My Dad’s 4-Herb Candida Formula | The Story Behind Mycocyde

Almost 29 years after my dad died, I can still learn something from one of his formulas. I really love that.

Since I’ve been going back through Dad’s original formulas, and some of my own, sharing the stories and herbal thinking behind them with you, I pulled out some old family notes while researching Mycocyde for this blog post. I wanted to double-check Dad’s original formula and proportions, and as often happens when I start digging through this old stuff, I ended up going a little further down the rabbit hole than I planned.

These particular notes were written down by one of my brothers shortly after my dad died. He had worked closely with our dad and knew his formulas, and thank goodness somebody thought to write this stuff down back then. We certainly weren’t thinking about what it would mean to us almost three decades later.

There’s something I love about old herbal notes. A few plant names, measurements, maybe an instruction that wouldn’t mean much to anyone else. But when you know the herbs, and in this case, when you knew the person behind them, you can start to see what he was thinking.

My dad used only four herbs in Mycocyde: Sarsaparilla, Lomatium, Poke Root and Cayenne Pepper.

I’m not going to give away all of Dad’s proportions, but I will tell you one because I think it changes the way you look at the whole formula.

Sarsaparilla makes up nearly two-thirds of Mycocyde.
I already knew this but I had to sit with that for a minute. If Dad was formulating specifically for Candida, why make that much of the formula Sarsaparilla?

Well...he clearly wasn’t thinking only about killing yeast.

Sarsaparilla is one of those wonderful old apothecary herbs we don’t talk about nearly enough anymore. Traditional herbalists called it an alterative, an old word I actually wish we still used more often. Alteratives were herbs used to help the body gradually clear what it didn’t need and shift the internal terrain in a better direction.

Sarsaparilla has a long traditional history surrounding the skin, liver, elimination and those chronic situations where something in the body just seems stuck or out of balance. And that was the biggest part of Dad’s Candida formula.
I think that tells us a lot.

Then there’s Lomatium. No surprise there. If you know anything about my dad, you know he loved Lomatium. His pure Lomatium tincture, LDM-100, was probably what he became best known for. He valued this plant for broad botanical defense, and it has an important place in Mycocyde.

But it wasn’t the star of this particular formula. Sarsaparilla was.

Then Dad added Poke Root, and this is where we get into some real old-school herbalism. Poke Root is a powerful plant traditionally associated with the lymphatic and glandular systems, especially when herbalists saw stagnation, congestion and swelling.

Poke is not an herb to fool around with, and Dad knew that. Those old herbalists worked with some pretty powerful plants, and part of their skill was understanding that you didn’t need, or want, a lot of certain herbs. Dad used a smaller, very deliberate amount of Poke Root in Mycocyde for the particular job he wanted it to do.

And finally, Cayenne Pepper. Just a little.
Cayenne brought warmth, circulation, digestive stimulation and movement to the blend. I can almost picture Dad working through the formula: a big foundation of Sarsaparilla, then Lomatium, enough Poke Root to do the job he wanted it to do...and a little Cayenne to get things moving.

Maybe that isn’t exactly how the conversation went on inside his head. I sure wish I could ask him. But knowing Dad and knowing these plants, I can see the logic.
Work on the terrain. Address the challenge. Support the lymphatics. Keep things moving.

And then there’s this quirky little detail about Mycocyde that I’ve always found fascinating.
When Dad was alive and sharing his herbal formulas and protocols, he strongly suggested taking a tincture of Echinacea 20-30 minutes before taking Mycocyde.
The Echinacea wasn’t part of Mycocyde. It came first.
Echinacea has a long traditional relationship with immune and lymphatic function, and Dad wanted it taken ahead of Mycocyde to prepare the body for the actions of the herbs that were coming next.

I would LOVE to sit down with him today and pick his brain about that. Why 20-30 minutes? What had he observed? Did he try it other ways first? Was there some little piece of the puzzle he understood that never made it into the notes?

I don’t know.

And honestly, those unanswered questions are part of what makes going through his old formulas so much fun for me. Dad wasn’t just thinking about what herbs went into a bottle. He thought about what came first, what came next, and what the body needed help doing along the way.

There’s another important piece to Mycocyde too. Dad believed Candida and parasites often went hand in hand.

His thinking was pretty practical: if the internal environment was allowing one unwanted guest to thrive, maybe it was worth considering what else might be hanging around in there too.

That’s why Mycocyde and Clarkia-100 have always made so much sense together. Mycocyde was Dad’s Candida formula, while Clarkia-100 was his broad parasite formula. Today we pair the two in our Cleanse Pack, and it has become one of our most popular bundles.

It’s funny to think about the path these formulas have taken. Dad created them decades ago. One of my brothers worked alongside him and made sure important details got written down after we lost him. A few years later, I picked Dad’s company back up and kept making them.

And now here I am, almost 29 years after his death, pulling out those old notes again and finding something else to think about.

That, to me, is herbal legacy. It isn’t just keeping Dad’s recipes alive. It’s continuing to be curious about why he made them the way he did.

And apparently, he can still send me down an herbal rabbit hole all these years later!