#Epithelia line tissue surfaces that the outside world can directly access, such as skin, sclera, mouth, gut, vagina, #bladder and #urethra. The natural world produces a vast array of #antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral compounds, especially as flavonoids, alkaloids and phenols. Attacks on most of those tissues and breaches of their integrity are amenable to natural topical treatments and are well treated by many. However, regarding the lower #urinary tract, we impose heavy constraints on our healthcare through our medicines regulatory agencies treating #urothelial and systemic treatments as equivalents, thus with #urothelium as exceptional regarding topical pharmacological #epithelial treatments.
Treating skin infections effectively with honey, the gut with foods and nutraceuticals, and even vaginal epithelium with “live yoghurt” legitimately avoids onerous regulatory constraints, but neither bladder nor urethral urothelium have such drug-regulation “get-outs,” although there are similar, sound physiological and pharmacological grounds for considering them equivalently.
#Cystitis and #catheter associated #UTI have become scourges, with associated #AMR from their treatments with antibiotics causing serious problems for patients and healthcare more widely. Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t have to rely on Big Pharma that has been reticent to expend the requisite hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a new systemic antibiotic for the lower urinary tract, if we could extract therapeutics from nature and safely apply them as topical treatments with regulatory agency approval? We’re starved of treatments in the midst of plenty.