Parasites: What You Don't Know Can Hurt You
By Sari Huhtala
Coping with a bout of diarrhea for a week is a challenging experience, let alone 10 years, but that’s just what Lauretta Leblanc endured before getting to the root cause of her symptom. The diarrhea symptom began surfacing in 1995 on an occasional basis, then progressively worsened month to month and year to year, Leblanc says. “I had diarrhea most of the time – between meals, if I drank something, if we were traveling I had to stop, and this went on for about 10 years,” Leblanc recalls.
She hadn’t been overly concerned, she says. Afterall, the medical specialist she had seen on occasion hadn’t found any presence of disease and wasn’t overly concerned because she was not losing weight and there was no pain present. The only symptom, really, was diarrhea. Although, reflecting back, she says she knows she was much more fatigued back then, but rationalized that perhaps it was due to her job at the time and hadn’t really connected the fatigue to illness of any sort. “I was starting to get black circles under my eyes, likely from dehydrating,” but again, she hadn’t given it much consideration at the time. “ was already a healthy eater, and then I just made some small changes like switching from whole wheat to whole grain products” to see if dietary changes would make a difference.
But her plight worsened over time to the point where she didn’t even want to leave her house. “Whatever I ate just went right through me,” Leblanc says. “At the end I was really sick and I became really worried. One day I remember I went to the bathroom 11 times. Halfway through a meal I’d have to run to the bathroom. When I started vomiting I remember looking at my husband and saying “What’s wrong with me?”” And yet, conventional medicine had no answers for her. That’s when she opted to have live blood analysis performed.
And that is when she realized that her body had been a host to a parasite for 10 years that had been progressively growing inside of her. “I was diagnosed with a parasite,” Leblanc says. “(The practitioner) showed me the live blood sample and I could see a long parasite.” The practitioner informed her that in the long-run, without treatment of the parasites, damage to her system would have been extensive enough that she would have required a colostomy bag.
One often thinks of the possibility of getting parasites when out of the country, but Leblanc says she had never left the province. She was told it had likely come from a vegetable or a salad she had eaten. Her course of treatment involved drinking ParaZap parasite cleansing tea, B complex vitamins, Vital Greens and enzymes and making dietary changes like eliminating milk from her diet and reducing red meat consumption. Within one month her health improved dramatically and her follow-up live blood analysis showed no presence of parasites.
After years of struggling with bowel problems, a diagnosis of diverticulitis, doctors suggesting surgery to remove portions of his bowel and just plain old feeling lousy all the time, Art Perron, a self-proclaimed “troubleshooter,” has taken up a new mission in life: do whatever it takes to bring his health back naturally and ensure his kids are healthy for life.
Perron, a 44-year-old Sudbury resident, admits a couple of years ago he lived his life much like others – never paying attention to the small signs and symptoms in his body, buying into conventional medicine rhetoric and living at the hands of pharmaceuticals only ever masking symptoms rather than addressing the root cause of symptoms and eating processed non-food items day to day. After a life-altering event two years ago, Perron decided he’d had enough.
Now, armed with knowledge and research from a hundred plus documentaries he’s viewed, dozens of books and resources on everything from genetically modified foods to water and food sources, attaining and maintaining good health is his sole focus. Shifting his diet to eliminate all processed foods, avoiding dairy and conventional meat products that have antibiotics and hormones and paying attention to food sources to ensure no genetically modified foods find their way onto his or his children’s dinner plates were among the first steps on his journey to better health. But the most profound effects came following consecutive colon hydrotherapy sessions, he says.
“I literally felt the toxicity coming out of my body,” Perron says. No small wonder, he points out, parasites were among the toxins inhabiting his body. “It took five sessions to get my colon cleaned out completely,” Perron says. “Before the sessions I had a lot of bloating in my stomach and a big belly and I couldn’t lose weight. I lost 15 pounds. I found out I had a yeast infection in my colon, which I was told is present when you have parasites.
I’m sure I had been living with parasites since I was a teenager. You think it’s normal to feel a certain way, bloated and unhealthy, but once you start getting healthier you realize there was nothing normal about the way you were feeling. “I had been going to a chiropractor two to three times a week because of pain in my body, then I went for my first colonic treatment and as soon as the treatment was done I had no pain.”
His experience led him to bring his four-year-old daughter to a naturopath who conducted electro-dermal screening, a procedure that allows for testing for parasites, allergens, bacteria, yeast and fungus. “My daughter had a big belly and was always complaining about a sore stomach. She had black circles under her eyes, her skin was dry and she was grinding her teeth. She had a parasite.
When a child can’t tell you what’s wrong with them, you need to look at the small symptoms and fix the symptoms, rather than mask them.” Under the care of a naturopath, his daughter was treated with a parasite cleanse, probiotics and nutrient supplementation.
