by Carmel Reid, Somerset, UK

We can suffer from a number of different fungal infections in our bodies and two that are prevalent are ‘Thrush’ and ‘Athlete’s Foot’.

Many women experience occasional bouts of a common yeast infection known as vaginal thrush, caused by Candida albicans yeast (a single-cell fungus).

It causes itching, irritation and swelling of the vagina and surrounding area, sometimes with a creamy white cottage cheese-like discharge.

Vaginal thrush is fairly harmless, but it can be uncomfortable. It can also keep returning – this is known as recurrent (or complicated) thrush.(1)

We can buy creams over the counter at a pharmacist that help to suppress the symptoms, but my question is: Does it get rid of the underlying cause?

You can also get oral thrush: oral thrush is a yeast infection in the mouth. Symptoms of oral thrush include sore, white patches in the mouth, an unpleasant taste in the mouth, a burning sensation affecting the tongue and problems swallowing. Oral thrush can affect people of all ages, including adults with weakened immune systems.

Candida albicans is one of the ‘normal’ flora that live in our gut, but becomes a pathogen if there is a disruption in the balance of microorganisms in your gut. This balance of ‘gut flora’ is a crucial part of your immune system and digestive health, but it can easily be lost during periods of stress or after a course of antibiotics. When this balance is lost, the colonies of Candida albicans are able to expand rapidly until they involve a large portion of your gut, overwhelming the other flora and causing disease.(2) Continue reading “Fungal infections and food” →

by Leigh Matson, London, UK

Recently I have been looking at my expectations, about myself, others, life and situations and what I have been finding is that these expectations directly have an impact on my health.

One such example is that I called work today to say I would not be in due to a viral illness and while I was on hold waiting to speak to my manager, all sorts of thoughts came flooding in. Expectations of ‘I need to be apologetic,’ ‘I need to show that I will be back into work tomorrow, no wasting time ‘being ill,’’ ‘I can’t be ill because work won’t be able to manage without me’ etc. As well as the judgments of ‘you should feel bad because now you’ve placed more work on people’ …you get the idea. All in the space of being on hold on the phone, and in my body my heart was racing at a thousand miles an hour. This made me feel even more drained and worse than I did before.

Continue reading “Expectations and Illness” →

by Joel Levin 

To lose a friend or loved one through suicide is traumatic for all who are involved. A few years ago a close friend of mine committed suicide and the ripples are still felt today. From time to time you review past conversations with the person, wondering what signs might have been missed and if more could have been done.

There is rightly much effort placed on understanding and preventing suicide, but what is unclear to me is why these efforts focus on only one form of suicide.

It would seem that most of suicide prevention focusses on the ‘acute’ cases; the cases where someone makes a choice, on some level, to end their life in an abrupt way.

Calling it a choice is not intending to minimise the anguish some people feel in the lead-up to that choice; in fact, contemplating the level of anguish one must be feeling to reach that point, helps me understand the choice all the more.

But there is still another form of suicide that goes under the radar. What is this other form? Continue reading “Slow suicide is still suicide” →

by Michael Nicholson, Company Director and Business Owner, Somerset, UK

I was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer. It’s not something that I felt and there was no pain, but I had been getting very tired during the previous 12 months, so when the diagnosis was announced it was no huge surprise. I’d known it was time to stop because my body was saying so. Immediately prior to the diagnosis I had just planned my month ahead and it involved being in Germany for 5 days, Greece for 5 days, Kent for 2 days, possibly Spain for 4 days, London for 4 days and various meetings elsewhere – leaving only about 6 days at home. It was an insane schedule and it needed to stop. And by stopping, I suddenly realised that I had the most amazing blank canvas and I could work my magic on it in whatever way I truly chose to live.

The process of discovering the cancer started with seeing a consultant about the PSA levels that had been recorded at my regular medical check ups, which I had been persuaded to have following a heart attack three years earlier. During this time I had become open to finding out more about my health, which as a man was not something that I had been previously inclined to consider – so this in itself was a true change and fundamental in setting me on the best course to detect and treat early the cancer that presented.

Continue reading “A Blank Canvas Waiting – Life After Prostate Cancer” →

By Joan Calder, retired/volunteer work, Frome, UK. 

Hello! I am called Pityriasis Lichenoides by the medical profession, although they freely admit they do not know what causes me to exist. It’s a long complicated name but it makes me feel important and I had a big presence in the body where I have lived for eight years, in fact, you could say, I have been in control of the situation during that time — up until now.

I was born in the gut of a female human; my parents are of unknown origin, although there is a possibility it started with my hostess’s inflammatory reaction out of a response to Father Virus or Mother Bacterium. This is not surprising considering the way she maltreated her body, and her emotional reactions to everything around her. I lived quite happily in those long dark serpentine tubes for a long time until one day she met what is called a Gentle Breath Meditation and started to practise it.

Continue reading “A skin rash tells its story.” →

by Chan Ly, Commerical Interior Designer, Brays Creek, NSW

Throughout my adult life I had always considered myself as being healthy. I thought I was looking after myself by eating healthy food. I never smoked, drank alcohol, coffee or took any drugs. I felt my body was in good shape and I had always been petite and I would often over eat at meal times because I wouldn’t put on extra weight. The first time I ever had to go into hospital was to give birth to my beautiful son when I was 25. My entire pregnancy was amazing; I felt a little bit of morning sickness during the first trimester only, and labour was natural and fairly quick.

I had my second pregnancy 3 years later. I went through a very different experience. I had suffered from severe morning sickness throughout the first trimester. I was mostly dehydrated and I constantly ate to try to get rid of the nausea. I was working full time and living on a boat with my partner and son. I struggled through the first 3 months and felt so much better when the morning sickness subsided. During the second trimester, I was feeling more tired than usual and I went to all the regular check-ups at the hospital. It was a standard procedure at 26 weeks of pregnancy to do a glucose test to check for diabetes. When the results came back, I got a call from the nurse while I was at work to tell me that I was just slightly over the borderline of being classified as having gestational diabetes. I didn’t quite understand what this all meant at the time, how it all worked and what I was going to enter into. I just remember getting off the phone and crying. I cried, not because I was afraid of having gestational diabetes, but because I was disappointed and felt extremely sad that my body wasn’t coping with the pregnancy. I thought I was healthy and well, but now my body was telling me something different. I was under the illusion that I was very healthy because I had never experienced any illness or disease, until now. Continue reading “Gestational Diabetes” →

by Eva-Maria Anja Daniela Förtsch, M.Sc.Klin.Psych., Psychologist, Neuropsychologist, Psychotherapist, University Lecturer, Bochum, Germany

Hello. My name is Eva-Maria. Lovely that you choose to read these lines. If you read this because you have cancer, your life might not be easy right now. Perhaps you are worried, in anxiety, angry, sad or even in desperation. If yes, I am totally with you because I have also gone through that. But also if you don’t have cancer and you are just interested, I would like to invite you to read on and feel into what it might offer to you. In the following I want to share with you my experiences with cancer and how it changed my life and my relationship with my body through a big clearing and healing process.

The Diagnosis

I was diagnosed with a very dangerous form of skin cancer (melanoma) when I was 28 years old. This diagnosis came all of a sudden, after the removal of a birthmark on my upper back in between my shoulder blades. When I heard the word “cancer”, I was shocked. Panic arose in me and countless thoughts flooded my mind – and not a single one of them helped me to cope with the situation; all of them were full of anxiety. I was frightened of what would happen next, of the cancer spreading in my whole body, of chemotherapy and of dying. I already saw myself in hospital, thin, pale and with no hair, believing that I would not have much time left. The emotions coming up were overwhelming. I had already spent so much time in hospitals and had had so many surgeries in my life. Hospitals were horrifying to me and reminded me of much pain, anxiety, sadness and helplessness. ‘Why again me?’ ‘This was not fair!’ ‘Why can´t I have a healthy body like others at my age?’ These thoughts did not stop and my anxiety grew.

Although I am a successful psychotherapist and well-trained at supporting others in dealing with their difficulties, I had no idea how to cope with this situation. Continue reading “Congratulations! You have Cancer” →

By Lee Green, Business Owner, Melbourne, Vic

The picture of the traditional family doctor is well known to us all – a General Practitioner that has a history of the family and is well versed in the ailments of all generations. This role is often depicted in period dramas, especially in well to do families of old – the visiting practitioner being the authority figure that knows ’health,’ or seemingly so, as is portrayed.

Interestingly, as illness and disease climb through the roof, the pressure on our worldwide medical systems is such that they veer closer to collapse – in effect a breakdown of a system that has been essentially supporting us to get on and function – the same system as portrayed by the family GP of old that we have given our power away to and expect to fix us and ready us for the next thing to do.

We have essentially made the role of the GP the first line of support – we take along our ailing bodies and ask for help. The appointments are often short, there is often a wait, and the GP may or may not be having a good or bad day; how they look after themselves in their important role of looking after other people is a key component to this particular element.

Another one being how we walk into the surgery ourselves.

Continue reading “The Family Doctor” →

 by Liane Mandalis, Possum Creek, NSW, Australia

My whole life I have felt trapped in my body. Now, I know that sounds a bit strange, but this is how it has felt for me. Bodies are dense, they get sick, they are subject to abuse both from ourselves and from others. In short – they get hurt and the pain goes deep. If I choose to not connect too deeply then I won’t get hurt, right? Wrong.

I have spent a lifetime fighting my body and perceiving it as some ‘enemy’ that needed to be at best conquered and at worst abandoned. I was under the belief that our bodies let us down; they shake, they tremble, they vomit, they cry, they bleed, they break, they shut down, they faint, they get SO exhausted… Basically, my body did not feel like a safe place for me to be, but seeing as I had nowhere else to go, the only option was to ‘grin and bear it’. And so I did, through the many ailments that would come and seemingly go, only to come again. Nothing too serious to warrant immediate medical attention, but enough to leave me feeling depleted, depressed, disconnected (but from what?), anxious and exhausted. At one stage it all felt ‘too much’ and I suffered from bouts of anxiety and panic attacks. I was a nervous wreck, ever ready to fight or take flight. Continue reading “My Body and the Body of God” →

By Carmel Reid, Somerset, UK

I am an engineer, and I have come to realise our bodies are amazing pieces of engineering, with extraordinary delicacy in the way our various systems keep our bodily functions in balance, and I have come to truly appreciate the exquisite instrument we live inside every single day!

In 2002 I was noticeably breathless at the smallest exertion, like climbing a flight of stairs, and my major muscles were weak – with my arms I could not lift my own body weight on parallel bars at a children’s playground and with my legs I could not stand up from a squatting position and my hands were very shaky. My GP checked me for asthma by inviting me to blow into a tube, but I had been attending singing workshops and my lung capacity was pretty good, so he suggested I might have a thyroid problem and gave me a blood test, thinking, as I was overweight at the time, that my thyroid was underactive.

As it turned out, my thyroid was hyperactive; I had a swelling on the right side of my neck and a radioactive iodine test showed a ‘hot nodule’ in the thyroid gland. Then in 2003 on a visit to the gym, my heart rate showed up at 166 on the cycle machine, and a further visit to the doctor gave me a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. He explained that hyperthyroidism can cause weakening of the major muscles (which explained my weak arms and legs) and can also cause atrial fibrillation (irregular heart rhythm). This can lead to clots forming in the heart, which can then cause a stroke, and he recommended I take aspirin to thin my blood.

Continue reading “Simple Lifestyle Changes Help Heal Hyperthyroidism” →