Overlapping symptoms can be confusing…
Even doctors get confused by many common symptoms of GI disorders…
There are many overlapping symptoms that are commonly found in a number of gastrointestinal tract illnesses, diseases, and infections. Make sure you don’t get confused by these, or you may end up taking treatment for the wrong disorder.
Unraveling the confusion…
This is a very important topic as there are many symptoms that overlap when it comes to gastrointestinal tract illnesses, diseases, and infections. It is absolutely necessary for you to understand this so that you are not confused by these before, during, or even after any treatment you take.
For example, you may have experienced certain symptoms and your doctor or health care professional then does a diagnosis and pathology test that concludes you are H. pylori positive. Next, you complete treatment to clear your H. pylori infection – only to find the same old symptoms show up soon after treatment.
This does not necessarily mean that your treatment has not worked and that you are still infected with the H. pylori bacteria. You might be thinking that this doesn’t make sense.
So, let us explain…
When doing the initial diagnosis, doctors normally tend to assess symptoms for the more common illnesses, diseases, and infections. This also applies to the range of laboratory tests that they request. A good example of this is that we have found that between 65 to 70% of patients that test positive for H. pylori, will also test positive for candida albicans.
The symptoms of H. pylori are VERY similar to the symptoms of candida albicans.
HERE’S THE PROBLEM! The pathology tests used to determine the status of H. pylori and candida albicans are usually different – so it happens that candida infection/overgrowth, is largely overlooked.
Yet, most patients being treated for H. pylori have symptoms that relate to both H. pylori and candida albicans, so it is easy for doctors to get confused by these symptoms and to treat the wrong condition over and over again.
The golden rule is that if you experience persistent symptoms after a successful treatment, then this is an indication that you may weel have a further underlying complication that needs to be identified and treated.
Staying with the example above, and with the point about persistent symptoms, please note the following differences between H. pylori and candida albicans infections.
CANDIDA ALBICANS – When candida albicans is activated, the yeast infection tends to multiply very rapidly. This is because the normal 60:40 ratio of ‘good versus bad bacteria’ becomes something like 20:80 where the bad bacteria take control, leaving no hope for the good bacteria to cope.
H. PYLORI – By comparison, H. pylori can take years to colonize in your stomach. It happens so slowly that we refer to this bacteria as a ‘stealth invader’.
What to do if you still have symptoms after treatment
As we have indicated above, some symptoms are common to a number of gut-related issues.
Once you have been treated for h. pylori, for instance, make sure that you get tested properly after treatment with either an HpSA or GI-MAP stool test, to establish if the treatment has been successful. If the treatment has been successful, you will need to look further into the cause of the ongoing symptoms.
As a starting point, you may find it interesting to search Google to find what can cause the symptom you have, As an example, if you Google ‘what causes bloating in my stomach’ you will find 20 or more possible causes. (We chose bloating as an example because this is quite a common ongoing symptom)
In some cases, bloating is caused by two or more factors, and even when one of those is eliminated, the bloating continues. The same can be said for a host of other symptoms.
Of course, we don’t promote self-diagnosis and always recommend that this is done by a competent health practitioner.
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