Carly’s Story (or, Why You Need to Become Your Own Doctor)
D-mannose
A couple days ago I ran into an acquaintance at the pool club. Her name is Rebecca and her daughter Carly was in the same group as my daughter in camp last summer. One day when we were waiting for our kids to get out of camp, she told me about Carly’s chronic Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) and how Carly’s doctor had prescribed antibiotics indefinitely to treat it, and said that if this course of action didn’t work, the next step would be to operate.
As a result of the long-term use of antibiotics, which kills the good bacteria in the gut that keeps the yeast and other bad guys in check, the bacterial balance in Carly’s stomach had gotten out of whack. With the mommy and daddy good bacteria out of the picture, the yeast were free to throw a wild house party, which resulted in Carly regularly getting yeast infections.
When Rebecca told me about this, I immediately suggested taking Carly off of sugar, gluten, and dairy, all of which feed the yeast. Kinda like adding lots of attractive teenage girls and alcohol to our metaphorical house party in her gut. But Carly was a four-year-old at the time, and if you don’t have kids or they’ve grown up and you’ve forgotten, I’ll just say that keeping a kid in modern America away from sugar is like keeping a mosquito away from a swamp in summer. So her mom didn’t find that to be a realistic option.
But I also remembered reading Suzanne Somers’ interview with Dr. Jonathan Wright in her book Breakthrough, where he talks about something called D-mannose as a natural way to heal bladder infections. I suggested this to Rebecca and told her she could pick it up cheaply at the health food store.
Apparently, 90 percent of bladder infections are caused by E. coli (not the killer mutant version, just the regular ol’ kind that’s found in everyone’s colon to help finish the digestion process).
But, when the bacteria gets into the bladder, it causes infection. The E. coli, it seems, have a Spiderman-like ability to cling to the inner lining of the bladder by sticking to the molecules of the simple sugar known as D-mannose. Here’s the story in Wright’s words:
Like any living thing, they love to reproduce, and they do, causing an E. coli population explosion, which from our point of view is an infection. The whole time, the E. coli cling like crazy to the D-mannose inside the bladder so they won’t get washed out or rinsed out with every urination.
But we can actually put E. coli’s love for D-mannose to good use! When a patient (usually a woman because women get more bladder infection than men) is given 3 to 5 grams of sweet powdery D-mannose (a safe, simple sugar that by now is found in virtually every health food store), only a small amount is metabolized. Most is “kicked out” through the kidneys into the ureters, then into the bladder, where the bacteria say “Party time! Look at all that delicious D-mannose!” They detach themselves from that little bit of D-mannose that is naturally in the walls of the bladder and they grab on to these great swirls of D-mannose coming into the bladder from the ureters. They float around enjoying all that D-mannose, and the next time the woman empties her bladder, the infection is literally rinsed away! She never had to go near an antibiotic, she’s better, and the E. coli are happy, too, wherever they go, surrounded by all that D-mannose. What could be better?
When Somers asked why everyone doesn’t know this, Dr. Wright said the following:
You know the answer, Suzanne…D-mannose isn’t patentable. You can get it at a compounding pharmacy or natural food store without any prescription. The patent medicine companies just aren’t interested. And antibiotics are such a great business. Just think of all the other drugs you need to take to combat the side effects and secondary infections created by the first antibiotic.
When we need them, we need them, but we only want to use them if we absolutely must. And in a case such as this, the alternative medicine (D-mannose) is a much better option.
When I saw Rebecca at the pool the other day, her face lit up and she exclaimed “Karen! D-mannose! It worked!” Apparently, after many more months on the antibiotics and several yeast infections later, Carly began to feel tingling and numbness in her hands and feet. Peripheral neuropathy – a side effect of the antibiotics. Rebecca called her doctor, who didn’t get back to her for two weeks and then suggested another medication to treat the neuropathy. It was then that Rebecca decided she’d had enough, remembered what I had suggested and gave it a shot. It worked immediately and Carly hasn’t been on antibiotics since. More importantly, she didn’t need the operation that her doctor had strongly encouraged by that time.
Doctors Don’t Know Everything
Why am I telling you this story? It’s not to pat myself on the back (though I did feel really awesome about having helped them so significantly with that little bit of information). It’s to illustrate that our doctors don’t know everything.
They are not magicians, they are detectives limited by the information they know and the information they choose to believe. They’re limited by the prejudices of the paradigm in which they operate. They’re limited by the political influence of Big Pharma and the health insurance companies. So although they may mean well, and I absolutely believe most doctors do, if you want to heal yourself, you can’t give all your power up to your doctors. You need to become your own detective, gather your own information, and go beyond the limitations of what your doctors are willing to believe to find the answers that will create dramatic shifts in your health.
Every ailment isn’t always as neatly and easily solved as the D-mannose-UTI secret, and MS is a very complex and often quite stubborn disease, as we all know. But little, pivotal pieces of information can add up to major improvements in your health. It’s for this reason that I’ve been busy putting together a free eight-week live interview telecall series with leading experts in the MS community. I’ll be telling you more about it in the coming weeks, but for now I’ll just say that I look forward to putting the wisdom of these experts in front of you so you don’t have to spend years wasting your time wading through the sea of voices to find the ones worth listening to.
One page in a book prevented Carly from being operated on. Maybe one sentence from someone with the right information can make a difference in your life.
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As someone in the biotechnology field, I’d like to add to that. It’s not simply that “Big Pharma” and health insurance companies influence healthcare for their own profit. They don’t intentionally keep it secret as Dr. Wright and Susanne Somers believe. For instance, doctors know about the benefits of cranberry juice in treating UTIs, and juice is also not patentable.
The medical institution is very slow moving and will not incorporate any treatment without rigorous studies proving both their safety and efficacy. Anecdotal evidence will never change the course of traditional western medicine, it must be supported by a controlled study. In the US, this is particularly stringent. For instance, the horrible birth defects, “flipper babies”, due to thalidomide happened in the UK because they only tested on guinea pigs, which showed no adverse effects. In the US, rats were tested as well, and they had terrible defects. As a result, thalidomide was not used in the US. Studies like this can cost millions of dollars to complete.
For academics to do these studies, they have to apply for grants. In order to get the grant, they have to justify the importance of the study. They can apply for government or private grants, but very few of these granting agencies see complementary medicines as worth funding. In addition, academics for the most part are interested in furthering their careers either by getting tenure, prestige, what have you. Usually this means discovery for things that don’t already exist. Investigating alternative treatments for illnesses that have traditional treatments will not get academics ahead in their careers.
The only other institutions capable of funding the millions of dollar studies are pharmaceutical companies. Most of the workers within these companies are loving people with families who actually want to help people too. But they are limited in that they work for a business and can’t investigate whatever they want to. A pharmaceutical company is a business, and it will not invest the millions of dollars necessary to rigorously study the effects of complementary medicine, such as D-mannose without seeing a return on their investment. And since they can’t patent it, they can’t get that return.
Doctors have seen adverse effects from some health supplements, and will not recommend these unless they are proven safe and effective, or both the side effects are well known and their potential interactions with prescription medication. Because so few are, many doctors don’t bother learning about them. If you look up D-mannose on physician websites, such as WebMD, you will see that they say “no scientific evidence to support…” and such. So it is a vicious cycle that will continue unless some humanitarian funds the research, or some academic decides to study it.
So it remains a secret, but not for the conspiracy reasons Susanne Somers and Dr. Wright would have us believe.
hi kris. thank you for your very well-written perspective on this. i think you make an excellent point. it’s easy to demonize Big Pharma but the truth is that the entire system needs to be changed to reorganize the incentives so that they are aligned with the patient. thank you for your input!