![]() The drug had, in fact, given her hepatitis. In 1986, (yes, this idea has been around since then!), doctors in Illinois treated a woman who believed she had Candida overgrowth and was taking the antifungal drug ketoconazole to treat it. Some antifungal drugs can also be bad for the liver. In one study, Iliev and his colleagues at Weill Cornell Medical College and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles found that treating mice with antifungal drugs worsened the severity and progression of allergic airway disease and colitis. But these drugs could be harmful, even dangerous. Instead of sitting for the hearing and defending his Connecticut medical license, though, he apparently moved to Arizona.)Īs a further worry, many doctors aren’t just recommending dietary improvements they often also prescribe antifungal drugs. (Some of these doctors do other suspicious things, too: In 2003, the Connecticut Department of Public Health alleged that Warren Levin, author of Beyond The Yeast Connection: A How-To Guide to Curing Candida and Other Yeast-Related Conditions, performed tests that weren’t medically legitimate, claimed he was conducting research when he really wasn’t, and allowed his staff to conduct procedures they were not properly licensed to perform. And of course: The more people these doctors treat, the more money they make. Making matters worse, many doctors set things up so that even if clinical tests confirm you’re fine, they can still lure you into treatment.įunctional medicine guru Mark Hyman points out on his website that tests for Candida overgrowth “can be helpful if they come out positive, but don’t rule yeast out if they’re negative.” In other words, if you get a positive result, you almost certainly have Candida and need treatment, but if the tests come back negative, well, we should probably treat you anyway. So there certainly is interest and money being poured into the scientific study of yeast and how they affect us-though, of course, we could stand to have more!-yet there is not yet evidence to support the current medical claims. Yet this is not true: The National Institutes of Health funded 200 research projects related to Candida in 20. government refuses to fund research on the topic. Some even complain of a conspiracy-that the U.S. “Doctors disavow it and science has done very little in studying such an interesting and consequential malady,” Jim White, co-founder of, told me over email. Proponents of the epidemic of Candida overgrowth openly admit there’s not enough science on the subject. (Popular naturopath Josh Axe even mistakenly describes Candida as a virus when discussing toenail fungus, which is kind of like calling a giraffe a plant.) Other physicians list serious autoimmune diseases such as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus as “symptoms” of yeast overgrowth, yet not a single study has shown that these conditions can be incited by yeast. Indeed, some of the symptoms people have linked to Candida don’t make any sense.ĭoctors proclaim, for instance, that nail fungus is a symptom of Candida overgrowth, yet most nail infections are caused not by Candida but by dermatophytes, a very different kind of fungus Candida nail infections, which are rare, only afflict people with vascular conditions. Those kinds of claims are “absolute hair-raising nonsense,” concludes Bernhard Hube, a biologist who studies fungal infection biology at the Hans Knoll Institute in Germany. ![]() The popular claims being made about yeast and how they affect people, he says, simply “aren’t scientifically justified.” Saying that yeast are associated with, and can perhaps aggravate, a few specific diseases in mice is very, very different from proclaiming that most people suffer a collection of vague symptoms because their bodies have been overtaken by yeast. Iliyan Iliev, a mucosal immunologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, has been investigating the link between yeast and various diseases in mice. (Crohn’s patients often have higher-than-normal levels of antibodies against components of Candida and other yeast.) The associations between yeast and other gastrointestinal conditions are still just that-associations-and so far no one knows whether the yeast play a causal role or whether changes to yeast populations might be a consequence of the conditions. With Crohn’s, researchers are careful to note there’s no evidence that fungi cause the disease-they do, however, seem to aggravate the inflammatory response, at least in mice. Some research has, for instance, linked yeast such as Candida to a few gastrointestinal conditions, including Crohn’s Disease and Graft-Versus-Host Disease. ![]() There are certainly other health issues in which yeast could play a role, too-but they are limited in scope and still quite uncertain.
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