Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

Oh wow, I have the first half of this situation. I went through a period where my digestion was so bad that it was affecting my ability to function from day to day. I didn't get anything useful from my gastro; I even had a negative celiac antibody test. Eventually I started rigorously tracking everything I ate against my symptoms, and after a few months I was able to draw a strong correlation with gluten intake. From memory it was in the 0.7 range. The day I cut out gluten, a set of awful digestive symptoms completely left my life. They return any time I am glutened.

I was fortunate that over time I managed to return myself to full capacity, through reading a ton of research and running dozens of experiments like the above. But it was so damn hard. The symptoms reduced my ability to use my brain to fix myself. And if you're not a careful eater, it's not at all intuitive which foods contain gluten. This was also almost a decade ago while living in a developing country, so it wasn't even apparent that gluten might be a suspect.

I'm currently based in the US - does anyone know how one might get properly tested for chronic giardiasis, as a person who isn't themselves in microbiology? I almost certainly encountered poorly treated water in that period of my life.

Also - I can't help but suspect that a nontrivial percentage of the developing world is living below their full capacity due to something like this. Neglected tropical diseases are a horrendous category.

For testing: As the article says, find a doctor that has experience with it and ask for an antigen test. The below capacity thing can be very real, supposedly a different parasite in the us is responsible for people in southern us having the stereotype of lazy. In that case it could infect you through your feet from tainted soil. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...

Thanks, I'm certainly going to try that. I was more asking if anyone has experience getting tests done properly in light of their low accuracy. From what I understand, an antigen test is still a stool test, meaning they are only 50% accurate. As a commenter on this post shared, managing the health system is challenging in this area. I just did a bit of googling, and found a couple of leads here:

> CDC recommends collecting three stool samples from patients over several days for accurate test results. Commercial testing products for diagnosing giardiasis are available in the United States. [1]

Perhaps running three tests is the standard of care, or if not one might advocate for this based on the CDC recommendation. And if dismissed, perhaps there are commercial products available at the consumer level.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/giardia/hcp/diagnosis-testing/index.html