GynoFiles

Can pain with urination be a chlamydia infection? Where do you least expect a chlamydia infection? Your elbow, yep, it can be there, your eye, it can be there too. (Actually in the joint of your elbow, but you get the point!) But it's usually in the private parts that you expect. But what you don't expect is not to expect it. In other words, you just have to get tested as often there really are no symptoms at all. For instance with chlamydia infections of the urethra, or the tube coming from the bladder, the symptoms can be painful urination, but it may be no urine pain at all! And actually blood in the urine, called hematuria, usually means a regular bacterial type urinary tract infection. Hematuria, or blood in the urine usually excludes most urinary infections by the chlamydia organism. In fact asymptomatic urethral infections with chlamydia are so common gynos often use pee tests just to test for the infection in you and your partner. And for regular bacteri...

The future of curing infection is in danger according to the newest report in September 2013 from the CDC. describes an infectious disease landscape in which 2 million people in the United States are sickened annually with antibiotic-resistant infections. The report estimates that at least 23,000 people a year die from antibiotic-resistant infections. For gynos are growing numbers of cases of  drug-resistant gonorrhea,  and a growing percentage of the organisms that cause gonorrhea are resistant to even the last line of medications currently available. Another serious threat is from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and over 80,000 serious MRSA infections each year in the United States. Breast MRSA and genital area MRSA infections are diagnosed relatively commonly in gyno offices. A critical component of controlling these infections is to watch the amount of antibiotic use you consume. About half of all antibiotics given are probably unnecessary. Testi...

When asked what is the most common STD a patient is likely to have, we usually turn to statistics, and then try to skirt around the HPV issue. HPV is prevalent in millions, but mostly we cannot test for it, and few physicians usually site HPV when they consider STDs. If the vaccines have any promise at all, it would be to make HPV again a very rare disease. But we have often thought that chlamydia was then next most common STD followed by gonorrhea. But a new study shows that in at least one group of patients actually Trichomonas vaginalis , commonly called "trich" is more common than Chlamydia. But what is most important is to get checked every time you have a new partner. You and your gyno can get together and decide which tests are best and how frequently to have them.

No clapping for the clap. It may get the best of us. The CDC has checked the gonorrhea being passed around for the past ten years by testing men in over 30 cities around the country. Over the past few decades standard treatments have all followed these paths including the antibiotics sulfonamides, penicillin, and tetracycline. In 2007, the CDC stopped recommending any fluoroquinolone regimens and now cephalosporins have been the last treatment known to be really effective. So we now give cefixime or ceftriaxone along with azithromycin. And the important thing to remember, you cannot always be tested by cultures. Most labs do DNA tests, which tests for the organisms presence. If you have a treatment that has failed your gyno may want to try to find a lab that will indeed do a gonorrhea culture test, which can test for the organism, and test for how sensitive the organism is to the medicine you were given for your treatment. Cures now may have to be evaluated by a follow up check up to...