A doctor has been advising people not to practice this home remedy for yeast infections

Yeast infections are a common vaginal infection for women and there are several ways to get rid of them, but all of them require going to see your doctor. At best, home remedies are not always effective and at worse, they can be extremely dangerous for your health. One gynaecologist has recently released a warning about one rather strange technique.

She posted a warning on Twitter

Doctor Jen Gunter is a gynaecologist who practices out of California (United States). On Twitter, she recently posted a thread of Tweets to warn people about a specific old wives tale which is frankly quite dangerous:putting garlic in your vaginafor three days in order to cure a yeast infection. No scientific studies have ever proved that this technique works and so far, scientists have not managed to prove that garlic has anti-fungal properties outside of Petri dishes.

‘[The results are] in a lab, not even in mice. Just a dish of cells. Your vagina is not a dish of cells,’ explains the gynaecologist.

Risks of paralysis

According to Jen Gunter, your vagina is the ‘perfect' place for the development of bacteria associated with botulism, a rare, but life-threatening illness caused by very potent toxins that are produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. This bacteria normally forms in foods that have not been properly stored and this illness generally leads to food poisoning. If not treated, however, it can also be fatal.

As a result, the doctor posted this series of tweets with the hopes of alerting people to the dangers of putting garlic in their vaginas.

‘Garlic could have bacteria from the soil. Bacteria from the soil can be pathogenic - - bad for the body. That’s why we clean wounds. If you actually happen to have an inflamed yeasty vagina, that soil bacteria would be more likely to infect,’ she wrote on Twitter.

Garlic can also cause biofilms to form, which are a multi-cellular community of micro-organisms held together by a mucus-like matrix of carbohydrate that attaches to surfaces and covers them. They generally form in water or aqueous environments but they can also form on the thin films of plaque found on teeth, for example.

‘You do not want them to form especially when you have yeast,’ explains Doctor Gunter.

So how should you treat a yeast infection?

By taking anti-fungal medication in capsule form or as a pill which you can then swallow. This medication gets into the bloodstream and attacks the mucous and destroys the fungus. You have been warned!