Chances are, you have a parasite.

Maybe you picked it up when you were travelling, maybe you got it at a local restaurant where the chef didn’t wash his cutting board after preparing raw meat, maybe it was in your yogurt. It doesn’t matter where it came from, now it’s in you.

You might be aware of some of the symptoms a parasite causes (bloating, diarrhea, constipation, acid reflux, gluten allergy and milk allergy) but it’s just as likely that you don’t have any symptoms. If you read up on some of these organisms in a microbiology textbook, the word “asymptomatic” comes up again and again, meaning many of them don’t cause any symptom whatsoever. Beyond the symptoms that you may or may not have, there’s no way to know that you have a parasite simply by thinking about it.

Parasites are a worldwide problem that surpasses epidemic proportions. Probably 90% of people worldwide (7 Billion x 90% = 6.3 Billion) have one or more type of parasite, so if you’re reading this, there’s a 9 out of 10 chance that’s you. The effect this has on your health is like carrying a large balance on a high-interest credit card. Your spending money (all the good food you eat) goes to pay the interest and you never get ahead in your health.

But They Said I didn’t have one

If you’re like most people, at some point you were tested for parasites and your lab results said “NO OVA OR PARASITES SEEN”. From this you concluded that you were among the 10% that didn’t have one. On the surface, it seems impossible that such a high percentage of people can make it into the 10% category who don’t have a parasite. When we look deeper, the problem becomes apparent: Laboratory stool testing is not accurate.

Proud as we are of modern advances in medical technology, stool testing via microscope analysis isn’t modern at all: it is a 17th century technology that is hopelessly outdated. (Blood-immune marker analysis is also consistently inaccurate but that has its own separate set of problems and they are not the focus in this article).

So why aren’t labs finding parasites through stool testing? There are two reasons:

1. They’re not really looking for parasites
2. Looking doesn’t really help

Problems with Laboratory Testing:

Let’s explore these problems in order:

1. Not Really Looking

Let’s examine a standard stool testing report from Vancouver, Canada. As Canada has one of the world’s leading health care systems in the world, we would expect their parasite stool test to lead the way in quality and thoroughness.

It looks like they’re looking; you get a lab report that says they looked; but if you analyze it, what they are actually screening for are bacteria.

You will see that the report is divided into two sections: Microbiology and Parasitology. All the tests for specific organisms of any kind fall under the Microbiology section.

In the Microbiology section, they don’t actually test for parasites. Instead, they tested for well-known bacteria that may potentially turn into public health epidemics, such as E. Coli, Salmonella, Yersinia and Vibrio. For the non-medical-microbiologist reader, you need to understand that bacteria are not parasites. It’s commendable that a country would test for these, but while bacteria have fancy-sounding names, none of them are the parasites you went in asking to be tested for.

Here’s a quick list of what they do test for and what it means in English:

So you’ve asked to be tested for parasites but the only clear response you’re getting is that you don’t have Cholera, Blood Poisoning, Flesh-Eating Disease or the Bubonic Plague.

While this will doubtless come as a relief, I think you’ll agree it’s rather misleading that you asked to be screened for parasites and the lab’s response was to test for things that had literally nothing to do with parasites. For the lab to then assure you that you don’t have a parasite on the grounds that they tested for bacteria is borderline absurd.

2. Looking Doesn’t Really Help

Under Parasitology, the section where we could reasonably assume that they test for all the most common parasites (roundworm, hookworm, whipworm, toxocara, trichini, liver flukes, intestinal flukes, 6 different kinds of tapeworms, filarial worms like strongyloides and protozoal organisms like giardia and several types of intestinal amoeba) we only find the words “NO OVA OR PARASITES SEEN”. That means they didn’t see any parasite eggs.

I’m sorry, let’s back up a bit: seen??? Yes… Someone took a look at your stool sample under a microscope, didn’t see anything with their eye and checked off on your form that you don’t have any parasites, on the grounds that nothing was visible to the human eye. This is the 21st  century and you are still being tested for parasites by having someone look for them with their eyes.

I don’t care how many times magnification their microscope is: there are 4 major problems with using sight to identify a parasite:

1. Your parasite may not have shed any eggs in the stool sample you submitted, so there may be nothing to see. It is not uncommon for many organisms to go through latent cycles, sometimes for months where they are not reproducing (e.g. not excreting eggs).
2. If it did shed eggs in your stool, did you scoop up those particular eggs in the tiny portion you extracted as a sample? At the risk of being graphic, most organisms secrete eggs in line with their reproductive cycles and the mass of eggs tends more to be condensed together than diffused apart. If they were condensed on the bottom of the pile and you scooped from the top, you could easily have missed all of them.
3. Even if by luck of the draw some eggs made their way into your stool cup, the lab tech would then need to take a portion of that sample out with a dropper and dilute it in a stabilizing gel to make it visible on the microscope slide. Were there any eggs in their sample of your sample? Were there enough eggs after the dilution to still see any in a visual examination?
4. And on that note, the question that nobody seems to be concerned about: why, in the 21st century, when we can use muscle testing to identify parasites directly through the body’s own BioElectric Field are we still performing microbiology scans with the microscope, which is a 17th century technology? One day this will be seen for the laughable and ineffective process it is.

This doesn’t even begin to address the issue of human error, so let’s simply focus on the error in logical reasoning: absence of proof is not proof of absence. If you have symptoms you’re even remotely aware of, you will almost definitely fall into the 90% category that has a parasite but it’s just as likely you have no symptoms whatsoever.

Here is an honest, if humorous result I would like to see printed one day on a parasite stool testing report.

What’s the Solution?

If a lab really wanted to find it, they probably could but its too expensive and time consuming. They’d have to spend hours instead of minutes combing through your stool sample, and they’d need to cross reference about 10 full samples, and go through the whole mass of your bowel movement, not one tiny container. It’s not a simple task for the lab tech when all they have is a microscope and for a number of reasons, it’s not a priority for any health care system.

A muscle testing parasite screen is the most effective way of finding out if you have a parasite because it evaluates the body’s BioElectric Field as a whole and can identify even one single parasite in you, whether its shedding eggs or not and no matter how short a time you’ve had it. However, there are only a few people in the world who offer this service. In fact, I am only assuming there are other people offering it, I don’t personally know of any. I developed this methodology myself and it is not the purpose of this article to explain the process, although if you’d like to read more about it there is a short write-up on this page.

It seems to me the real problem isn’t a lack of understanding of how to get rid of a parasite – it is in fact a lack of appreciation for how likely it is that you’d have one to begin with. So the goal of this article is to make you aware that there’s a 9/10 chance you have a parasite and that your stool test was probably wrong.

If you understand this, you’ll be much farther ahead than you were when you started reading, when you thought instead that you had low energy, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, food allergies or periodic back pain, knee pain, ankle pain or muscle cramps. These are all symptoms of a parasite you don’t know you have.

If you understand that much, at least you will know that you need to keep looking for a solution. Since most readers are in denial that this applies to them, it is the most valid place to start. Only when we’re both on the same page that you probably have a parasite will it become apparent why you need a solution. Only at that time will the solution have value.