Treating A Bladder Infection
Question: How is a bladder infection best treated? I keep getting one every few months, and I find them most annoying and painful.
When a patient arrives at a surgery with symptoms of a bladder infection (cystitis), a urine sample will be checked for infection. A plastic strip covered with spots that are sensitive to different constituents of the urine is used for this purpose. This can give a quite accurate picture of what is happening to cause the patient’s symptoms. The sample is then sent to a laboratory for further testing to find out which bacteria is causing the infection, and which antibiotics will kill it. These tests may take a few days to complete, so the patient is usually started on an appropriate antibiotic immediately, which can be changed at a later date if the tests results indicate that this is necessary.
Other medications (in the form of a powder that makes a fizzy drink) to alkalinise the urine and remove the unpleasant burning sensation are also prescribed. Drinking extra fluid will help wash the infection out of the kidneys and bladder. If several infections occur, further investigations such as ultrasound scans or X-rays of the bladder and kidneys are performed, to exclude some of the rarer more serious causes of recurrent cystitis.
In most patients, cystitis is a considerable nuisance, not a serious disease that can be easily and effectively treated provided the patient presents to a doctor at the first sign of trouble.
Question: For the past twelve months I have been plagued by bacteria causing a urinary tract infection. I feel better on antibiotics, but two or three weeks after stopping it is back again.
Recurrent urinary tract infections occur because the responsible bacteria is not completely removed by the antibiotics, because there is an anatomical problem with the kidney, bladder or its control, or you have another medical condition that allows an infection to re-enter the urinary tract. The first step would be to determine what bacteria is responsible for the infection by doing laboratory tests on the urine, and then giving a long course (a month or so) of the antibiotic that has been found to be capable of destroying these bacteria.
If the infection still recurs, investigations such as special ultrasound scans, X-rays or cystoscopy (looking into the bladder) need to be performed to find any anatomical abnormality. If possible, this abnormality should then be repaired, or if this is not practical, a long-term course of special antibiotics needs to be prescribed for months or years to prevent further acute attacks of infection. Blood and other tests on kidney and general body functions may be necessary to find another condition (eg. diabetes) that may be lowering your resistance to infection.
By using the appropriate treatment, it should be possible to remedy the cause of the repeated infections, or at least prevent them from recurring.
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