Hi Nicola, you have the right approach and the safest one. With mercury, or in fact anything that is holding the immunity down, candida is a very good thing to tackle, but NOT by aggressively trying to eradicate it with antifungals for the very reasons you gave. Not only can it be foolish, but also outright dangerous. I have been respoisoned also from antifungal use. It killed a lot of candida at once and released a load of mercury. I had tremors, hot and cold flushing, metal taste in the mouth, muscle tics all over my body, it was incredible what it unleashed. I was lucky to be able to chelate it back out with DMSA at that time, which proved it was mercury that had been released.

So diet is the best thing, as it simply denies candida what it needs to thrive on, therefore the candida slowly reduces by way of starving and no long thriving. IN doing that, and eating the healthy foods, your immune system can improve over time and some symptoms you attributed all to mercury, may have been candida and may go or reduce to a point.

However, some people do take antifungals regardless, as their candida can be that serious and in some cases there may not be much other choice. Mercury removal is one of the keys, but that depends if it THE problem. Mine appears to be ongoing infections from jaw/gums and even a persistant viral infection, as well as mercury and possibly incompatible replacement materials. So my body is ripe for continual candida and makes my misery even worse.

I use diet, but of course, only get results to a "point" but find I'm always battling. One thing is offsetting the other, but they all need to be dealt with.

I do believe that candida should always be addressed, as it's such a terrible thing, but nobody who has an underlining problem should expect to truly get it under proper control, but they might at least be able to control it more and find they deal with their other issues better.

Some good natural antifungals are coconut oil, garlic (though I cannot use garlic supplemetns, they're dangerous to me), and oregano oil. However, again, it's wise to stick with the diet and do that for at time before ever introducing any antifungal and coconut oil is probably the safest at that point. THe other stuff? You may get the mercury release phenomenon, so be careful.