I was hoping to get some feed back to see if anyone has had a problem with thrush. I am currently close to a year out of treatment and just within the last couple of months I have had thrush mouth 3x's! Is this normal? Is it due to a dry mouth? I try and keep my mouth moist, drink water all the time, and I use the biotene spray which is on my night stand. I sleep with my mouth open, don't know why just do so I get really dry. I drink water in the middle of the night and use the Biotene spray. any feed back would be helpful. Currently I am using the Mycelex 10mg lozenge for treating the thrush. If this is a topic that has already been discussed, sorry for bringing it up again. But I am just worried.

I had problems with thrush for awhile and seemed to live on mystatin. It got significantly better after I bought a water pik which I used in addition to brushing. I'm not sure if the two are related, but just a thought that might help.

Donna

Thanks Donna for responding. Hey I will try anything at this time. My dentist a few years back recommended a water pik for dental care. One of my co-workers uses a water pik and really likes it better then brushing. (I think I would still brush.) So I might try the water pik. Thanks again. Take care.

Debbie

I use a water pik twice per day and still manage to occassionally end up with thrush. The water pik works great at removing anything your toothbrush can leave behind. My ENT gave me a prescription rinse to go with it.

Its not fun having thrush at all. Thrush is a virus. If you dont completely get rid of it the first time with medication, it will come back.

I'm almost 6 years out, had IMRT and about 80-90% salivary function return and I had thrush a couple of months ago.

Water Piks are a great idea but not a substitute for flossing. I use one all of the time and have a battery operated one, by Panasonic, for travel.

It's pretty easy to alter the pH in the mouth which opens the door for thrush.

i would suggest taking oil of oregano or olive leaf extract (in pill form) to rid the body of the yeast you are carrying in your gutt and then add probiotics to add good flora to your gutt. Those who dispute this works have not tried it, plain and simple. Using diflucan etc too rid the body of excess yeast is great too but for maintenance to keep it at bay ongoing, this works. It is happening because you have a yeast overgrowth in your system that needs to be gotten under control. Your treatments made you more inclined to suffer from it.

Also eating more veggies (raw, juiced or steamed is best) will help neutralize your system, giving less acidity for the yeast to work with and grow.

Sugar is what fungi lives on, so removing as much sugar, white flour, and fruit as possible from your diet will help to remove the yeast as it will not have anything to live on. (green apples are safe in the fruit dept)

Best wishes - I had thrush so bad that went undiagnosed for so long it got where I could not even swallow liquids... it can get serious if not tended to and it will keep coming back if you do noto treat the cause instead of the symptoms. And not always does it show up as white patches which is why mine was misdiagnosed for so long ... if your mouth is burning, it may well be thrush.


Also, to clarify something another poster said ... candida (yeast, thrush) is not a virus, it is a fungi. For this reason it is treated with antifungals. Fungi is very stubborn and will remain unless you get all layers of it. This is why you do things for maintenance after initial antifungal med treatment or it will continue to repeat itself every once in awhile ...

It also tends to come back every time I am put on an antibiotic so I sometimes take Diflucan when I take antibiotics. I am on a permanent does of Nystatin to keep thrush at bay on the prosthesis in my neck but still it comes back from time to time in my mouth, just burning, nothing white.

Where do I buy this oil of oregano? I need to try that.

Take care,
Eileen

Thrush can kill you if allowed to go unchecked and systemic. It starts in the mouth then goes to the esophogus, then into the stomach and then it can go systemic. It's very difficult to treat once it has gone systemic. I would use holistic and home remedies with extreme caution.

There was a long while, post Tx, that I was taking 400mg of Diflucan every day. A maintenance dose for H&N post Tx is Diflucan, 50-100mg/day.

AIDS patients take up to 800mg of Diflucan/day and that's just for maintenance.

By comparison a female yeast infection can be cured with 1 100mg Diflucan tablet (and it is the same fungi).

The candidiasis fungi is present in the mouth (and vagina) all the time. A normal immune system and pH keeps it in check. Dry mouth is a major reason for pH imbalance. Antibiotics alter the pH so that's another reason why a candida bloom happens.

I tried yogurt with acidopholis and it didn't change a thing. I found that Diflucan was the most effective in the anti-fungal group of "...azoles".

yes, it can be very dangerous if left untreated... and very uncomfortable.

my doctor told me that things such as yogurt with live cultures are good and she recommends them to use in conjunction with other treatment, they will not cure it on their own, it will just help get the good bacteria built up so you heal quicker and don't get a recurrence, hopefully. it is good to use WITH the other treatments like diflucan etc.

she also told me that doing ongoing maintenance doses of things like diflucan are counterproductive and make you more suseptible to another bout of the candida (thrush) because the thrush will actually become immune to it and use it as food, like it does sugar... so one would want to balance this with the ongoing problems one may encounter after treatment.

while the fungi is always present, it is the overgrowth that causes the problems and this is what things like oil of oregano and olive leaf can help keep under control. i use it daily and have no more problems with thrush and like i said i had it so bad it got where i could not even swallow... anf they used every pill they have at their disposal to get rid of the stupid stuff because it had such a stronghold by the time they figured out what it was (because there were no white patches as they look for). it was in my mouth, and down my esophogus.

*they have told me since, that this could have contributed to my diagnosis of cancer as well - so nothing to play with. While i will never know IF it was a contributing factor, I will always know it possibly was and that is enough for me, to hate the stuff with a passion.*

Maintenance doses of anti-fungals are usually for people with compromised immune systems, transplant patients and HIV patients fall into this category. Diflucan will never become a substitute source of "food' for candida. Candida is NOT a known contributor to cancer development. Here is the OCF page on Candida for more information http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/dental/candida.htm

sure seems to be a lot of conflicting info out there on this subject...

Question Brian : What is your thought on this :

it makes sense to me that a year and a half long battle of thrush could be a contributing factor when squamous cell carcinoma is found in the surface cells and all cells sluff off and grow back - and it is a mutation in this process that causes the problem of cancer...

They said even an ongoing problem of a misfitted denture can cause cancer because of constant irritation it causes ,... so if the skin is constantly irritated because of thrush - makes sense to me that this could have the same effect.

Thrush is commonly looked at as a side effect of the treatments for cancer, not as a cause of it ... so this is where the studies focus... but to my doctor it seemed obvious that there could be a connection, and a very strong one at that, because of the long process of irritation to the affected area.

contrary information while it is out there for every topic under the sun, it causes so much confusion in people wanting simple explanations... when one source says one thing and another says another ,... but I guess the case in point is - there is no simple answer and no one knows it all - and old thoughts on it are proven wrong just about every day when something new is learned so we are all students of this disease and have to balance the info we receive from any and all sources.

as far as resistance to the drug - this is becoming more and more of a problem, just as resistance to antibiotics is becoming more and more of a real problem. i am sure it will be more and more visible as more and more cases are reported. my doctor said it is most common in hiv patients who have long term treatments, but also happens more and more in cancer patients, the thrush becomes resistant to it and continues to grow.

Rita, I might be able to shed some light on this. Years ago OC was thought to be caused by irritation (sharp tooth, poorly fitting dentures etc.) This has fairly much been eliminated as a cause through more recent studies. Also years ago, it was thought to be caused by poor dental health care. This too has been discounted as a cause by more recent studies. I wonder if your doctor is still thinking about the earlier information.

Of course we can interject the idea that studies do not cover EVERY case of OC just the ones that were studied. That is not how statistics gathering works though. Further we could imagine that if alcohol is considered a cause and that it works possibly by thinning cell walls then abrasions too are affecting cell walls well.....we'll maybe never know.

Either way Thrush should not be put up with because it hurts!

Opinions are just that. Everyone, informed or not has one. If it has not be verified in a peer reviewed published study, it can be said to be anecdotal, (is see it occasionally and my experience tells me this MIGHT be happening) but that is far from being a fact. Squamous cell carcinoma occasionally occurs in beds of lichen planus, which is not a pre cancer. It never ceases to amaze me how many people then think that LP is a precursor OSCC condition. Two different and unique, non symbiotic, pathologies can occur in the same tissues, that does not mean one caused the other. Candida falls into the same line of thought. Think how many women develop chronic Candida infections (this is what a vaginal yeast infection really is) , many of which are very persistent and hard to eradicate. You do not see cancers developing in that population of women in those areas.

For your assumption about chronic irritation to be true, you would have to prove that chronic irritation causes a DNA mutation, that causes a malignancy. It would have to be consistently repeatable in a similar group of people. It is not. While chronic irritation causes cellular changes, it is not commonly known to cause mutanogenic ones. It certainly cause hyperplasia, and other defensive conditions in cells.

As far as yeast being hard to eradicate it is because it is just that Yeast a small single celled Fungi and they are so resistant to so many things. They are a parasitic organism and tend to affect skin by more so muccous membrane areas and arent known to have any relation to cancer

They are actually not parasitic in humans, they are symbiotic saprophytes. They actually perform a vital function while living with us. But like everything else in life, balance is essential. Out of balance they are dangerous, or at the very least, painful and harmful.

thanks i have no idea where doc got the info, on some of it I got the same opinion/info even from one of the docs at the UW when I mentioned what local doc said ... (when my prosthesis was needing refitted and causing bad irritation) so as I said - it makes it so confusing LOL ... anyways thanks for your explanations, your explanations sound much less scary i am just so glad we don't have to understand it to fight this nasty stuff...

happy new year!!

Hey,
Knowing that I posted something like 60,000 words very quickly here, I am sure much of it is unread; however I need to give you a serious account of this issue. (see: Gimme a kiss big boy!)

The thrush I had became unmanageable, tabs and rinses and drugs had become more on my daily intake than anything else. My wife had taken leave from her regular day job and taken a night job in a nursing home as a CNA. She has been in nursing for years, however was required to take yet MORE training by the nursing home mega corp.

She finds herself reading a section about treating thrush in nursing home patients. The recommendation was to stop all foods dairy, foods containing yeast and sugar. I was living on all of them, in one form or another.

She went out and got flavored soy milk and that was substituted for the whole milk I had been making �Vern Food� with. Continuing with the meds of course, the thrush vanished very quickly with the milk products absent.

The idea of yogurt seems to be replacing bad yeast with good? I am hoping to produce some valid documentation on the subject. However it did work for me. I remained clear of thrush during treatment even though I resumed the dairy products, I haven�t had any thrush in the year following.

As always, I am not a doctor and I do not play one on TV. However discussing this with your doctor might make the life a little easier.

UncleVern

I had a terrible case of thrush during and after treatment that was not responding to meds. I was finally told by one prosthodontist to avoid anything WHITE. Between milk, Ensure Plus, cream sauces over pasta, my entire diet was white. Once I stopped that, the meds worked and the thrush went away. White carbohydrates turn to sugar so they need to be avoided also.

Take care,
Eileen

Thrush...
Brian is absolutely accurate in his statements. The fungus that causes "Thrush" is part of our normal flora. It only becomes problamatic when the normal is disturbed and there is an opportunity for thrush to take over. It is easily cured when recognized.
Oral thrush or "candida albicans" is eliminated by daily Nystatin oral suspension rinses or for an immediate solution Diflucan can be prescribed. Thrush should not, if recognized, be a problem in any patient.
Cheers,
Mike

I keep a bottle of Nystatin handy at all times. When I see it starting I get on it right away.

Take care.. Diane