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Looking for answers

Looks like i finally found a bunch of folks like me. I've read a lot on the internet but i never really read about someone who had the exact same symptoms. So here's my story :

So i basically started to notice the smell when i was something like 14. It's a ****-like smell that goes from garbage to manure with a stop on the diahrrea case, depending on the days.

Now here's the weird thing : I started sort of a diary to keep track of the incidents and the conditions in which they happened over the past year, and it almost never happens at home (twice in a whole year). On the contrary, it happens on a daily basis when i'm at school or going out. It happens in particular when i'm stressed (by a test or just by a social situation). Another trigger seems to be the simple fact of sitting (especially when leaning forward, thus compressing my guts/stomach).

Second weird thing : i almost always pass a stool after (sometimes really small, as big as a walnut), even though i absolutely didn't feel like i had to go to the bathroom.

Thirdly : my farts do not smell 80% of the time, and smell really different from the fecal body odor for the 20 other %.

So here's my theory : i suffer from crippling social anxiety since i am a child (it started around 9), but i somehow dealt with it by locking up emotionally. So when i get tensed and my rectum is not empty, all that anxiety is putting a lot of pressure on my nervous system, thus messing with my external sphincters which open, allowing that awful smell of **** to come out.
I truly believe that the main cause if psychological, as i managed to have only 2 "problems" in 3 months from September to November 2013, by calming myself down and focusing on something else during class. But my main problem is that the more it happens, the more tensed i get in public, and it drags me in a devil's circle.


So the whole point of that huge text (thanks for reading this far, i really appreciate the effort) is to know if any of you suffers from the same symptoms (anxiety triggered fecal body odor), and i you found anything about a cure, because i can't avoid stressful situations my whole life.

Best regards,

Frank.
21 Responses
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Avatar universal
Hey guys, here's the solution.
1 be patient. Time is your healer
2 make the decision every morning to be happy and create positive energy
3 pray each day, or at least make a conscious decision within yourself to calm down and be grateful internally
4 stop eating processed junk. Anything from a factory, has probably lost its nutrition.
5 balance your diet, fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts... Meat, dairy and starchy foods like grains should be limited to keep you fresh healthy and light. If you cheat, never feel bad.
6 as you go along your journey dont let any person or any persons reaction make you feel guilty, your positivity heals you.
7 tell someone you love them each day. If you haven't anyone to tell, better yet tell God.
Helpful - 1
Avatar universal
Hi, dear seekinganswers3000, I am a new patmer here, I've read your story. how are you going now with the diet?
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Avatar universal
Hi all, I'll start by saying im living the nightmare with you all. But there is hope, everyone needs to be tested for candida and leaky gut. There's proof in the comments up there ^ that there is a common denominator. I had candida and distinguished this through sheer diet and antifungas, but that is not the problem it's the leaky gut that is. Our bodys are overwhelmed by these toxins and it causes great stress on the gut, liver and immune system. I have been to see a nutrionist for a recent test and im lacking a lot of bacterias and im very acidic. Ive not been able to do the right protocol to fix this as I have just got a new girlfriend (yes there is hope for us) and ive just been eating out and living for the moment. But in the few weeks im doing everything in my power to put these things right and live a happier life again.
My symptoms are as follows
People itch there heads, eyes, noses, cough, sneeze and get a red rash on their faces.
Im shedding hair from all over my body, get cold hands, sewage smell, cramps in the night, loose bowels and fatigue. There is a end to this we just need to keep researching and we will get there. It's hard to deal with I know, I've dealt with this since 17 and now 21. The only thing I thank is that nobody thinks it's us so we can just get on with it without being resented for something out out control. Get me on facebook Tom Flannery i have a white shirt and blue pants. Email me to tomflannery_1993***@**** im here for anything. Good luck all and there is a end and I'll make sure I get there.
Helpful - 0
Avatar universal
Me too. Working a job around other ppl is almost unbearable. I've suffered (along with my income) a long time. I have to admit it's difficult being happy.
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Avatar universal
I just want to be able to go to work and support myself
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Avatar universal
So is anyone working on this forum
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Avatar universal
We will never be healed until the government is ready to cure herpes
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Avatar universal
Taking things one day at a time is a great perspective, an outlook that remains in the present is the most healing.
I think we can all get well to the point that we don't notice anymore symptoms, but as to whether that's a "complete" healing not sure.
we should keep a realistic perspective and understand that we may have to take good cautious care of our bodies for the remainder of our lives.
This doesn't mean depriving oneself, but doing all things with restraint moderation and balance. Mastering self control.
Helpful - 0
Avatar universal
Thanks! It's one day at a time for me, but I'm focused on reaching my goal (being completely healed). I believe we will all get there soon.
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Avatar universal
I agree with you for sure! There is a type of fungus or pathogen involved. It's a long term healing process. Stay strong mate!,

Relying on diet completely is a mistake.
We must be positive thankful and generally happy for the gift of life.
The body's infinite intelligence wants to heal, observe your thoughts and remember to love your divine self.
Helpful - 0
Avatar universal
Diets may or may not be the solution for all. It;s quite possible that some PATM sufferers do not suffer from candida at all. For me,  the Candida Diet has helped significantly which encourages me to continue until the symptoms are finally gone for good.

I can't comment on the TMAU diet, but the Candida Diet eliminates cheese because it contains lactose (a sugar), and in many cases, high mold content. Both of these trigger and aggravate Candida overgrowth.

Rice, particularly, white rice contains too much starch which your body converts to sugar- feeding candida.

To be honest, no one on this forum is completely sure of what causes PATM or how to cure it. It's more a community of common sufferers who are sharing best practices and seeking support.

Whatever you do, don't give up. It gets better.
Helpful - 0
Avatar universal
Hey again mate, I hope you get the message faster this time because I'm only going to give you the dignity once more.
You are literally exuding negative criticism.
These things I just mentioned are what life is trying to teach us.
We should eat all sorts of things, just be balanced and don't overeat.
Eat your fruit and vegetables.
Drink a green juice
Create daily healthy habits.
BALANCE mate..
Take a bath, get a massage, let go!
Realise your mind and sensible diet is the true healer along with time and patience as well as SELF CONTROL. End of story.
Helpful - 0
Avatar universal
God Bless you with the courage and strength to keep moving forward !!!

addictions to food are a beast to overcome !


however for me being able to sit next to someone without any patm reactions from them or anyone in the vicinity (rubbing nose, coughing, ugly looks etc )

is PRICELESS and worth much more than any food addiction !!!!!


I AM thankful that I contnue to remain PATM free


Helpful - 0
Avatar universal
I'm grateful for the helpful responses.  But I'm extremely skeptical about these diet-based solutions.  We have no idea what the problem is, so we don't know what diet we ought to eat.  We're just eating things that sound healthy without any real logic behind it.  Systemic candida doesn't exist (systemic implies that it's in the blood, which would be fatal), and a pervasive candida infection in the gut would be treated by the antifungals that I'm currently on.  It makes no sense to think that eating a diet which reduces the food supply for candida would be a more effective treatment than a prescription medicine that completely wipes candida out.  

I could try reducing my carb intake further, but I'm running out of things to eat.  I don't know whether to eat a candida diet or a tmau diet.  They are absolutely incompatible, since the tmau diet requires that you stop eating pretty much every good source of protein and fat, and the candida diet requires that you stop eating everything else.  And it seems to me like these solutions are all complicated and ad hoc.  There is no reason, for example, why cheese should have anything to do with candida, other than that cheese doesn't sound healthy.  If we really understood our problem, we would be able to come up with a simple meal that we could eat every day with impunity (IE unbreaded chicken and white rice - which did NOT work for me when I tried it).

Avoiding stress and staying calm is simply not an option.  That would require that I never fall in love and never have a real career.  What kind of treatment is that?
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Avatar universal
Amen, Amen, Amen !!!!!!  Keep up the excellent work !!!!! God' continued best to you always !!!!


great info for  patmfbofml  !!!
Helpful - 0
Avatar universal
First I want to say that you are certainly not alone ( I once thought I was the only one affected by this mystery/misery illness). Second, I must commend you for being so strong and fighting through this. I have suffered for sixteen years (your same exact symptoms). Lost some really young years where I should have been carefree and enjoying myself.

Lost some really great career opportunities. Missed out on a few really potentially great mates. Honestly, this is one of the worst things to have to suffer with. I've cried, prayed, changed my diet multiple times (before finding one that actually reduce symptoms), gone to countless drs with no success (only bills to pay for empty visits) and on and on.

But all is not lost, my friend. Nearly two months ago, I discovered a link between Systemic Candida and PATM. Since that time, I have been on the Candida Diet (eliminated all sugars, carbs, and starches). Within the first two wks, my PATM symptoms (and BO) dropped 75%. People still coughed and rubbed their noses but not nearly as much as before.

My theory, along with a few others on the forum, is that Candida overgrowth (caused by whatever) outpopulates the good bacteria in the gut. This, in turn, leads to leaky gut syndrome (excessive gas, fecal odor). LGS causes food intolerances to things you were never intolerant of before (dairy, certain veggies, etc.). In addition, the candida fungus, I believe, is present in sweat, saliva, breath, skin particles and that people you come into contact with are allergic to it (the same why mold and mildew makes people sick. They sneeze, cough, scratch, and have nasal problems).

Many times, in different work environments (as I have trouble sustaining employment despite the fact that I am good at what I do and get compliments on my work), more than half of the staff starts getting sick and are out for days. Often they'll say, "It's never been this bad." or "This only started a few weeks ago." (usually around the time I started).

On a brighter note, in the past 7 wks since starting the diet and taking supplements, I have seem so much improvement. I still have a ways to go before I can say it's totally behind me, but this gives me so much hope that it will one day end. Hang in there. It gets better.
Helpful - 0
Avatar universal
God Bless you always, my heart goes out to you because I have walked in your shoes !!!!

what are you doing to get better ?   please check out my and others posts on "people are allergic to me (PATM) " forum

also I continue to remain patm free as long as I continue to be proactive in making -non patm choices-  everyday

I am excited about two new supplements that hopeful12345 told us about :

spanish black radish

Saccharomyces Boulardii

google and youtube for more info -  I now have added these two to my daily healthy choices
Helpful - 0
Avatar universal

Nobody even takes the allergy aspect of the disease seriously.  My brother rejects the idea outright.  My mother, who got mysterious running eyes that she felt the need to comment on every single day of my last visit home, insists that nothing is wrong.  My father had brutal reactions when I first started living with my family again, and has had a terrible cough and allergies ever since after a lifetime of being allergy-free.  I got into grad school, possibly because the professor I interviewed with was already sick.  But the TA in my class had to leave the country because of a strange lung problem!  The guy sitting next to me in class went to the doctor repeatedly over a matter of months for a weird lung problem!   A guy in my lab has had such intense coughs every day that he needed to see a doctor.  And people routinely have such bad coughs around me that they have to get up and leave the room.  Every single person in the house I live in has dry coughs and itchy noses and red eyes when I'm around.   Everyone at school reacts the same way.  A few months ago I was walking down the street and a girl actually dropped to her knees and started coughing, and when asked by the guy with her what happened, she said it was "just something in the air".  Once, back when I was still teaching, a kid sneezed 8 times in a row and then muttered something about being "contaminated".  I'm leaving out countless incidents.

Meanwhile I go to the doctor and he says "well your body can't produce histamine!"  And smirks.  I feel like I'm destroying the lives of the people who have to work with me.  I understand that I'm going to need counseling if I ever want to function comfortably in society again, but I will never receive appropriate treatment as long as they continue to deny my symptoms.  

The symptoms for the allergies are this:
- Red eyes
- Itchy nose, sometimes on the surface rather than the inside
- Itchy scalp and skin in general
- A dry cough, which can get very intense
- Rarely, sneezing.  But when sneezing happens it tends to be abnormally repeated.
- Stuffed up ears
- I tend to get these same symptoms every once in a while, often after taking a shower or doing laundry

The symptoms for the smell are this:
- After eating bad foods or skipping meals or intensely stressing out, it smells fecal.  It's bad enough that people 40 feet away outdoors are bothered by it.  But my parents and I seem immune to the smell.  
- When drinking alcohol, it seems to smell like fart.  Again, it acts over absurdly long distances.  

And these two smell things are confirmed by other people, if anyone's wondering.  I don't know how often they happen, but they definitely happen sometimes.  My best theory, based on what I've read in other places, is that there is some kind of noxious chemical either being overproduced by my gut flora or underprocessed by my liver which sometimes smells awful and sometimes acts as an irritant to people.  But I don't have enough control over it to be sure of any hypothesis.  

I really don't know what there is to do about any of this.  If you're looking for more support groups, you can search for PATM "People are allergic to me" and FBO "fecal body odor".  But nobody has any answers.  Some people have TMAU, but I don't think TMAU is supposed to cause allergies.  TMAU should be easy to manipulate by eating more or less choline, whereas I can eat a big egg sandwich and it doesn't seem to make any difference in my odor.  Crohn's disease is supposed to be painful and unmistakable when you have it.  And nose/skin yeast infections should be easily detectable by a doctor.  

I'd recommend taking a fiber supplement and a probiotic.  In the very least, you can be an allergy-inducing wreck with regular bowel movements.  If you can convince a doctor to give it a shot, you can try out (unabsorbed) antibiotics and antifungals.  I'd recommend taking the MEBO TMAU test, getting tested for gluten sensitivity, and checking for lactose intolerance.  These things are probably a waste of time and money, but if you can't even occupy a room with people everything else is low-priority.  

Good luck.  And jesus ******* christ I hope someone finds a cure for this.
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Avatar universal
Hey.  I have the same thing, too.  I'm a 26 year-old male in LA these days.  About two years ago I was extremely stressed out and had a bad case of constipation.  Then I developed this bizarrely awful fecal odor which I can't detect.  I found out about it while I was teaching my first class!  It was a class in an inner-city neighborhood, and the students were not shy about complaining.  Interestingly, nothing happened until the third to last class, and students didn't become vocal until the second to last class.  But once they started complaining, it was bad.  They were declaring that "it smells like *** in here!" and "this is disgusting!", etc when they entered the classroom.  A woman stopped by the class to tell me something, and had this huge "WTF" look on her face when she poked her head in.  It was straight out of a nightmare.  After that 4 hour class ended (I couldn't leave over a smell or I'd be fired), I went home and washed all of my stuff, showered like crazy, and came back to the next class.  I smelled just as much as before.  Students who had been sitting in the front for weeks moved all the way to the back.  People were dry heaving and sweating.  It was horrific.  A day or two later I had to take a subway and the guy sitting across from me sneezed over 10 times in a row.  I started to wonder if I was losing my mind, but I was completely lucid throughout the experience.

Ever since then I've been experiencing these symptoms.  Every day people rub their noses, cough, sneeze, and itch.  The smell seems to be intermittent, as people who I see frequently make comments only on rare occasions (usually after drinking or going out to eat), and seem to be surprised that anything is there.  The allergies are constant, but nobody ever seems to entertain the idea that I might be causing them.  For the most part people think I am a socially anxious person who avoids everyone, and possibly has bad hygiene (despite the fact that I actually wash and clean religiously).  

My parents don't believe me.  The absurd thing about this is that my brother (who I only see a handful of times a year, and possibly never habituated to it) can actually smell it, and eventually admitted to it when I pressed him on the issue.  My brother is a well-adjusted engineer in a managerial role, not a schizophrenic playing along with my delusions.  But even with his back-up my parents don't believe me.  And if you're expecting anyone to tell you about a smell, think again: my smell was so bad that it was hard to be in a room with me, my brother is usually brutally honest to me when it comes to improving my appearance, and he STILL wouldn't admit that any smell was there until I pushed him about it.  The fecal nature of the smell makes it too embarrassing for anyone to talk about.  

I went to the doctor dozens of times and they always just smirked at me and dismissed what I was saying as nonsense because they couldn't smell anything.  Once my brother admitted to the smell it was a bit easier to make my case to doctors, but they never found anything.  To date, I have gotten a colonoscopy, anal exams, all of the ordinary ear/mouth/nose/throat checks, had a doctor basically stick his nose near my *** and smell (and he smelled nothing!), taken antibiotics, and am currently taking antifungals.  I took the MEBO TMAU test and the results came back negative, but I think I might have screwed up the procedure.  The wait for results is an absurd 6 months.  

For non-medical treatments, I add vinegar when doing laundry, use antibacterial soap, use gold-bond medicated powder to reduce sweating, take a copper chlorophyllin supplement and probiotic with every meal (I used to also take activated charcoal, but nothing I do besides taking a fiber supplement seems to help much, so I stopped doing it after a year or so).  In the past I've cut out dairy, gluten, and choline (which effectively eliminates all sources of human nutrition), as well as smelly foods like garlic, onions, and indian food.  Nothing ever made the smell go away.  I still eat a relatively restricted diet that revolves around chicken, but I do eat bread and small amounts of cheese.  I tend to eat badly on Friday and then avoid people over the weekend.  But I've tried pigging out on all the worst foods before going to the doctor, and it never seemed to make any difference.

ctd in the next post
Helpful - 0
4274626 tn?1487889732
derp74...I have the same thing and I agree it's got to do with social anxiety.  It feels like it's my nature to be shy and introverted, but when I fight the urge to be shy and full of anxiety, and instead force myself to come across as upfront and confident around others, it completely makes the smell/patm go away.  It ***** because I like to be introverted but the smell/patm has more say than I do because I want it to go away.  It is a vicious cycle that is hard to break.  I'm with you on that.  Where are you from?  I'm from San Diego.  
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Avatar universal
God Bless you always, never ever give up !!!!!!    please start taking oregano oil capsules ( with p73 on the label), probiotics, chlorella, l-glutamine powder


take epsom salt baths daily, go to the sauna at least weekly

start making healthier food choices :  fruits and veggies (especially greens), plant based food choices , much  more than - junk food, processed food

google/youtube :  candida and/or leaky gut  to see if those symptoms apply to you


u can do this, God is with you each and every step of the way !!!!!
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