diagnosis, in my opinion, is not.   I believe a bit more effort should be included in the diagnosis.

Pain is the only voice your body has and there is always a reason for it.  Finding its source is not easy, especially when a trusted medical community is satisfied to medicate you for a lifetime and categorize you as hopeless.

If you are to find wellness, you must resist the diagnosis of fibromyalgia as anything more than a description of your pain.  Next, begin a concentrated search for the source of your particular pain and look more deeply for the root cause or causes, knowing that the weakened body can manifest pain from more than one source.

What is common for chronic, fibromyalgia-like pain is the sensitivity to toxic substances and sugars.  Sugar exacerbates pain, no matter the original source of pain.   Most all painful bodies respond to lifestyle changes that clean up the body.

There are a few things every painful body should investigate to begin their search for the cause of symptoms if wellness is the goal.  You may find you have some or all of these potential contributors or, your cause might be completely different.

#1.  If you have silver, metal amalgam fillings in your mouth you are living with mercury toxicity.  It may take years to manifest but, at some point, metals toxicity will create pain and symptoms  that are often given the diagnosis of fibromyalgia.  You need to be tested for metals poisoning, being aware you cannot rely on a blood test for accuracy.  You will need a medical professional who understands metals and this is not likely going to be a typical, Western medical  practitioner. 

#2.  Candida overgrowth symptoms are also very closely aligned with the symptoms of fibromyalgia.  If you have candida overgrowth, a gut bacteria, you will need to make several lifestyle changes as it cannot be solved by a pill.  Sugar and flours, which are the favorite diet of candida, will inflame the body while candida thrives on them.  You will need a medical professional who understand how to cure candida or you can easily do the research to solve it yourself without products or pills.  Candida overgrowth responds to a healthy diet and probiotics.

#3.  Leaky Gut Syndrome is an offshoot of candida overgrowth and is actually caused when  the intestinal wall becomes permeated by severe candida.  Once the intestinal wall becomes compromised, foods being digested fall through the intestinesl and leak into the bloodstream, causing guess what?   Yes, symptoms that are again exactly like those of fibromyalgia.  

#4.  Glutathione is manufactured by the body.  It is the master detoxifier of your body.  If you are sick or in pain, production is less than adequate to manage normal, daily detoxification needs causing...yes, symptoms just like fibromyalgia.

What is important about these four simple possibilities as potential sources of fibromyalgia-like pain is that they each affect about a third of the population.  It is incredible that a doctor would consider labelling a patient with fibromyalgia and medicate them without knowing if any of these four very common conditions are at play.  

​Your source of pain might not include any of these conditions and the possibilities are infinite.  What is sure, however, is that if you medicate the pain without finding the source, wellness will not be yours.

If you walk into your doctor's office and quote this information, it will likely be discounted in favor of drugs.  Your own research will be infinitely more important.

​ Your pain is real.  It has a source that is screaming for attention.  Find it and be well.

​The headlines today are "Pain Pills May Prolong Pain."  This is not new news.  We have known this for a very long time.  We know that when chronic pain is masked, the body is pushed beyond its true ability.  When the pain is not respected and the body is forced to overdo, the cause of the pain is agitated instead of encouraged to heal.

The longer pain is allowed to reside in the body, the deeper its roots.  Secondary conditions develop at some point and the original problem becomes more complex.  Masking Pain, Manifests Pain.

So why is this groundbreaking news  today?  It is because those who misrepresent drug side effects, Big Pharma, and those who overprescribed pain killers for profit, doctors,  have found themselves in lawsuits.  Finally the addicted and families of the dead are taking charge and refusing to be victims of the system.  

Now that  addictions and deaths are of crisis proportions we will see change.   Those punished will never represent the true numbers of those who contributed to these crimes, but it is a start.  There are two things to remember before you accept drugs into your body.  #1.)  Properly prescribed drugs are the third largest killer in America, following only cancer and heart disease.  #2.)  Every recalled drug in America was once approved by the FDA

I have just taken a great bashing on a chronic pain site for saying I don't believe in living on pain drugs.  People went on attack saying I knew nothing about pain and that without drugs they would have no life.  

I do know something about pain.  We have an intimate relationship that has lasted decades. 

What I know is that when drugged, my body will perform many more tasks then it would without drugs.  It feels good to be more active but that overextension causes increased pain and allows pain cycles to have a firmer grasp.

I know that allowing pain to take up residency is dangerous.  Pain drains the body and forces its systems to become burdened.  Eventually these systems break down, causing secondary issues and illnesses that complicate life.

Learning about pain takes experiencing it.  If you are always medicated, it is impossible to experience anything.  I believe pain is the voice of your body and has something to say.  My choice is to listen and find out what it wants from me.  

Usually it wants the same old things.  That means the right kinds of rest, exercise,  nutrients and a diet that is clean and free of sugar, flour and chemicals.  It also asks that I cut my toxicity down to minimal exposure every day.   I offer it remedies in the form of essential oils, vitamins, minerals and foods that heal.

For the most part, living clean has become easy.  There are days, though, that I just don't feel like giving my body exactly what it needs.  There are days when I think we can manage some sugar and a few toxins.  There are days when I just want to behave like everyone else and if I do, I pay the price.  

In some ways, I think chronic pain people are the lucky ones.  When they finally find wellness, they understand how the body works and what it needs.  They have the ability and knowledge to treat it right and nurture it.  It seems they have a jump on learning to live through old age without illness and have the potential to die healthy.  That is the goal.