Health professionals have found a natural remedy to cure oral thrush in adults in a supervised study conducted at West Wimmera Health Services, supervised by manager of Community and Allied Health, Dr Martha Karagiannis.
Dr Karagiannas and her colleagues found that all the participants of the study were free of oral thrush after they drank a certain beverage – that they can’t name – along with Australian pineapple juice, for a 14 day period.
“This is a positive outcome considering the most common treatment for oral thrush is anti fungal medications which may harm the liver over a period of time” said Dr Karagiannis.
She told Neos Kosmos that this could have significant impact for patients with swallowing difficulties and saliva viscosity.
“The oral cavity does need to be very clean especially with people who do have swallowing difficulties, as bacteria in the mouth has the capacity to lead to aspiration, pneumonia and can cause all sorts of health issues and even death in some people so it’s imperative that the oral cavity is quite clean,” she said.
Further to the study, the health professionals are looking to people with mouth cancer and how they can assist in that realm with the natural remedy.
“These findings are remarkable,” said Dr Tom Karagiannis and expert radiation biologist at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute.
“It will be interesting to see if the beneficial effects can be extended to other applications. For example, xerostomia (dry mouth) is a common problem associated with cancer radiotherapy. It would great if this product could alleviate symptoms” said Dr Tom Karagiannis and expert radiation biologist at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute.
Dr Martha Karagiannis added that “a lot of people on the study had complex issues and are on a lot of medications already so the less medications you have is better so it’s fantastic to use natural products to relieve those ailments.”