Dr. Amy Nett: For urinary tract infections, Chris does actually have an article on his blog about treating urinary tract infections without medications. Yeah, we do recommend D-mannose. We actually recommend about 500 milligrams every two to three hours for five days.
In addition to the D-mannose, lactoferrin is another good option that you can use. You’re using it really as a biofilm disruptor, so you could also use something like InterFase Plus or Biofilm Defense. Those are other options to use, slightly more potent biofilm disruptors.
The other thing you can consider for urinary tract infections is Lauricidin. We’ll be talking about all this again more as the course goes on, but Lauricidin is an antimicrobial. It’s derived from coconut, and you can use that for urinary tract infections, particularly those from microbes other than E. coli.
We also use a formula from KW Botanicals. It’s called the cystitis formula. That’s KW Botanicals. You should be able to set up a practitioner account. They have a number of different herbal formulas, but I find their cystitis formula tends to work for urinary tract infections, so that’s another one I’ll use.
In terms of probiotics, yes, there is a lot of research that suggests both oral and vaginal probiotics might actually treat urinary tract infections, which is sort of interesting and didn’t intuitively make sense to me. I think one of the questions, though, that remains is which probiotics to use, I think, especially for vaginal administration of probiotics, and it’s honestly not something I’ve used a lot. I think I’ve seen Chris use it once or twice with some of his patients, and I think they use Fem-Dophilus. That’s a Jarrow brand probiotic. You could consider using the vaginal administration. Again, if you look on PubMed, there’s research showing both oral and vaginal administration of probiotics can potentially treat urinary tract infections, so that is a great question.