A hot water bottle can bring relief.
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Cystitis plagues countless women and antibiotics are increasingly losing their effectiveness. Old home remedies and forgotten medicines are now being tested again in research. We tell you what helps.
Ea stabbing pain in her abdomen like a thousand hot needles announced to her that it was about to start again. Blood in the urine again, a bladder infection again, antibiotics again. “Every time I sat on the toilet crying. Not just because of the pain, but because nothing helped,” Marie recalls today in her twenties, when her bladder was so inflamed every few weeks that she had to take painkillers and antibiotics for months and was repeatedly treated in the hospital became. The life of the now 32-year-old was determined by the resistant bacteria in her bladder: “I could hardly take the train for half an hour or attend meetings because I had to go to the toilet every few minutes.”
Like Marie, millions of women regularly struggle with bladder infections – out of shame, many do not talk about it, and Marie’s name is actually different. Cystitis is often associated with sexual intercourse, crude sexual practices, or poor toilet hygiene. And as long as the antibiotics worked, patients, doctors and scientists did not have to deal with the so-called cystitis in detail. The topic was also neglected in research. This takes revenge – more and more pathogens are developing resistance to antibiotics. New therapies are urgently needed. An antiseptic was recently rediscovered in research, and ancient household remedies are also being put to the test.