[slau]

My dog has been getting UTIs her whole life, ever since she was a pup. The vet kept prescribing the same antibiotic over and over again. We would do the full 10 days of treatment, the symptoms would be alleviated for a couple weeks, and then they gradually showed up again over the course of a few weeks to a month.

They kept insisting asking if we did give it twice a day, are we sure we did the full course, did we respect the 12h interval, etc. The vets told us this (we saw about 6 different vets at the clinic), the person manning the phone berated us, the nurse welcoming us again repeated the same thing.

Eventually I asked to see the test results (the cultures). It was clear that another antibiotic was effective, and that the one they were giving us wasn’t (it was about 25% better than the control). I asked why we couldn’t get the other one, and it turned out it was difficult to get in our country because it was only approved for humans.

We had to get a dispensation from the health ministry to import it from a neighbouring country. It was a mess of a process that took weeks.

Blaming patients is so ingrained that we were being gaslit into giving our pet an ineffective treatment and made to feel like we were doing something wrong all along.

[M95D]

> it was about 25% better than the control

Please give more details, because I've done antibiotic susceptibility tests for 20 years and I'm not aware of any control used like that.

[slau]

Sorry, I’m not at all into biology so I didn’t know how to express it.

I just meant that over the course of 72 hours, the speed at which the Petri dish with the less-effective antibiotic was filling up seemed to lag behind the control by about 24 hours. At 72 hours both were “full” regardless.