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Daniel's Story

Below, Daniel uses himself as an example, to show you the processes of diagnosis undertaken:

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Age 1-10

  • Straight out of the womb I did not want to breast feed (I was a little bugger even back then). Breast is indeed best as every baby is born with a leaky gut and it is the colostrum in mother’s milk that helps heal it ready for solids and the various infections that twill inevitably come our way as we get older.

  • Repeated urinary tract infections and antibiotics (UTIs are often a sign of candida infections)

  • Repeated antibiotics as a child for a suspected case of bacterial meningitis 

  • Mumps, Chicken pox and Measles

 

Age 10-20

  • Family stress as my parents divorced mixed in with the usual angsts of being a teenager

  • The mandatory STD associated with university life and another course of antibiotics to get on top of it

  • A fungal foot infection aged 18 that would just not shift

 

Age 20-30​

  • I began dancing and training people so I began a 100 hour work week that lasted for over 3 years.

  • I began to get acid reflux

  • A touring lifestyle that involved late nights and poor diet as we lived out of hotels (and night clubs!)

  • Oral thrush infection and white coated tongue

  • Sore throats

  • Multiple joint pain and consecutive injuries

  • Chronic fatigue

  • No longer able to get enough adrenalin in my body to get me up on stage and through a performance

  • I had to retire from dancing

 

Age 40+

  • Brain fog

  • Gut issues: bloating and IBS symptoms

  • A voyage of self discovery to get on top of things.

  • The thought I would have to settle for just feeling older and this was the nature of being over 30

 

Tying my case history together-

My presenting problem was chronic adrenal fatigue and discomfort which meant I could no longer do what I loved. Scouring through my timeline, the first whispers were already there by the time I was 2 weeks old. 

My gut never got a chance to heal and much of my mother’s gut microbiome (the bacteria that lives  in harmony with us) never made it across (if you fancy a great read on the topic I would thoroughly recommend 10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness) A good dose of antibiotics made sure that any ‘good’ bacteria became collateral damage leaving what should have been a sterile small intestine with the starts of candida overgrowth. The signs of Candida overgrowth are urinary tract infections, thrush, fungal foot infections, brain fog, and a white coated tongue – a clean sweep! 

Candida overgrowth then affected my digestion by creating lesions in the gut wall (leaky gut) allowing undigested proteins to enter my bloodstream causing inflammation and autoimmune responses. Add in high stress (physical and emotional) and I was the perfect storm for a catabolic stress response which broke down anything made from collagen (my predisposition to injuries and further gut wall breakdown). 

My solution at the time was to increase my coffee intake and sugar intake to get me up in the morning and keep me going into the evening. My friendly Candida loved the added sugar it was being lovingly fed and the coffee further stressed my adrenals. The end result, my adrenals went on strike.  In order to prioritize survival my adrenals sacrificed the production of sex hormones (inability to gain muscle plus the libido of a door mat) and they struggled to make cortisol causing uncontrolled inflammation, whole-body joint pain, and the inability to get the adrenalin needed to get me up on stage each night. What a mess. 

What was the medical solution – corticosteroids and the chronic pain clinic to understand the complex nature of pain so that I could live with it in harmony? In other words: disconnect that flashing light! Still being the obstinate bugger who refused to breastfeed aged 1 week I chose instead to look under the bonnet.

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