What is the difference between Yeast Infection and a Bacterial Infection?

Here’s a good question, an intelligent question. I like intelligent questions because they require me to really think about giving quite a reasonably good reply. This question comes from a lady in Australia. How do I know if I have a yeast infection or a bacterial infection? What is the difference? How can I tell how? How can the doctor tell?

It’s a tough one. It really catches people out and, in fact, it’s something I struggled with, too. To be quite honest, I don’t care what kind of infection you’ve got. All I care about is trying to find out what caused the problem and how I can fix it, how I can remedy the problem.

The two key things that you look at with people when they come to you presenting with problems are the signs and symptoms. I may have spoken to you about this before. Symptoms are very important to me. Symptoms are subjective; these are what the patients tell you. You can’t measure them. You can’t quantify them. You can’t see them. You can only go by what the person is telling you, what they’re experiencing, what they’re feeling; whereas, signs are something we can see with our eyes.

We can test. We can see cuts. We can see wounds, for example. We can see hair loss. We can see skin rashes. These are signs. Also tests can pick up things, but sometimes these things don’t match; the signs and symptoms don’t match. And with infections, it’s very difficult to try to piece the signs and symptoms together because both of them can create a similar outcome. Bacterial infections can create fevers in the body or temperatures that can create tiredness; all sorts of problems can occur, so there’s no clear-cut way really of finding out.

Some people will argue with me that there is, but in the end, it’s not really important. The important thing is basically to find out what got the person in this mess, help them overcome it, and prevent them from getting into this mess again.

So a couple of telltale signs that will determine the Candida infection will be the sugar craving. The craving for sugar is the blood sugar drops, particularly around meal times, they’ll have some food, they’ll go down really quick, they’ll develop gut problems quickly, many of them after meals. These are things. So look at the symptoms that are characteristic of Candida infection, which can point you in the direction of that person having Candida, the itching, the bloating, gas, craving for sugar, the vaginal infection, the jock itch, the toenail fungus, itchy anywhere on the body. It’s less likely that the person’s going to have itching in and around their body if it’s a bacterial infection, but it is possible.

But in the end what you’re going to find is that most people with a Candida infection will have a bacterial infection anyway, especially in their digestive system. There will be parasites and bacteria and yeast infection there. All of that needs treatment. Then it becomes less important to worry about what the person’s got.

After doing many, many thousands of stool tests, I can tell you that nearly every patient I see with a Candida infection, we can culture it and we can see it through a microscopy that that person will also have various kind of dysbiosis or SIBO, small intestinal bowel overgrowth. They’ll have bacteria there. Probably in about 15 or 20 percent of cases, there will be parasites like Blastocystis, Dientamoeba fragilis; they’ll be present there as well as the bad bacteria.

And the other thing that you probably haven’t even thought about is what about the good bacteria? Because people with bacterial infections may have not a bacterial infection, they may just have a lack of beneficial bacteria. And in that case, the bacteria that are generally okay like e-coli may become pathogenic or turn into criminals or “militants” as we call them today. Guys with their guns running around shooting. We may get that scenario as well.

As you can see, there’s a lot more at stake here than just determining whether they’ve got a bacteria or Candida affecting their body, and generally, most people will have both. When they’ve got a bacterial infection, there’s often an element of Candida. When they’ve got a Candida infection, there’s often a bit of an element of bacterial there. So the main thing is to treat through way of diet and lifestyle and targeted supplementation, and you’ll see all about that in my other videos.

Thanks for tuning in.