Treating Bladder Infections Without Antibiotics: When You Don't Need Antibiotics for UTI

If you have ever had a bladder infection, you know just how unpleasant it can be. And up to 50 percent of women and 25 percent of men will eventually develop a urinary tract infection, most commonly after the age of 60.

The first sign of a UTI (urinary tract infection or acute cystitis, more commonly called a bladder infection) may be something odd but innocuous like white foamy bubbles in the urine. You can feel the need to "go" without being able to urinate, or you might need to go all the time. There can be abdominal pain, blood in the urine (hematuria), and dysuria, stinging, burning, and pain with urination. Fever and bladder spasms can follow.

Most of the time the organism causing a bladder infection is E. coli. This is the same bacterium that is so common in the bowel. Babies tend to get bladder infection because the bacteria travel in their diapers. When older girls and women wipe forward instead of backward after bowel movement, they may transfer E. coli to the urethral spincter, where it can travel up to the bladder and even into the kidneys. Men can get E. coli infections through anal intercourse or by simply failing to change their underwear. Fecal matter in underwear that touches the tip of the penis can cause an infection. Bladder infections can also be caused by other species of bacteria, viruses, yeasts, or Chlamydia. In men over 60, UTIs may follow infections of the prostate. Diabetes elevates the risk of repeated bouts of UTIs in both sexes.

READ Urinary Tract Infections: Minor Irritation For You, Potential Killer For Elderly People

Is There an Easy Way to Treat UTI Symptoms?

A sensible home remedy for bladder infections that has been used for generations is simply drinking more water. The more fluid you consume, the more you need to urinate, and the more likely, one would think, the infection is to be washed away with urine. If you have swelling of the lining of the urethra or spasms of the muscles around the bladder, not only will drinking more water not result in flushing out the infection, you can become painfully bloated. Cranberry juice works on a different principle; its proanthocyanidins are anti-bacterial, but not sufficiently potent to cure an infection, and sugar-sweetened cranberry juice can actually feed the bacteria it is designed to treat.

What About Antibiotics for UTI Symptoms?

In the modern world, UTIs are almost always treated with antibiotics. Either a single infusion of an IV antibiotic (for a severe case) or five days of oral antibiotics is usually enough to bring the infection to bay, at least the first time the antibiotics are used. The first time someone gets antibiotics for a bladder infection, they might get relief after taking antibiotics for five days. The second time, they might need to take antibiotics for seven days. A few months later the UTI might have returned, and require 10 days of antibiotics. 

READ Urine odor: Is smelly urine a symptom of Urinary Tract Infection (UTI)?

Urinary tract infections tend come back over and over again, and the antibiotics used to treat them tend to become less and less effective. Infections cause inflammation, and inflammation gives bacteria new opportunities to start the infection all over again. The new bacteria have had opportunities to develop resistance to the antibiotics used to treat the first, second, third, or fourth rounds of the infection, and they aren't simply washed away. But a Danish scientist has learned something about the most common UTI bacteria that may make them a lot easier to beat.

Blowing Bladder Infections Away

A team of researchers led by led by Jacob Møller-Jensen of the Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Southern Denmark have developed a different way of studying bladder infections. They have built an artificial bladder lined with real bladder cells. They have used the artificial bladder to study how E. coli behaves at every stage of bladder infection.

Scientists already knew that E. coli can stick to the outermost layer of cells in the bladder to hold themselves in place. E. coli bacteria do this by hooking themselves to a kind of sugar that appears on the surface of bladder cells. It's not the exact sugar you find in table sugar, but it's chemically very close to it. The more sugar there is on your bladder cells, the more places they have to hang on. The bacteria can use sugar to form a connection to bladder cell that is like a barbed arrow into the cell that cannot be pulled out.

READ Mucus In Urine And Other Urinary Tract Symptoms: When You Need To Go To The Doctor

By anchoring themselves into the lining of the bladder, E. coli can grow so thick that they form a biofilm coating the bladder. With the bacteria in close proximity to each other, they can exchange genes that give them antibiotic resistance in something that has been likened to "bacterial sex." The E. coli biofilm doesn't just hold the bacteria in place, they also give them immunity to drug treatment.

The bladder is not completely defenseless against the bacteria's ability to form a biofilm. It will shed its outermost layer of cells to get rid of the infection. That's why you may see white bubbles in your urine when you have a UTI. Those bubbles are like peeling skin after a sunburn, only from the infected lining of your bladder.

However, some "smart" strains of E. coli have a second ability to form hyphae or "roots" in the lining of the bladder. The bacteria first change their shape. They become thin and long in a process called filament formation. They stick not just to the outermost lining of the bladder, but also to cells beneath it. As they pass through the layers of the lining of the bladder, they continue to multiply, but eventually they insert themselves deep into the bladder where they are out of reach of oral antibiotics (but not antibiotics delivered by IV). The bacteria close to the outer layer of the lining die when they come in contact with antibiotics, but other bacteria can become dormant deep inside the bladder. The normal renewal process of the bladder pushes these dormant germs to the lining in time, long after the five or seven or ten days of antibiotics have been completed.

READ Home Remedies For Urinary Tract Infection

The Danish researchers hope eventually to be able to block a gene called Dam X that gives some bacteria to burrow into the bladder and stay dormant until their host is off antibiotic treatment. However, in the meantime, this discovery offers some insight into how you may be able to overcome recurrent bladder infections with the technology currently available:

• You don't need to drink water until you slosh. It's important to avoid dehydration, and if you have so much pain with urination that you don't want to drink you need to see a doctor to get pain medication (usually morphine) so you can stay hydrated.
• Unsweetened cranberry juice and cranberry extracts may be helpful in the very early stages of your very first UTI. They aren't likely to help you a lot once you have had even one UTI.
• The antibiotics that really work are those delivered by IV. In the United States, you can't get IV antibiotics in a doctor's office. You have to get them in an ER or in a hospital. This may seem like a drastic approach to fighting the infection, but they may be the best way to keep from getting a UTI over and over again.