Your excellent article about chronic urinary tract infections (Would I ever get back to normal life?, G2, 20 February) highlights the lack of awareness among medical professionals and the poor treatment approaches available on the NHS to this debilitating condition, which my 28-year-old daughter has suffered from for the last 12 years. I can frequently recall watching her in pain and discomfort, and the continued impact it has had on her professional and personal life, and our family life.
It was not until seeking treatment with Professor James Malone-Lee, whose pioneering of a different approach your article discusses, that she began to show some recovery. It isn’t acceptable that his treatment approach is only available privately and that the way of testing for UTIs is outmoded. It’s time the National Institute for Health Research commissioned a clinical trial that would hopefully help the thousands of people (mainly women) who suffer from it.
Carol Ferguson
Thornton le Dale, North Yorkshire
• I agree it’s a scandal that women with cystitis are still being fobbed off, told that there’s nothing wrong or that they can’t be given any treatment – almost 50 years after Angela Kilmartin set up the U&I Club to support women with UTIs and to campaign for the medical profession to take the condition seriously.
The U&I Club was a life-saver for me. As a young woman in the 1970s I suffered from frequent, severe attacks of cystitis, for which my doctors could find no obvious cause. Angela’s advice on ways of preventing cystitis made a huge difference to my life, with attacks becoming less and less frequent.
After several decades largely cystitis free, I have recently begun to suffer from it again, but with far less severe symptoms. After being told on several visits to my GP that there was no infection present in my sample, I now treat attacks myself with over-the-counter remedies. These relieve the symptoms, but I know that it will crop up again in about three months’ time. This fits with the information in your article about bacteria becoming dormant until cells are shed from the bladder wall.
It’s encouraging to know about the work being done by James Malone-Lee and other consultants. I hope it won’t be too long before the medical profession as a whole recognises and acts on their findings.
Carolyn Sugden
Birmingham
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