Immune Health
Functional Medicine Approaches to Treating Urinary Tract Infections
The second-most common human infection is one that people barely speak about. Urinary tract infections, also known as bladder infections, impact 10-20% of women at least once a year, and the typical treatment intervention is prescription antibiotics. Middle-aged women presenting with chronic conditions like autoimmunity, dysbiosis and hormone dysfunction are common patients in functional medicine, so taking antibiotics regularly could pose an issue for them. When optimizing microbiome health, immune tolerance and hormone production, it is crucial that bacteria are given the opportunity to thrive, and antibiotic use poses a threat to that opportunity. With that said, if urinary tract infections are one of the most common infections physicians see, and we are attempting to avoid unnecessary antibiotic use, what functional medicine approaches do we have?