Woman suffering distressing urinary problems should beware the emergency room: These difficulties are misdiagnosed and mistreated by emergency room doctors more than half the time.
A study at the MetroHealth Medical Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, shows that women with urinary tract infections (UTIs) who go to hospital emergency rooms receive misdiagnoses more times than they are properly treated.
“Less than half the women diagnosed with a urinary tract infection actually had one,” says researcher Michelle Hecker.
The researchers say that the doctors they studied mistakenly prescribe the wrong antibiotics to women so often that their prescriptions are adding to the problem of antibiotic resistance among infectious bacteria.
Unfortunately the same emergency room problem pertains to STIs. “Sexually transmitted infections were missed in 37 percent of the women, many of whom were wrongly diagnosed with urinary tract infections.”
They add that about two-thirds of women who were suffering an STI were incorrectly told they had a UTI. That means they receive drugs that don’t clear up the STI.
The problem starts with the fact that when women suffer UTIs and STIs, the symptoms are very similar: They both cause painful and difficult urination as well as the urgent and frequent need to urinate. And when doctors do urine tests, the results are again pretty similar. That confuses emergency room doctors and causes them to prescribe the wrong therapy.
So if an emergency room is your first stop, you should get a second opinion. Otherwise you are running a significant risk of getting the wrong therapy. Better yet, consult a reliable urologist or gynecologist to be sure to get the proper diagnosis and best treatment.
