Hello, hello. This is EM Basic, and I'm your guest host, Tony Ziddick. I'm an emergency medicine physician and researcher in Miami, Florida. I'm an assistant professor of emergency medicine with Florida International University and Nova Southeastern University. I'm going to talk to you today about a topic that is super basic, but is also frequently misunderstood, even sometimes by attending physicians.

That topic is urinary tract infection, UTI.

Urine for a treat.

But before I start, a quick disclaimer.

This episode is meant to be as evidence-based as possible, but in certain circumstances there is insufficient evidence.

Therefore, I simply state my opinion.

Those opinions are mine alone and do not represent the viewpoints of my affiliated institutions.

All right, all right.

Let's get into it.

Initial approach.

When you sign up to see a patient who might have a urinary tract infection,

you first need to recognize that the spectrum of disease is huge.

Most UTIs are mild, and the patients are not sick in the emergency medicine sense of the word.

The patients could have been treated by their primary care doctor.

On the other hand, some UTIs can lead to full-minute sepsis and be life-threatening.

The management of septic UTI patients is really about managing the patient's

sepsis.

So I'll defer you to the EM Basic Podcasts about sepsis for that.

In this podcast, I'm going to focus on the more mundane,

yet in my opinion, more often misconstrued tasks of identifying and treating

a UTI, assuming the patient doesn't have septic shock.

Terminology and history.

...