Welcome to Natural MD Radio, your place to hear the whole truth on health and medicine for women and children and get the tools you need to take back your health naturally starting now. I'm Dr. Aviva Rong. Hi and I've got a less than glamorous, but nonetheless incredibly important topic to talk about with

you this week, and that is urinary tract infections, especially bladder infections. Now in full personal disclosure, I had never

had a urinary tract infection until I was in my late 30s, and I was in my late 30s and I was in my medical residency and wasn't really drinking

much fluids wasn't peeing when I needed to pee.

And then one night in the middle of the night

went to the bathroom and thought,

oh my goodness, it feels like, well, actually that's not what I said.

I'm sure I used some four letter explicative

that I won't use here, because I know a lot of you

listen with your kiddos in the car scene in the car.

But I felt like I was urinating steak knives and I thought,

this is what my patients are going through

and this is why they're so happy to have fast treatment with an antibiotic.

In fact, urinary tract infections are so common that about half of us

will have at least one at some point in our lives. I am so grateful that that was my only

one and I certainly learned to nip that in the bud and prevent it by drinking water and peeing when I first needed to go pee.

Those two simple things changed my life when I was in residency.

But at least half of us are going to have one at some point in our lives and one in

five of us are going to have some urinary discomfort or bladder

infection every year.

And about one in five of us is going to have a

recurrence at least six months later. It's a lot of bladder infections. Now

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