Fungus 101

by Doug A. Kaufmann

Did you know that the first diagnosed disease was a fungal infection?

France, where the silk industry was strong in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suffered a tremendous blow when the silkworms began dying in droves. Without silkworms, there would be no silk and without silk, there would be no employment. One of the brilliant scientists of the time actually diagnosed the silkworm disease as "muscardine," today known as a fungal infection of silkworms caused by the fungus Beauveria bassiana.

The point of all of this is simple. Although it was the first germ diagnosis ever made, today fungus is rarely thought of in clinical medicine. This is most unfortunate, because many researchers, including this author, believe that serious diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancer very often have a fungal root cause. This being the case, a very valid argument can be made for the use of antifungal remedies as health enhancing, prescriptive or otherwise.

One of the early drugs developed by Pfizer for use in AIDS patients was Diflucan. Within a few years, however, not only infectious disease doctors were prescribing Diflucan. Ironically, Diflucan proved itself to gynecologists also because of its ability to cure vaginal yeast conditions with one single pill. Think about that. Diflucan kills yeast and fungi and it was developed specifically to treat AIDS patients. What, then, must be the cause of AIDS? BINGO! Today, every oncologist in America prescribes antifungal medications for what they believe to be "secondary" yeast infections. What if the yeast infections were primary and mimicked cancer?

Never let it be said that this column doesn't provoke the thought process!

There are millions of Americans who I believe would benefit tremendously by taking antifungal remedies, but one major problem exists-physicians rarely prescribe them because they feel that infectious agents are almost exclusively bacterial or viral. Through the years, when symptoms of unknown etiology (cause) exist, I have asked hundreds of physicians to prescribe a nontoxic, no-side-effect drug called Nystatin in hopes of reversing the symptom or disease in the patients. Rarely has this occurred, however, for two reasons: So often, the prescribing physician does not believe in the fungus-disease phenomenon, and also he is concerned that Nystatin may harm the liver of the patient. The fungus-disease link is very well documented in the scientific literature, the same literature that also documents the harmlessness of Nystatin.

What is an educated patient to do when an antifungal approach seems so logical to them, yet their physician will not prescribe antifungal drugs? First and most importantly, understand why the physician will not prescribe antifungal drugs, because there may be a very good reason. Ask the doctor if he would object to your trying the antifungal diet and natural, nontoxic antifungal remedies. Most docs will not object, believing that these antifungal remedies are not as strong as antifungal drugs; yet, as you will read, some are more capable of killing fungus than even the most powerful antifungal drugs.

Visit Doug Kaufmann at www.knowthecause.com.