01/09/2024
Do you suffer from chronic digestive woes? You may fall into a few of the scenarios below for which digestive testing can be quite helpful.
Maybe you’ve tried a candida diet or a parasite cleanse and it did little to nothing for you, that may not rule out ongoing overgrowth, but it may be the case you were treating with the wrong products. Functional stool testing will identify any “bad” microbes and also culture them in a Petri dish to find out what agents work the best to kill them off.
Another possibility is maybe it’s not so much the microbes, but the strength of your digestion and immune system that lead you susceptible to gut troubles. Again a good functional stool test will help you identify this.
I rarely see patients come back positive for parasites, I believe this is often over emphasized in some health circles. However, if you’ve spent a lot of time traveling abroad, in the back woods or around animals you will find yourself in a higher risk category. Most of the time however digestive imbalances are caused by bacteria and fungal imbalances.
We can’t forget about insufficiency dysbiosis. This is when the trouble may not lie in too many bad microbes but in too little beneficial ones. Patients who have a very limited diet with minimal fibres may find themselves in this category. Especially those with IBS who feel awful after eating high fibre foods. We can strategically work around this.
Maybe you don’t suffer from many digestive symptoms but want to look deeper into the root causes of your chronic health conditions. Our digestive health and microbiota has been linked to skin conditions, mood imbalances, autoimmune progression, hormone balance, chronic pain and fatigue to just list a few!
Stool testing is not always needed or financially available for all. That’s when seeing a well educated naturopathic doctor can help you sort through the pesky symptoms you’ve been experiencing. In my opinion, nothing over rides a good patient intake, manual exams and clinical experience. In the end, we’re treating a patient and not a sheet of paper with results. With a good ND you’ll feel heard and included in the detective work to solve your case.
