Parasite cleanse, anyone ?

[gabbyh]

My boss feels that most American have some sort of intestinal parasites(I know, YUK!)...especially if you live with animals in the house:D

So I'm getting ready to use a Paraway Pack:

http://www.unicityeuronfr.com/country/en_UK/products/pdf/parawayPack.pdf

He also feels it will help in my weigthloss goal...has anyone ever done this, or ever thought about doing it????

~Gail

[Hammster]

Hey Gabby. Did you read what is in all the things that come with that? None of it has been evaluated or shown to do any of the claims it makes. And I bet it's ridiculously expensive.
I believe if you just eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables (Fiber) and drink lots of water and drink cranberry juice (for urinary tract health) and do these things regularly you will be as cleaned out as the stuff you are thinking of trying. I noticed it only recommends using it twice a year, whereas you can do the things I mentioned every day. Also once you are on a good diet like that, walk for at least 30 minutes every day. You will lose weight and will remain "Cleansed" without resorting to products with unproven claims. Give your decision a lot of thought and I think you will agree with the healthy lifestyle over the quick fix twice a year. :D

[emommy]

I'm not sure of the product you are talking about, but to me it (and your bosses advice)sounds a little sketchy.

What I do know is that it is very, very rare for your average American with a clean water supply to get a parasite. I work in a Parasitology lab at a large medical center. We screen hundreds of stool samples a day microscopically (yes, it's a glamourous job!), and we may find one or two positives a day. Often, those positives are on foreign visitors.

People who do have a parasite are usually acutely ill with diarhhea, cramps, dehydration. If you don't have these symptoms, I wouldn't worry about it. The best way you could prevent catching anything from you pets is to make sure you both have clean water and for you and your family to have good handwashing habits.

[Arete]

I agree that this sounds very fishy. Besides, having parasites would probably contribute more to weight loss than getting rid of the parasites would! :D (Although it wouldn't be a healthful weight loss). Horses, dogs and cats that have parasite problems are usually very hard to keep weight on. I imagine the same would be true of humans.

Also, the literature you posted states that it is OK to give this to small children and pets. I realize that most people don't consider horses to be pets, but the pills contain black walnut, which is toxic to horses and can cause severe lameness problems even in very small doses. I have no idea if any of those other items are safe for dogs or cats, but just the fact that they state something like that makes me leary.

I put this in the same category as the "detoxifying" stuff. Just a way to create expensive urine!

[wallycat]

I've never tried anything like it.

I am very nervous when DH tells me that our cat has a tape-worm. Yes, I freak out...even though I don't even TOUCH the litter box.

I wash my hands like a fiend and I haven't traveled anywhere overly exotic....
still, I do eat sushimi (raw fish) and have eaten raw beef.....
who knows what I have growing :eek:

The joke at work used to be that i had a tape worm because I ate soooooooooooooo much and rarely gained weight. Of course, that was when I was young!!! :o
Now I have to watch my calories like real people :rolleyes: :mad: :mad:

[DocAgocs]

I think parasites are more common than is accepted by American Medicine. I think it is snobbery and perhaps a little fascism on our part to think that our country is SOOO clean and everywhere else is SOOOO dirty that "they" all have parasites and "we" are perfectly healthy. Look around. We fail miserably at health in general in this country, so I doubt it is that unlikely that people are going around with parasites.

According to labs like GSDL that specialize more in functional medicine testing than your average lab, sometimes stool samples are normal, but if you do what they call a "purged stool sample" (or something like that), it may show up with different things.

I do not think, like many in alternative health, that parasites are in every single person and cause every single problem all the time. That's stupid. I do think it's more common than we'd like to think, and I do think that you may have to perform the right tests to find evidence of them. Not all parasites are going to result in weight loss and that type of symptom pattern.

You can get parasites/worms from unclean situations, contaminated food, poor diet (high in refined carbohydrates and low in fiber and protein), a poor immune system or a low gastric acid barrier. Considering most people in our country pop antacids like candy and eat mostly refined garbage, the likeliehood of having parasites around seems reasonable to me.

Looking at the product you mentioned, I'm not terribly impressed by the overall profile of it. It has the right stuff in it, perhaps, but I doubt it has enough of it to do much. Here's a protocol that has been used by Australian herbalists with great success. I wouldn't do this without management from a doctor or herbalist who knows what they are doing. This is indicated for roundworms, pinworms and other tiny ones, but tapeworms and that sort of thing to be handled by herbs is kind of dangerous, so I would approach this sort of thing carefully.

My protocol is a 30 day regimen. It uses several types of antihelminthics (anti-parasite/anti-worm). The main product is called Wormwood Complex. Kerry Bone of MediHerb developed this product a decade ago on contract from an Australian company that wanted a natural-based lice shampoo. It was so successful that it became Australia's #1 lice shampoo. The components, minus the shampoo, are effective for internal worms and parasites, too.

Wormwood Complex contains Stemona root, Black Walnut green hulls, Wormwood herb and clove oil. If you, like Hammster, think that there is no research supporting the use of any of this because that's what the FDA forces companies to print on their labels, please email me and I will forward a PDF with all the research in it to you, all of which is from peer-reviewed clinical and scientific journals.

Anyway, here's whatcha do (under doctor supervision and after a correct diagnosis):
- for the first 10 days you take 4-6 tablets of Wormwood Complex and 4 tablets per day of Andrographis Complex (Andrographis, Echinacea, Holy Basil... email for studies if you think there are none) to boost immune system function. You also take 2 tablets per day of Vitanox away from the wormwood complex. Vitanox is an antioxidant, but is also high in tannins, which will burst parasite eggs. For really stubborn cases you can add 3 tablets of Garlic 5000mg, too, but usually it's not necessary.

- for the next 10 days take just the Andrographis Complex.

- After that repeat what you did for the first 10 days.

Twice during the first 10 days and twice during the last 10 days take 2-6 Colax before bed. It will cause a very loose stool the next morning, which will mechanically purge the dead worms and egg material. yuck is right!

Basically what you're doing is making a very, very hostile environment for the worms and attacking their eggs for 10 days. During the break, you may get some more hatching and some of the tough guys may still be around, then you hit them for another 10 days. It is effective, safe and scientifically proven to work if worms are present.

[ChristineVA]

I had an intestinal parasite once--giardia. Believe me, you will know it when you have one. I lost 25 lbs in two months and everytime I ate anything, I was in the bathroom within 20 minutes. Not fun.
Christine

[DocAgocs]

Giardia is a different beast altogether. Not all of them have the same effect, thank goodness! Same as when you have worms in your stool or popping out to say hello at night it's pretty obvious. When it's that obvious, it's easy to take care of them. When they aren't that obvious that's when they're a larger health problem in terms of chronic issues. I know herbalists who are great at treating juvenile rheumatoid arthritis doing nothing more than that protocol I posted above, for example. Who knows?

[ChristineVA]

Doc,
I agree with you. What I can stand to see is ordinary, uneducated lay people pushing "remedies" on people and they haven't even been tested. I think there's a lot of stuff that conventional medicine misses or ignores. Especially these days. If there's no money to be made on a treatment, then the research will be ignored.

I remember when I had giardia, I had a "friend" try to sell me nutritional supplements. I believe it was also the same one the original poster mentioned. I believe in alternative medical treatments but only from someone who has researched it, knows their products, and isn't involved in some sort of money-making, pyramid selling venture.

Christine

[gabbyh]

Doc, I was hoping you'd see this thread and respond:D

I'm very familiar w/ Great Smokies, so do you think it's a better idea to do a comprehensive stool analysis before doing a cleanse?

I will also check out the info from Standard Process/Medi-Herb as I now receive their info...thanks to you ;-}

~Gail

[emommy]

I certainly didn't mean to be a snob or a facsist. The fact remains, that I have reviewed thousands of stool slides for ova and parasites on both random and purged specimens. 99.9% of them are negative. Of those that are positive, at least half have a travel history outside of the US in the last 2 months. That's just hte plain facts.

I am not saying the US is perfect, nor sterile or pristine. I am just stating the facts as I know them from years of experience.

Please never, ever call me a facist again.

[DocAgocs]

I'm very familiar w/ Great Smokies, so do you think it's a better idea to do a comprehensive stool analysis before doing a cleanse?

I don't deal with GSDL, so I wouldn't know. Not a bad idea, probably. I prefer Diagnos-Techs, but I generally only do salivary hormonal testing if anything along these lines (not for parasites, just in general), so I can't tell you who the best lab for the GI tract stuff would be.

Emommy, I wasn't directing that statement to you personally. I'm sorry if it came out that way, but I was just saying that's the attitude in general. I value your expertise highly. In your opinion, why is it that a lab like GSDL can specialize in finding parasites, evidence of worms, etc whereas in your lab you find very little of it? Having your perspective on this would be very valuable. Sorry for the misunderstanding!

[ChristineVA]

Doc,
Do you think that the other labs (not Great Smokies) only do O&P tests versus further testing?

When I had giardia, several doctors ran the O&P test on me and it was normal. Well, apparently, the O&P misses giardia in like 75 percent of the cases since giardia "sheds" intermittently. My doctor finally decided to just treat me for it. Said if it was giardia it would stop and if it wasn't, that the medicine would have no effect. So do you think that Great Smokies has different methodology in their testing?
Christine

[emommy]

Examining a stool for Ova and Parasites is suprisingly Low-Tech, and has changed little over the years. Basically, a specimen is filtered and spun and the concentrate is examined for evidence of protozoa and the eggs of worms, and then another slide is stained with unconcentrated stool. There is skill in reading a slide, and quite a bit of luck is involved, too. For instance, if the parasitic load is low, you may have sampled a portion of the stool with evidence of a parasite, or not.

Like was mentioned, usually at least 3 stools should be collected over different days, because one specimen could be blatantly positive and the others are negative due to the intermittant shedding.

If there is a certain "critter" that is suspected, specific tests can be done which are a lot more specific, for instance antigen tests for giardia, cryptosporidium and e. histolytica. There are also special stains for microsporidium and cyclospora. Unfortunatley, it costs an absolute fortune to run all of these specific tests in a screening capacity, and you and your insurance company may not want that.

As for why our positivity rate appears lower, I'm not sure, and I guess without comparing the labs actual data, it's hard to say. I am thinking of "positives" as being just the pathogenic parasites, and not the protzoa we considered non-pathogenic or self-limiting like E. nana. Those non-pathogens more just signal that the person may have found contaminated water, etc, and may have picked up something more sinister in the process.

I'm sorry I got so inflamed. I guess I just read that all wrong.

[DocAgocs]

Emommy, thanks for the insight. I don't exactly how much GSDL charges for their bowel and parasite tests, but I have a feeling they cost a pretty penny. I would assume that, because this is their specialty, they probably are doing everything they can to determine if parasites and eggs or worms are in the samples, including stains, etc. The whole shebang.

Here is some insight from the materials I have from Diagno-Techs. DT is another functional medicine lab, but their specialty is definitely saliva testing, whereas GSDL is all about stools:

Cultures (Stool)
1. Yeast, fungal
2. Pathogen & flora cultures

Parasite Tests (stool)
1. Giardia
2. Cryptosporidium
3. Clostridium difficile

O&P Microscopy (stool)
1. Wet mounts
2. General Stain
3. Special stain
+ we report all visualized parasites

So, that's the stool battery, then they also do saliva testing for:


Roundworm (ascaris)- Microscopic egg detection is elusive because the time required from egg ingestion to shedding stool is 2-3 months. The saliva based SIgA test enhances detection of this worm.

Tissue worm (trichinella)- Saliva SIgA detection is used as the basis of our trichinella detection.

Toxoplasma- A chronic tissue parasite infection affecting 50-60% of the US population. Saliva samples are used to detect toxoplasma secretory antibodies.

Tapeworm- Saliva SIgA is used for detection.


So, according to what I understand, DT will essentially do the normal bowel type tests, stains, etc, as well as looks for occult blood, other evidence of pathogens of the GI tract, and couple that with Secretory IgA testing. The SIgA seems a little generic, so it looks like they're using that sort of as screening, then coupling the patient's symptamatology and the rest of the testing to come to a best guess.

DT is very pro-natural "treatment" of these things, so having an idea that "something is there" is important in that the treatment of most of these worms, parasites, fungi and yeast isn't all that different for different critters because the idea is to make the environment as hostile as possible for them, then replace the normal flora that should be there.

This is in direct contrast to the medical profession which will use a variety of medications specifically aimed at specific pathogens. Since the medications tend to carry some pretty nasty side-effects, it's a pretty darn good idea to know, without a doubt, what's there and how to deal with it.

Based upon having dealt with Diagnos-Techs myself and looking at Great Smokies Diagnostic Lab's website, I would probably send hormonal saliva panels, as I already do, to DT and stool samples/suspected parasite/worm cases to GSDL.