Natural Baking Soda for Interstitial Cystitis

If you are taking baking soda for your interstitial cystitis or chronic UTI symptoms, I highly recommend a natural brand. I used to take baking soda for my sharp hot stinging urines back in Spring 2018 up until Fall 2018. It would provide almost instant relief to non-sharp wees because the wee would be super alkaline, which I tested with PH strips. That old blog post can be found at My Natural Ways for Healing IC / UTI / Bladder Inflammation.

I was taking Arm & Hammer Baking Soda back then, but I'd like to tell everyone that if you are taking baking soda, please switch to an organic brand at Whole Foods, or the Bob's Red Mill Baking Soda, or other natural brands like Frontier. This was advised to me by an Interstitial Cystitis patient who healed her IC, she did the Bob's brand. It is clean with only 1 ingredient: sodium bicarbonate, and the most important thing is that it isn't chemically procured like Arm & Hammer and other non-natural brands --- which I will explain below.

Other baking soda brands might be laced with chemicals or additives or chemically procured, so stick to the clean baking soda. I wish I had known this back when I was doing baking soda last year. I retired the baking soda back in September 2018 because I was feeling so well with my wees, but then I did a little bit of it again in November or December 2018 briefly when I got a bad flare (e-coli tripled according to the DNA urine test, which proved my "flare" was when the pathogens grew, as shown on my instagram post). I haven't touched baking soda since 6 months ago, because that's how much better I am healed by now.

I switched to Bob's brand this week for baking my bladder-friendly treats. And I decided that if I do feel a twinge in my urine now-and-then (it does happen several times a week), then I will do the Bob's baking soda. So I will be going back on the baking soda only if/when I feel the hot twinges in the urethra or wees. From time-to-time, I will get weird wees in the mornings, and sometimes in the later afternoons if I didn't eat clean enough.

If you're wondering why I would pay dollars more for Bob's Red Mill baking soda over the much cheaper Arm & Hammer brand, here is an explanation from Crunchy Betty:

Why on earth would you want to pay dollars more per pound for something like Bob’s Red Mill when you can get Arm & Hammer for a stick of gum?
It has to do with the way the two things are procured. A brand like Bob’s Red Mill (or Frontier or various other natural brands of baking soda) are mined directly from the ground in their natural sodium bicarbonate state (also known as nahcolite). In fact, Bob’s Red Mill is mined right here in Colorado, so for me it’s kind of like buying local. Which is nice.
There are no chemical reactions, nothing added or fiddled with. It’s just pure sodium bicarbonate, the way the earth made it.
On the other hand, Arm & Hammer baking soda uses a chemical reaction process through which trona ore is mined, then heated until it turns into soda ash. Then the soda ash is treated with carbon dioxide, and baking soda pours forth through the glorious brilliance of science.
It’s just a lot of effort to go through to procure something that’s abundantly available at this point.
Arm & Hammer (and other similar brands) use a chemical process that turns trona ore into soda ash and then reacts carbon dioxide with the soda ash to produce baking soda. This is not necessarily bad, per se, but it’s not the same as brands like Bob’s Red Mill and Frontier procure their sodium bicarbonate directly from the ground, in its natural state.

Overall though at the time of writing this post, I'm feeling a strong 80% better. I do feel like I have plateaued though, like I'm "stuck" at 80%, so I will be looking for new ways to get up to 100%. When I discover ways that work, I will blog about it.