Study Says Cranberries Don’t Cure UTIs

So you’re telling us we drank all that cranberry juice for nothing?….

If you've ever had a UTI, then you know that waiting for a doctor's appointment to get antibiotics feels like torture. The uncomfortable bloat, the constant feeling like you're going to pee your pants, and the burning pain when you actually do pee are all reasons why anyone with a UTI has tried to find an alternative to waiting for a prescription. One of the most common treatments people have stumbled upon time and time again is the cranberry pill. And if you've been depending on cranberry pills to cure your UTIs, we have some sad news. In an article for the Huffington Post,Rémi Thomasson of the Université Paris Descartes — USPC and Antoine Muchir of Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) — Sorbonne Universités, explained why it's so important that the public have access to studies that don't turn out as the scientists hoped. As an example, they offered a study about cranberries.



In this study, the news was that scientists didn't see the UTI causing bacteria in women's urine clear up with help from cranberries. Basically, nothing happened. Still it's super important we know these results so we don't all continue chugging that bitter juice thinking it's actually helping.

Who knows how many other studies failed that we didn't hear about but maybe should have?

The researchers argue having these results available will cut down on expensive studies that duplicate other failed ones, will help researchers developing pharmaceuticals and doing other important work, and will help average people understand themselves and science a little bit better. It's incredibly helpful to know that our cranberry lifeline is useless, so we want to know what else is out there as far as failed studies. Negative Results shows not proving a hypothesis isn't a failure, it's actually a pretty useful bit of information.

Related: Period Cramp Cures Don't Exist Because Science Is Sexist

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