Need Advice

A colon cleanse is not a good course of action, because it doesn't get rid of your bacteria; it's nothing but a laxative. You might flush some bacteria out, but because bad bacteria is notoriously hard to get rid of, you're more likely to flush out what good you have in there, I think, than to flush out bad.

Has a doctor told you that you have abnormal amounts of bad bacteria? We all have some, but it's only a problem if we have too much. The probiotics will help, but the general course of action if you have a bad bacteria overgrowth problem is to take specific antibiotics (not just any antibiotic will do) and to also take large doses of probiotics. The bad bacteria can be hard to dislodge and most people would rather do a course of antibiotics and be hopefully be done with it; taking nothing but probitoics may require many months to overcome the bad bacteria, if it can even do it alone.

Yes, antibiotics kill off good and bad bacteria in your guts, and yes, your old regimen of antibiotics may have caused the problems you have now. There's actually something known as antibiotic-associated diarrhea and antibiotic-associated colitis, and both are caused by the antibiotics causing an imbalance in your intestinal bacteria. However, even though antibiotics may have caused the problem, it is usually to them that you have to look to also fix the problem. Only this time, take lots of probiotics so you can get yourself back in balance. Now that I've learned how antibioitcs and probiotics work, I never take an antibiotic for anything unless I am also on a probitotic pill at the same time, and then I take at least one Activia yogurt a day for about three weeks after I stop the antibiotics to get things straightened out in there.

If you have had yeast problems in the past, that's a pretty good indication you have a bad bacteria problem now. When you have an overgrowth of yeast or bad bacteria in one spot in your body, it almost always shows up somewhere else too (like your intestines).

If your doctor doesn't trust your test results, ask him for a breathalyzer test. You just breathe into a machine and it can tell by the gases you expel if you have too many bad bacteria in there farting the wrong kinds of gas. Also, someone on here mentioned getting her stool sampled for yeast (by a GI); I suppose it comes out when there's too much and shows up in a sample, like the test you did on yourself. So, it's not crazy to think that your stools can say you're out of balance with the bacteria.

Of course, if you are taking probiotics, this can skew both tests. Don't take probiotics for several days before another stool or breathalyzer test. Stop a full week before, I'd say. See, there's only so much room to live in your digestive tract. Put in a lot of good bacteria and they will either come out for lack of room to live, or they will push out the bad bacteria and take their place (and thus give you stools full of bad bacteria). Same thing with analyzing your breath; you don't want good bacteria that are floating around loose in there, without a home, to skew your results and make it look like there's more good and less bad in there than there really is. It only counts if the bacteria have a home.