A little more info on the gut topic. Giardia
 

This is very interesting.
I wonder if we should all be having stool testing.

These 2 case studies sound familiar to quite a few of us. It links guardia to pn.
I'm going to ask for this gross poop test:D.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1605742/

Thanks for this. I'm not in the least surprised. I'm willing to bet all sorts of infections via the gut, often via or in conjunction with gut dysbiosis, cause nerve damage and a host of other problems. We know so very little about all this, and we're just starting to learn. The traditional stool tests are not the best/most precise, but they can be useful in the case of a handful of known infections. I believe there are thorough stool analyses at labs that will even note bacterial and yeast makeup, but they are usually not covered from what I've heard and cost several hundred dollars. I think naturopaths and alternative physicians perform them.

Edit: Just to be clear, they do check for the particular infection you mention, but it often takes several samples, if done properly/thoroughly.

My problem is the gut symptoms improved but the neuropathy never did.

Giardia cycles in the GI tract. It lives in the lining for a few days, then comes out to reproduce, causing symptoms, then goes dormant again. The stool tests have to be timed when the organism is actively in the bowel. It does not typically show up when in the dormant stage.

I have had Giardia infections a couple of times through drinking stream water when I was walking in the bush - they were not fun.

Lesson learned - now I carry drinking water and make sure that stream water is boiled before I drink it.

As much as I hate antibiotics, I wonder if it would be worth it to try the one for this. It would be interesting since my kids and I never have normal stool. TMI sorry, but always yellow and diarrhea off and on during the week. Wonder if it could be a parasite.

Also interesting that they live in the duodenum and that is where copper is absorbed and we are all low or deficient. I can't imagine why strong healthy people couldn't kick giardia though, and that it would lead to the neuromuscular rash we get and neuropathic symptoms. Makes me think its something more sinister.
I don't know... just rambling as I think about what is going on here.

I just had a chance to read the case reports and comments, all very brief, but very interesting. Antibiotics, Metronidazole, resolved both cases of neuropathy. Short and low dose courses in both cases, but never a single course. Interesting. This is what I plan to do in a sense, but more complex, involved and also using far better antibiotics, a complex and diverse array of natural ones. Every study shows they are as or more effective than pharmaceutical ones.

I Giardia tested back in 2013 it was negative, reason chronic ibs.
giardia usually cause really bas gastrointestinal symptoms to warrant a test.

Metronidazole and its cousin Tindamax, are well known causers of nerve damage.

A whole family with chronic diarrhea? Could be other causes there. But it does warrant medical evaluation.

Closely look at your foods. The gums added to most processed foods, including dairy and ice creams (carob bean gum aka locust bean gum), can cause issues for people with a gut biome that ferments this complex carb. Before embarking on the giardia research remove the "gums" from your food intake and see if there is an improvement.

Metronidazole can cause nerve damage, but in this case they clearly killed the infection and resolved the nerve damage. What's interesting though is that they're so aware of this potential problem that they defensively note that it didn't do so in this case, etc. That they use such meds when they know they can cause such lifelong and at times debilitating conditions, say like PN, is beyond me!

This is also worth reading, especially if you're interested in what it can do long term: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3870550/

And there's this: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056...99307153290318.

its always a balance between the positive effects they give and the negative effects antibiotics cause. I dont think if a medicine is natural it is necessarily better for you, a lot of these things carry their own side effects, we often dont know what they are because these products are untested. the tetracyclines are relatively safe and well tested antibiotics, like minocycline, deoxy. i dont know if they would help. i have a friend who claims flagyl really helps his reactive arthritis, so this is what i mean with the balance thing.

Yes, sure, natural doesn't necessarily mean good. Regarding herbal antibiotics, the few good quality studies out there all show greater benefits and almost zero side effects. Studies in vitro and animal models all show excellent results too. I'd say that's pretty good. If you're interested, I can post some links to some studies, some of which I've posted before. More studies are always good, I agree, but there's no money in it, so...

I think they will usually be poorly conducted studies because there isn't money in it like you say. Anything that kills bacteria in the gut will have side effects, visible or not. I've read people advertising antibiotics that only kill the bad bacteria like natural cures e.g. Allicin, I think this is almost definitely misleading Internet propaganda. Antibiotics do not discriminate between good and bad, they aren't that clever. That's my two cents anyway.

Minocycline actually has a wide variety of beneficial properties like anti inflammatory activity and neuroprotective effects. I'm not saying we shud all go out and take it, but there are pretty safe conventional antibiotics that are well tested.

My son had giardiasis as a very young child. It was extremely common in my area at that time because of serious drought and the water levels in the dam that supplied the city were extremely low so I figure more than one person in the family could get it.

It seems the protozoa thrives in those conditions. Flagyl (metronidazole) was the medication used too and I always worried about that as he already had some gut issues as on Autism spectrum.

I wasn't aware until reading this thread and more information about it, that it can be present in the body without any symptoms. I always thought, due to the yukky symptoms my son had, that it would be obvious but not so apparently.

No gums or processed foods here :)
It isn't constant diarrhea as it is only once or twice a day and then fluctuates with constipation. The stomach symptoms are not bad, but there has to be link that we all have malabsorption type yellowy stools. Again sorry about the yucky stuff.

Not the studies I've read, so it's neither fair, nor accurate to describe them as such. Are there poor studies? I imagine, sure. But those are not the ones I was referring to or the ones I draw on when I make decisions. For example, here's one done at JHU very recently: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4030608/. Here is another one: http://www.ghrnet.org/index.php/joghr/article/view/1299. There are many others.

Allicin is a very powerful antimicrobial, antibiotic and antifungal, and this has been shown in a number of in vitro and in vivo studies. The claim that it only attacks gram positive or negative bacteria is false. However, studies of natural substances has shown that they tend toward having their greatest impact on pathogens and out of control bacterial and yeast overgrowth. For example, it has been shown to be highly effective when it comes to Candida Albicans. But this is not exclusive to so called 'bad' bacteria, and all the studies I've read don't indicate this. So if this is the claim on the web somewhere, then that's false, but that's not a study.

Do herbal antibiotics kill 'good' bacteria too? Yes, sure, but that's not the same as causing PN or serious gut dysbiosis, which hasn't been shown in a single study when it comes to natural substances, quite the contrary, but has been shown when it comes to pharmaceutical antibiotics. There are reasons go this and the research addresses why natural compounds are more effective and less harmful than isolated chemical compounds.

To each their own, but to the extent that I can avoid it, I would rather use natural herbs and substances used for thousands of years rather than chemicals manufactured in a lab for the profit of pharmaceutical companies. However, it goes without saying that herbs can be powerful and just because something is natural, it doesn't mean it's safe and has no potential side effects. Even probiotics can have side effects.

And yes, some pharmaceuticals can and are obviously necessary and helpful in certain situations. But there is no doubt that we overuse antibiotics in our time and that this has led to some dangerous developments.

This article describes the specific drugs used to treat giardia:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC88965/

the first study has quite a lot of people in it, over 100, there are a number of companies listed on the paper which sell herbal products so we can assume they sponsered the study, similar to what pharmas do. the study was done in a relatively short amount of time so we dont know these products are really safe apart from hear say knowledge. the second study is with 15 subjects which doesnt give them any credibility at all, especially as far as side effects are concerned which could effect 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000.

i used to try herbal medicines from india or china but had some very bad side effects which the drs told me would never happen with natural products. if you are desperate you can be talked into almost anything.

Some abx are indiscriminate, like the potent ones carbepenum, but those are for extreme cases of infections. abx may affect one type of bacteria more than others, which is why so many are developed. its also not safe to take abx, when there is no bacterial infection present, which leads to abx resistance

Well if you are suffering from rhuematoid arthritis and minocycline puts the disease into remission, then you can accept the degree of 'risk' involved. However for healthy people or those with unrelated diseases, yes, why take antibiotics - that doesn't make sense.

Interesting! I had Giardia as a kid, it was absolutely terrible. I wonder if it's true that it can remain dormant in your system for a long time.

1. No, we can't and we need not assume that the study was sponsored by those companies. This would be divulged at the end of the paper, and no conflicts of interest were reported. Johns Hopkins University doesn't work like that; in fact, funding to research universities, to their programs including their medical programs, works quite differently. I know because my work has involved such things. Not to mention that supplement companies don't have the kind of money to fund such studies. They are not multi-billion dollar companies like pharma. Moreover, even if the study was supported by the companies, which it was not, how would that be relevant? Are you insinuating that this corrupted the data, that the authors doctored the results? That's one serious accusation, which would then have to be proven, again not assumed.

2. The length of time of the studies and hence use of the supplements are not arbitrarily set. They are not testing long term, random usage of said supplements, but a one-month course of these herbal antibiotics, which is the norm for herbal antibiotic use in SIBO. This is the standard in pretty much all studies. Just like a pharmaceutical course of antibiotics tends to be 14 days for SIBO. There are standards depending on the condition and so it's not really a criticism of the study that they didn't go against protocol and standards.

So I don't know how it's relevant to the study that they may or may not be safe long term. They are effective and safe for the purpose of the study and condition under study. I also don't see how you draw the following inference: "we dont know these products are really safe apart from hear say knowledge". The study is not "hear say", it's a leading study by a leading research university.

3. Regarding the second study, just because a study involves a smaller number of participants, it doesn't follow that it has no "credibility at all".

And as I said very clearly, there are many other studies, not just two. I've read dozens myself. You can look for them. I'm not going to bother posting them here, because you seem dead set against the potential that herbal antibiotics can be and are both safe and effective, even in the face of quality studies. I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience with "herbal medicines", but personal experience is no reason to mis-characterize people's quality work and evidence based on much larger sample sizes and better controls than a single person's negative experience. The evidence speaks for itself, and as a researcher and a patient I value quality research.

I don't have anything against herbal products per se, but generally I think mainstream medicines are more effective, safer, and better tested short and long term.

I take your point regarding the university study, I wasn't saying their research was bias, perhaps it seemed like I was implying it which wasn't my intention. However, I do think these small study papers have poor statistics, any conclusions based on 10-15 people are weak even for a pilot study. I think any scientifically minded person would agree. For example, there is a clinical trial for a drug to replace lyrica which has 1000 patients in it at the moment. I hope it works out for them.

A lot of mainstream medicines are derived from plants so it would be foolish to deny the value the plants in medicine. However I am a big believer in science and medicines that have been properly tested, just having one paper on a small group of people taking a herb or any medicine doesn't justify its safety or efficiency. It takes many years of hard work to know a medicine is safe, and even then, it will cause problems for some people. Thanks for an interesting discussion.

"I think mainstream medicines are more effective, safer, and better tested short and long term."

There just aren't enough studies, not nearly enough, to settle the issue either way on effectiveness, and on a number of issues, including SIBO, studies are showing the opposite, namely, that herbals are more effective. Regarding safety, I'm surprised you say this, given the horrendous list of side effects that come with many pharmaceuticals. Regarding studies, you're certainly right, but we know why that's the case. But sure, it is definitely the case.

In an ideal world where there would be more funding for researching the wealth of natural substances at our disposal, we would have more studies and on larger scales. But we take what we have, and there are hundreds of smaller scale studies being conducted yearly for herb based medicines for various conditions. And honestly, if I can help it, I would rather take my chances with garlic and neem, or onion and grape seed extract, than with toxic chemicals manufactured by pharma, say so called safe statins or the like.

Many people are here due to side effects from so called well studied pharmaceuticals. Most studies don't study long term effects, because it's not cost effective, and the medication under study gets approval after a couple of years. But then we have people who after a decade of using some med end up with PN or some other chronic illness and have to suffer the rest of their lives. The funding you're worried about is in the pharmaceutical industry and does impact results and length of studies, and there have been some infamous cases, so I think there are some difficult issue here that need to be considered. And even with the most thorough studies, yes, as you note, there can be those who fall outside of the safety zone, so to speak, and so suffer.

On a personal note, so far I've only had benefit from everything natural, immense benefit and healing in fact, but much of my problems, perhaps even the SFN, was either made worse or perhaps partially caused by the so called least harmful OTC meds. I'm glad that natural herbs and supplements are getting more traction and studies are being done, even if on a much smaller scale than with pharmaceuticals. I'm not against meds when needed, but they always come with some serious side effects and support a terribly corrupt industry, so I will continue to seek natural methods of healing to the extent that I can. When/if I fail, I'll turn to big pharma. But I hope that never comes.

I do appreciate a good discussion, especially when it's about an important issue.

I have tried many pharma drugs and herbs by now unfortunately. On the whole the mainstream drugs were more effective by a long way. Side effects about even. That's just my personal experience.

There is a fine line between what you call natural and non natural, I mean codeine comes from poppies. I think purity and strength being a problem with drugs is often over sold by natural product enthusiasts, I mean it is nice to know what exactly your taking instead of just a mixture of many non rigorously tested compounds, it also makes it more potent. Yes side effects will often be stronger too than just eating poppy seeds, but life is always a balance.

I've my best results from lyrica, which improves sleep a lot, and pain a little, despite reading horror stories online about the side effects, for me at least they are mild. That's just me anyway, clearly you've got a different way of doing things and all the best to you.

I'm glad you've found something that works for you and gets you some good zzz. Sleep is essential. I use magnesium and avoid carbs and get very good sleep most nights. If I'm up, it's usually due to vitamin D jacking me up too much. But it also gives me plenty of energy to get through the day, so it's a trade off.