Greetings.
New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher, formulator of the Canxida
range of supplements.
Thanks for checking out my video.
Today, we're going to talk about die off.
Are you experiencing die off or what we call Herxheimer Reaction or are you experiencing
aggravation?
Let's just explain a little bit.
I'm going to read some out of my book and then I'm going to give you a little bit of
an explanation alongside.
Many people get confused.
When they feel worse as they start a Candida treatment or they push harder, they immediately
say, "I'm getting die off.
I'm getting die off.
That's what I read online.
That's what it is.
Can't be anything else."
Let me explain.
There are many types of aggravations a person may experience who comes to seek help of a
health care professional.
Some people come in with one or several pharmaceutical drug induced side effects.
Particularly after an antibiotic.
Others experience reactions when they stop taking drugs or changing brands of drugs or
supplements.
Some people experience strong reactions when they take a supplement or cut the dosage back
or switch to another supplement or combine two dietary supplements together.
Many people can potentially develop an aggravation at the beginning of natural medicine treatment
and this can be quite discouraging for some people.
Those who are used to conventional western medical treatment find the concept of feeling
worse before you feel better, a bit disturbing, and some find it even completely wacky and
having the "lulu" factor like being really stupid.
Particularly those who strongly adhere to the tenets of modern medicine.
Modern medicine believes that a diagnosis must first be made before treatment and then
the treatment is usually in the form of a drug that supposedly cures the complaint by
eradicating the symptoms.
What a load of crap!
You can't cure a fricking complaint by getting rid of a symptom any more than you can cure
serious bankruptcy by giving a credit card to someone.
You'd have to be nuts in the head to think about that.
Getting rid of a symptom does not equate to curing a disease.
Have a look at the World Health Organization's definition of what real health means.
It doesn't mean an absence of symptoms.
It means feeling totally flaming awesome, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally,
structurally, on many different levels having amazing health.
That to me is really good health.
Not just "Oh, my headache's gone.
I must be in really good health."
That's not good health at all.
Western medicine's idea of what good health means is a little bit different from what
people like me believe the concept of good health really means.
Aggravations can come about for many different reasons and here are six examples of common
reactions I see with patients.
Number one � drug side effects that we call iatrogenic disease.
Number two � coming off any medications or detoxing from pharmaceutical drugs.
It also means coming off any dietary supplements or increasing dosages or swapping brands as
I mentioned.
Number three � a change in diet after commencing treatment.
Very common.
If you make dietary changes, it's not die off at all.
Many people have this.
They contact me.
"I'm getting terrible die off.
What's wrong with me?
Oh, by the way, I've stopped drinking all alcohol.
I don't drink caffeine anymore.
I've got anti-gluten, anti this, anti this, anti that and I feel like crap.
What's wrong with me?
Must be die off."
No.
It's not die off.
It's because you made way too many changes way too quick.
It's not a good thing to do.
If you first start an exercise program and you go to a gym, would you spend four hours
in the gym doing 300 different exercises and then two days later, "Oh, my god.
I'm so sore.
Why am I so sore?
It shouldn't be like this.
I only spent four hours in the gym the other day.
I should have no pain in my body."
Well, if you think about it, it's pretty logical isn't it?
If you're going to make any kind of change, particularly when you get to your 40s or 50s
or 60s, you need to do it a little bit more slowly than if you're a teenager.
When you're 15 or 20 going into a gym is an entirely different experience.
When you're going into a gym when you're 40 or 50 like me.
When you're going through a diet change at 40 or 50, it's an entirely different experience
than when you're making a diet change when you're a young kid.
Why is that?
Well, there are a lot of reasons why that is.
One of the primary reasons I believe is because their organs are in a totally different state
of health and aging as we get older.
We tend to have different stresses that affect us.
We've got different kinds of bacteria in our gut and enzymes don't work quite as well.
I believe our stomach and pancreas and small intestine function slowly, slowly, slowly
will go down as we get older.
It's much more perky and more active and has much more power when we're younger to help
us digest food quicker.
As we age, that all changes.
You take that into account.
It's very important to do that.
If you have a look at some of the research done in the state, for example, the Center
for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, they'll tell you that your immune function declines
between one to three percent per year beyond 40.
That's just by default.
Your kidneys age.
Your liver ages.
Everything ages, so you need to take that into account.
Number four � I think we already mentioned.
Combining several different treatments, drugs, supplements at the same time.
Number five � Improperly combining drugs and natural medicines at the same time.
Very common.
Number six � Cleansing reactions of the body after commencing natural medicine treatment.
Oftentimes this will be drug residues clearing from the body.
So the liver and kidneys in particular have very powerful detoxification systems.
So as soon as you start drinking more juice or more water or taking some vitamins or minerals
like B vitamins or magnesium, they will upregulate cleansing responses and that can make you
feel awful.
You can feel tired and have a bad headache and feel washed out, have sore muscles, bad
breath, coated tongue, bowel change, farting like a horse, bloating.
All these things can occur just by taking some dietary supplements.
Are you killing Candida?
Is the Candida dying and making you sick?
No.
It is not the Candida.
It is an upregulation.
In my experience, the most common reason why people feel bad when they start treatment
is because the body is finally starting to cleanse.
I wrote about this extensively in my book.
If you've got a house that's dirty internally, now we all know that we should do regular
cleaning.
My wife's always vacuuming the room.
It drives me nuts sometimes.
I'm trying to work.
The machine is going.
So it's important to keep rooms clean, but we never clean the inside of our body.
So when we do finally clean the inside of our body, dust starts coming up.
When you think about it, theoretically when you think about it, dust will come up in the
air.
Dirt will start moving around.
We'll start coughing with dust.
Internally, our body is getting all that crap moving into the bloodstream and that is affecting
our cells and that's what's making us feel bad.
It makes sense when you do any kind of internal change for you to feel bad.
You may notice I've not mentioned the word "die off" reaction.
That is Candida yeast die off in the body due to effective Candida treatment.
In my experience, many people incorrectly perceive aggravations after commencement of
yeast infection treatment as die off and it's not really die off.
I found that these aggravations are often due to a combination of several factors and
cannot be blamed purely on die off.
Many diseases often get somewhat worse with effective treatment for many reasons as I've
outlined before.
Unfortunately, we live in an age that seems to be obsessed with speed.
Everything has to happen now.
It seems as if we can't seem to wait until tomorrow for anything.
As technology increases and everything speeds up, so do the expectations of healing our
bodies.
As a result, we expect a quick fix and conventional medicine certainly trumps here.
It gets rid of symptoms, more likely suppresses them, so the disease goes somewhere else and
gets buried deep inside our body.
Do you have a rash on your skin?
Take this antifungal cream.
It will go deeper when you apply that cream and will not be cured by any means, but will
temporary disappear, which is a cure according to the dermatologist or the skin specialist.
Is it any wonder we get aggravations once we actually stop these kind of suppressive
treatments and all these hidden and buried symptoms rise to the surface of the body?
Drugs taken even many years ago will leave residues that can remain deeply buried inside
your body and these toxins can and will resurface at inconvenient time.
They'll often resurface when you try to improve your health by natural means.
A die off reaction is not necessarily what you're experiencing.
So how do you know to distinguish between a die off reaction and an aggravation?
A true die off reaction is seriously powerful and debilitating.
I have seen serious die off reactions in the clinic to the point when the patient was put
in the emergency room and put in a hospital bed for a week.
It can rarely happen to that extreme like an anaphylactic kind of a shock.
But a true die off reaction is not that hard to pick from a disease aggravation.
The first thing I will look for generally is how severe the Candida is in the patient's
body initially.
If they particularly show a very, very high Candida count on culture in the stool test
like a 3+, this is why I look stool testing by the way, I totally discourage those people
to do a very strong powerful anti-Candida treatment up front.
Now you can understand why I really like stool testing.
When a patient comes in with a low count of Candida or no culture but we find the dead
yeast in the body excreted in the stool, we can go a bit harder.
If we find a high count of Candida, we have to come in with low treatment.
If we come in too hard with all guns blazing, that is the person who is going to get seriously
bad die off.
If you do experience serious reactions when you start a very powerful treatment, it means
that you had very high Candida often to start with.
Especially, if you've got major vaginal thrush or major jock itch or you've got really bad
toenail fungus or athlete's foot.
If you've got huge amounts of bloating and gas and strong sugar cravings, if you've got
the very powerful Candida symptoms at a very high intensity, there is a high chance that
when you do then counter that with a very powerful treatment instead of a mild treatment,
you'll experience die off.
Now you can understand the difference.
If you can really relate, if you've done my yeast infection quiz at yeastinfection.org
and you can strongly relate to Candida, you feel you've got these symptoms in high intensity,
then you'd have to be crazy to counter that with a very powerful treatment.
It's not a good idea.
Strong force with strong force opposing results in massive aggravation.
Not a good idea.
Have a think about that.
Subscribe to my channel for more videos please and make sure you do my quiz.
Check out my dietary supplements if you like at Canxida.com.
Thanks for tuning in.