SIFO Treatment Using Functional Medicine

Treating SIFO can be problematic for many. Excessive bloating, brain fog and digestive discomfort ruins quality of life and leads to developing autoimmune conditions.

We discuss symptoms and common pitfalls in treating candida, sifo and more...

SIFO Article - https://drhoustonanderson.com/sifo-small-intestine-fungal-overgrowth-symptoms-and-treatment/

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Transcript

0:00  
Welcome to the functional medicine and natural healing Podcast, where we share the secrets to upgrade your digestion, improve your hormones, restore your immune system and detoxify your body. I'm your host, Dr. Houston Anderson. Now let's get started.

0:16  
The following discussion is for educational purposes, only not intended to diagnose any disease or disease process, always discuss medical treatments or interventions with your personal position. 

Hey there, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Dr. Houston Anderson. And today we're gonna talk about an exciting kind of new diagnosis called CFO or small intestine, fungal overgrowth. And so this is something that's actually been around forever, and we used to call it Candida, or fungal overgrowth in general. And and I think for a long time, in general, we were aware of it more in specific cavities, like the mouth of throw in the vagina. So women are familiar with yeast infections. Many, many men are familiar with the high school jock itch or toenail fungus. These are all things that we're aware of. But we never talked about them in the gut. And and so one of my things in my office that I'm always going to do, and if you look at my website, that the concept is we talk about gut hormones, immune and detoxification during the entire process. And then one of the biggest things in the gut is actually, this fungal overgrowth now, where medicine has come short and fungal overgrowth is there's many different types of fun guy. And traditionally, we're only testing for Candida. So realize that these lab tests are very specific, and they only test for what we asked. So we asked a question with a lab test, and we get the answers back. So for example, if you were testing for Candida albicans, you would get an answer. Maybe that was a little bit General, that might include some of the subspecies of Candida, but you're not going to find necessarily all of the different types of fungi that might be present. So for example, there are funguses or fun guy sorry, that that exists in your home that maybe grow different. There's some that grow on your bread, mold that grows in your bread, and and these are all kind of within the family of a fungus, and how they work. But today, I want to talk most specifically, specifically about small intestine fungal overgrowth, where you're seeing this symptoms in digestion. And when you see these symptoms in digestion, you're gonna find that there's some definitely some some common things that happen. Number one is going to be bloating. So if someone comes into my office and says, You know, I don't I feel bloated at the end of the day, or you know, I have a flat tummy when I wake up in the morning and now you know, at the end of the day, I look nine months or six months or two months pregnant. And I can't figure out why or another another version of that more common in males is I have excessive amounts of gas, or have the you know, the guys come in, you know, almost gloating that they're like, Oh, I have the best gas in my entire family. I can pass more gas than anyone else. Well, that's not necessarily a positive statement indicates gut dysfunction, right? And likely, that of the fungal variety. So that CFO story. Another common symptom that I'm going to see in the office is brain fog. So the first time someone says brain fog, I'm not going to neurotransmitters or how the brains working. The first thing I'm going to say is how many fungal toxins is this person's brain dealing with? So that they have that inflammation brain fog is highly correlated to fungus, other symptoms ears, okay, so I always correlate the ears to fungus. So chronic ear problem, whether it's even even something as much as imbalance, inability to stand up straight or feel wobbly or lightheadedness, any kind of dizziness like that, excessive wax production in the ears, or if your ears feel plugged all the time, I'm going to associate that with some kind of fungal overgrowth. It could be in the small intestine, it could be in the sinuses. scalp, right so that when you start looking at people's hair, they they talk about hair loss, and fungal overgrowth is probably the most under spoken cause of hair loss in the community. And I won't go into it a ton, but, but it's the reason why biotin works for people so everyone takes by attends to they have beautiful hair, skin and nails. Well, one of the things that a fungal overgrowth, excessive fungus in the gut will cause is a biotin deficiency. So if you're that person that takes biotin and you look better, then then you know for sure you have a fungal problem that you're dealing with.

4:30  
You know, I guess not for sure, but you have a higher higher predisposition towards that being the actual cause of your symptoms. The other one you'll see a lot is any kind of skin peeling. So I'll see this a lot on the fingertips. I'll see this a lot on the palms on the wrists. We'll see it on the feet. But anytime someone's seeing skin peeling I often associate with that CFO symptom, cio or CFO problem and what we're looking for Hear is, can we find two or three of these symptoms that align with your history? And does it make sense for you and if we can, then we're going to go for that CFO route. Now I have an article on my website, Dr. Houston Anderson calm that kind of goes over small intestine, fungal overgrowth, treatments, things like that. But But I won't go over all the details in this podcast. But But if we going through there, and we're talking about CFO testing, the truth is CFO testing is at its infancy, meaning meaning most people are never going to get tested for CFO, you're going to have to go after really a symptom based approach. And this is not something new to medicine, right. So if you walk into an urgent care center or an emergency room and your throat is red, it feels like you have strep throat, it looks like you have pustules back there, you've had it five times before. And you can say this feels exactly like my last last strep throat, they look into your throat, it looks red, it looks pissy, they're going to give you an antibiotic, or in other words, they don't really necessarily always test to make sure that you have strep throat, they know it's some kind of bacteria, they know that it's in the back of your throat and they're going to prescribe for that. So oftentimes in functional medicine in my office, rather than running another $350 test, we're going to do something that's that's pretty much based on clinical experience, and thousands of patients. And so with C fo we're often doing that, because the lab tests can be really restricting. Now my favorite lab test, obviously for Siva CFO is going to be actually a test by Great Plains labs, you're going to look at the organic acids test, and that's where I would usually go first, if I wasn't sure, but if you have all the symptoms that I just just indicated, and your story just screams, small intestine, fungal overgrowth, then I'm going to just treat that

6:44  
as if it's

6:46  
a small intestine fungal overgrowth, which is what takes us to the natural story. In natural medicine, we can actually treat these things. Rather than using a prescription antifungal, we can use herbal antifungals that have a great safety profile. So we're not going to see side effects in our patients at such a high rate as we might use with with an antifungal prescription medication. So I do I do, um, you know, I am a chiropractor by degree so I'm not prescribing any medications in my office, and we're treating all patients naturally there, there's going to be you know, one out of 100 patients I will send out to do some kind of prescription management management, or definitely if they're already on a prescription, we'll have to send them to a doctor to kind of get off those medications as they start to heal. But in the article on my website, there's there's a couple interesting studies that I quoted. One study showed that 40% of IBS patients have fungal overgrowth in their small intestine. Once again, how many of those people get tested for small intestine fungal overgrowth? I would, I would say it's less than 1%. So I've never actually seen a patient tested in a traditional office, whether it's at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is right next to my office, or Phoenix Children's Hospital or any other gi specialist, I don't see them testing for C fo ever. But yet, the research suggests that it could be four out of 10 or 40% of the patients. And then with IBS in general. You know, the research is really coming out and saying that, you know, over 90% of people whether it whether it's an acute exposure now or a previous food poisoning, exposure exposure, there's going to be some type of infection related with that IBS.

8:28  
So if you're an IBS person and you're not aggressively a treat, treating your your, your gut with anti microbials. You know, obviously I recommend a ton of my website, but but if you're not treating with antimicrobials, then you're probably missing the boat altogether. Okay, so this takes us to the dietary component of CFO, any low carb diet is going to benefit CFO, everyone's doing keto right now everyone's doing carnivore right now, these are kind of the trendy diets in 2020, which I guarantee they'll change next year, because they always change. But if you look at what a fungus likes to eat, it prefers to eat carbohydrates. And that's why I want to mention actually kind of a two fold kind of a story here where one of the reasons the keto diet is not because it's the fat that you're that you're actually consuming, but because you're not feeding a fungus anymore because you're not feeding some of the bacteria that enjoy the carbohydrates more. So any low carb really will work. Look at the keto look at the carnivore. A lot of function. Medicine practitioners are turning their whole practices into carnivore based practice because they're getting such good results. But there's two things that happen when you go keto or carnivore. You avoid a lot of food sensitivities. So keto is gonna avoid almost all food sensitivities like grains, except for dairy. And then you have something like a carnivore which in general is gonna avoid pretty much all your food sensitivities. But it's also going to feed that fungus a lot less. So for feeding the fungus less you're going to have resolution of symptoms in the gut. Now I don't usually put my patients on something so strict as keto or carnivore But a lot of people are already doing it. And so we'll leave them on that for a couple weeks while we while we treat the fungus. My favorite supplement by far is Chinese copies for fungal overgrowth, and it's actually one of my favorite guts supplements altogether, that Chinese coptis is actually produced by one of our sponsors, AMG naturals. So you can buy that on Amazon or might be a link on our website somewhere, something like that. But

10:22  
long story short, there's a lot of antifungals. And so that's what takes me to our pitfalls in treating CFO. And and I like to talk about pitfalls, because I can't tell you once again, I think people are going from doctor to doctor because we're missing some of the main components. So one of the if not the most problematic story with treating Candida is well one one Candida fungus, any other kind of fungal related CFO, technically, you can have fungal overgrowth of the large intestine, you can have fungal overgrowth in any cavity in the body, anywhere that has nice and moist conditions. I didn't put this in the symptoms earlier, but but chronic sinus infections almost always are fungal related. It's a hard cavity to get to those sinuses, it's protected, it's close to the brain, your body doesn't want to create excessive inflammation in your sinuses, or you have brain symptoms. So it is careful on that. But it's important to know that this fungus not only resides in the small intestine, but it resides throughout the body. If you have toenail fungus, for sure you have systemic fungus, so someone might get a toenail fungus. But if it resolves, then it probably wasn't systemic. But if you have that toenail fungus that's just not going away for years and years and years and your your nails are yellow and flaky and unhealthy. You know, for sure you have this systemic fungal overgrowth, which is really common in people. So back to the pitfalls. One of the major pitfalls in treating CFO is that people are using too many combo supplements. So by combo supplements, you'll find that in my office, this is not 100% always the case. But in general, I'm going to use a singular herb or a singular supplement to treat something. And there's a couple of reasons why. Because if you take a product, so from one of the major, you know, namebrand popular products that are out there, you're gonna look they have like a Candida cleanse product, or general dysbiosis product or a fungal overgrowth products, and you'll look at those products and they may have anywhere from three to 12 ingredients. Now when you include three to 12 ingredients, you're not going to have the high quantities of individual ingredients in there. It's kind of like a shotgun approach. But it's a shotgun approach. From from a long distance, it's it is not usually strong enough to treat from all over us all the time, I get people to say like, oh, I've had this chronic fungus or Candida for you know, a decade and I can't get rid of it, I look at what they're doing. And and they're using a combo product and that combo products, it will work except for that usually in order for a combo product to work in the dosages that they're using, you're going to have to do something like you know, a bottle every week for like six months, it's it's just the dosage is required to the supplements become cost prohibitive. So when I tell people that hey, your favorite Candida product, you would just need to take a bottle a week and the bottles $70. And so just $280 a month for the next six months. Or you could switch to you know, a high potency herb like a Chinese coptis. Like depending on what what what fungal infection is we'll use different varieties of herbs. But the concept is in my office will fix that pitfall by switching to one specific herbs. And doing that in higher dosages which ends up being more affordable. So a high dose specific herb like coptis might cost you 30 to $45 a month instead of 200 to $300 a month. And that's going to actually perform better than the combo supplements. Now combo supplements, like I said, I still use I think I have two or three in my office that I use with patients. But in general, I'm going to avoid those that I can get a higher dose of the natural product. Next thing that I'm going to say in this is just on my supplement, kind of pet peeves. And I'll probably go over this in almost every single episode that we treat a condition because it's these are the common pitfalls, meaning meaning people that haven't gotten results anywhere else, come to my office and get results because all I do is change a couple things. And these couple things that I change are going to be that that a lot of the supplements contain extracts. So for example, just because we use coptis multiple times in this episode, I'm going to talk about berberine berberine is going to be found in coptis. But do I like a berberine extract? Definitely not you're going to find that that in general whole herbs are going to work way better than extracts. And so if you go and look at your favorite Candida product or the one you've taken before that quote unquote didn't work, I want you to see is it a combo product First of all, and second of all, is it an extract and in there's a few extracts once again that I use, but in general I'm going to like a dried herb sometimes they're going to be freeze dried sometimes

14:59  
they're going to be Dried, but I prefer a dried herbs so that we can get all the beneficial phytochemicals that are inside these herbs. Those are gonna be the two most common pitfalls. The layperson, someone who's just getting into functional medicine had no idea what sefa was, but feel like they have bloating now, I mean, you may just need to go on that low carb diet for a while. Other pitfalls you can be having recurrent exposure. So so if you have recurrent exposure of like mold in your house, and maybe that molds not actually taking taking home inside your body, and actually you don't have mold inside your body, so you don't have a chronic mold toxicity story. But the mold toxins the mycotoxins that are released from a mold in your house, as well as from the fungus that might be inside your small intestine, are going to use some of the same some of the same immune processes as well as the same vitamins. So chronic mold exposure, whether at work or at home or anywhere else leads to the symptoms of fungal overgrowth, because your body runs out of resources. You can also have fungal overgrowth anytime your immune system is down. So while I'm not the office is going to talk about emotional stress and life stress all the time, it's not my favorite thing to work on with patients. The reality is that the more stress you have, the more suppress your immune system is going to be. And that stress can be chemical stress from a poor diet, it can be excessive sugar, which will suppress the immune system, it can be excessive relationship stress, it can be excessive work stress, it can be even too much working out right. So a lot of people are just going crazy at their workouts and because they have a goal of achieving some kind of body physique, that's great. But because they're they're working out excessively, they're exhausted, their body is physically exhausted, they're unable to stay healthy, because they're using all of their their body's reserves for working out. So these can be some of the common common pitfalls when treating CFO it's something that should be addressed in almost all gut patients, right? Especially if you have that bloating symptoms specifically for gut and long term, what happens you have this fungal overgrowth for a while it burdens your gallbladder, then everyone needs their gallbladder removed, and it's a kind of a nasty spiral downhill if people are not addressing this. In the meanwhile, like I said, I'll link to an article in the show notes as far as what I would recommend to do for your CFO if you have it. But other than that, avoid those common pitfalls, get on some powerful herbs that will treat the CFO, go low carb, and from there, you're going to see a lot of good results. Once again, sometimes CFO and Candida can take some time to resolve a two week Candida cleanse is not going to work. It may take months and months to do this. But it doesn't always require another doctor visit right so if you know you have CFO, and that you took some supplements felt a lot better and you stopped and then the symptoms resolved. That means your CFO has not been eliminated, you can get to lots of the root causes like you know, excessive caffeine or a poor diet or high stress or, and in addition, you need to continue to take supplements to treat that CFO, what I found is that CFO does not go away from diet alone. So I guess that's the the last pitfall that I want to mention, CFO does not seem to be resolved by just dieting, I can see people that have been on a on a low carb diet for 357 years, and they still don't feel 100% resolution. Yes, they feel better on their low carb, but they don't necessarily feel like they can reintroduce those carbohydrates. So if you feel sick, when you reintroduce your carbohydrates, you know that you haven't adequately eliminated your CFO, and you need to do maybe a more aggressive antifungal herbal approach. And that's it for seafood today. If you have questions, shoot us a message, make a comment on the website. Reach out to us and maybe we'll record a podcast with your very own question and we'll see you on the next show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai