Dear Healthy Friend,

If you've never experienced a urinary tract infection, you might not know what I'm talking about... So, I'm going to describe it for you. It's the constant urge to go to the loo, when you get there, you find little relief. You're unable to empty your bladder completely and the little trickle that does come out is so painful and burns more than a thatch house on fire - causing your eyes to well up with tears...

Have you got the picture now? So there is no wonder that most people will resort to any measure to get relief... Even an antibiotic that could cause more damage than good...

Christine O'Brien reveals more...

In the name of good health,

Taryn Strugnell
Managing Editor of Nutrition & Healing

P.S. I love chocolate, especially if it's infused with fruit... And the darker the better! Yum! Dr Wright reveals the flaws in this common thought...

Urgent warning on common antibiotic
Christine O'Brien

Go to the doctor for a urinary tract infection and here's what's probably going to happen.

You'll spend mere minutes with the doctor and be ushered out the door almost immediately with a prescription for an incredibly common antibiotic combination of trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole.

So, it's really common - must be safe. No problem, right?

Oh, come on... You're a Health Bytes reader. You know even the most routinely prescribed drugs could come with long lists of problems.

This one comes with a pretty major one, in fact. Researchers recently found that this common drug combo could raise potassium levels to potentially deadly highs.

In fact, 189 patients in the study, in which researchers examined the medical records of 300,000 seniors, had to be hospitalised because their potassium levels became dangerously high.

The antibiotic combo can decrease the kidney's ability to clear potassium from the body. The resulting jump in potassium levels could have deadly effects on heart rhythm.

So what do you do now that one of the most common treatments for a urinary infection comes with a giant warning sign?

Luckily, you have a couple of options.

First, there's D-mannose, a type of sugar that can help get rid of an infection in just one or two days. Take one teaspoon every three or four hours while you're awake. Bacteria will cling to the D-mannose instead of the lining of your bladder and will be flushed from your system when you urinate.

Then, there's the prevention aspect. Cranberries have antibacterial properties that do a bang-up job of warding off urinary tract infections. You could drink a glass of cranberry juice a day. Of course, then there's the problem of finding one that doesn't contain the high levels of sugar that the typical supermarket brand does. Another option is, of course, cranberry extract supplements, which are very easy to find. In case of difficulty contact Health Works on (011) 325 5168.

Is dark chocolate good for you?

Q: I keep hearing that dark chocolate is good for me. Is this just another story that's too good to be true?

JVW: Dark chocolate has certainly been a media darling for a couple of years now. And there is evidence showing that it offers some health benefits. Just one example is a study published a while ago in the journal Hypertension, which concluded that eating approximately 85g of dark chocolate (which contains flavonols) on a daily basis helps in a small but significant degree to combat high blood pressure, insulin resistance, blood vessel dilation and LDL cholesterol in individuals with hypertension. The researchers referred to prior research that demonstrated the same effects in healthy individuals.

But what this study - and most of the other articles on this topic - didn't take into consideration are the adverse effects of the refined sugar in dark chocolate. But you can skip the chocolate bar and make your own hot chocolate using organic cocoa powder, almond milk and lo han or stevia.