In 2014, the CDC reported that UTI antibiotic treatment was avoidable at least 39% of the time.

That's right. More than one third of antibiotics given for UTIs didn't need to be given at all.

They went on to explain that this trend in overprescribing antibiotics for UTI is mostly because asymptomatic bacteria is insanely common in all age groups and is misdiagnosed as a UTI more often than we'd like to think.

And it's not only because of asymptomatic bacteria that we tend to over-prescribe antibiotics for UTI.

Patients often have urine cultures ordered without an appropriate indication,

some of which turn out to be false positives.

And all too often, the doc misinterprets the urinalysis.

Now, don't get me wrong.

We still appropriately manage most patients with Ui and that's important because a small

but significant proportion of patient with uti can progress to sepsis and septic shock develop

something like emphysemitis pyl anaphydritis life-threatening stuff so to up our game we need

to know how to prevent these nasty complications of UTI,

while at the same time be judicious and wise with our use of antibiotics.

We need to learn about all the subtleties of clinical diagnosis, differential diagnosis,

urine test interpretation, and antibiotic choice.

Welcome to the Emergency Medicine Cases podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Anton Hellman,

bringing you Canada's brightest minds in emergency medicine from EMC Studios in Toronto.

As always, I'm very pleased to have my friend and collaborator, an emerge doc at Markham-Snowville Hospital, the EBM nerd, otherwise known as First 10 EM, Justin Morganstern.

Welcome, Justin, back to the show.

Thanks for having me back. I'm glad I'm here for the most exciting topic in emergency medicine.

Definitely the sexiest.

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