Diagnosing UTIs

Most patients never get a clear explanation of how a UTI diagnosis is made. Urinalysis and urine culture has been considered the "gold standard" for decades, but new approaches are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to detect pathogens urine culture often, or entirely, misses.

This series walks through every layer of the diagnostic stack: how urinalysis and culture work, why up to a third of symptomatic patients receive a negative result, what PCR adds, and how next-generation sequencing identifies fastidious bacteria, fungi, and polymicrobial infections that culture cannot grow.

Read it if you've been told your test was negative despite having symptoms, if you're navigating recurrent infections, or if you simply want to understand what your provider is ordering and why.