Learn About Vaginal Infections

Learn About Vaginal Infections Dr. Travis Ork: We’re talking about STDs, women experience more symptoms than men, but a lot of times, they don’t even know if it's an STD or something entirely different. An example would be something like bacterial vaginosis. Dr. Lisa Masterson: Bacterial vaginosis is not an STD and there's a fallacy that women didn’t necessarily to have symptoms more than men, because basically STDs don’t necessarily cause symptoms. That’s one of the basic things about them. So bacterial vaginosis, as all you guys know my key phrase about the vagina being a “self cleaning oven.” It's that natural bacteria being imbalance. Now, if it's off balance, that’s what causes them natural bacteria to overgrow and called – do what's called the bacterial vaginosis. This can cause a foul discharge, that fishy order, especially certain things called gardnerella. Now, they used to be thought as STD, but not it's just an imbalance. And when you have something like that fishy order and gardnerella, you might have a greenish sort of foul discharge. This is something you can treat, you can cure with antibiotics in different forms, like creams, orally or with suppositories, So your vagina actually indicates to you a lot of times if there's something wrong. But if these go untreated, they can cause like pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility. Other ones can cause whitish discharges that can cause itching and irritation. Again, a cure for those type of things sometimes these are caused by bacteria, like step, just sort of like strep in the throat. You can also have a yellowish discharge, this again, can be all cure by antibiotics, so you want to make sure – the first thing I do with I ask a patient if she’s having discharge, I say what color is it? Because again, the one that really concerned about that actually maybe connected with an STD might be something chlamydia or trachomatis that has a bloody type of discharge. So when we ask if you're having discharges, does have a color, does have an order, this actually tells us a lot. Dr. Travis Ork: And an important to treat those early, you mentioned chlamydia, gonorrhea for women, because those symptoms can worsen every time. And one last time, women don’t need to do this because? Dr. Lisa Masterson: Because the vagina is a “self cleaning oven.”