Garlic made me feel better at first while I took it... and MUCH, MUCH WORSE after a while. It kept down (but didn't eradicate) my unfriendlies for a while until it stopped working, but it sure as hell massacred my friendlies, and symptoms came back WAY stronger & w/ new ones in the mix afterwards.

As to Tea Tree Oil, I have to DISAGREE: it is not meant to be taken internally anyways (read the warnings), and works great for external application. There's no gut flora or other friendlies to kill on your non-mucuous-layer skin, just hostile fungi.

The thing people need to realize is that there is no perfect solution to this candida problem, because you are required to attack it from so many different angles. Everyone is different, the intestinal terrain is very complicated and so many people pass through here insisting they've found the one and only way. The approach most of us are taking here is a combination of some scientific data and the folk wisdom of group experience and experimentation. The information we have is very incomplete and every approach has drawbacks.

I've seen many people claim "improving the terrain" is the only way. Only probiotics, cultured foods etc, and killing the candida does not work. That may be sufficient for a mild case, but if you literally have so much of this white and yellow mucus/candida plugging you up so badly that you can hardly eat like I do, you have to kill it and flush it out to even begin to start functioning better.

Then there is the school that says you must kill it before taking probiotics, because the naturals kill the good bacteria, and it won't implant anyway while overrun with candida. And there's some truth to that, but I see no reason not to bombard it with probiotics constantly anyway. Even if they don't permanently implant, they will temporarily improve your digestion and compete with the fungus.

I part company with Adieu when he says the natural AF's are essentially worthless, or at best a weak adjunct to RX therapy. I've had brutal die off from oregano oil, golden seal, GSE, Undecyclenic acid and the humaworm parasite formula that rivals anything I've experienced with Diflucan and Nystatin. I mean, confined to bed, heart pounding and sweating, candida pouring out of me. In combination they can be very effective killers.

So it's down to a cost/benefit analysis. If the naturals kill off massive amounts of candida, then the risk of killing some bacteria in the process is probably a minor hit in comparison. And besides, though we know that in general many of them are partially anti-bacterial, do we have any scientific proof that they entirely wipe out all probiotics, aside from the subjective reports of a few people? If you're pounding probiotics and cultured foods and simultaneously taking garlic and pau d'arco, I highly doubt that will negate the results.

If you want antifungals that we know for a fact don't pose a threat to the flora, go the RX route. It's a last resort for most of us but probably an essential in the end. At the moment I'm combining Diflucan, the naturals, probiotics and cultured vegetables and getting some of the best results I've ever had. But it's slow, painfully slow.