Home Remedies to Treat Yeast Infections

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Kayti Brosnan. I'm a registered nurse here in Austin, Texas, and today, I'm going to talk a little bit about home remedies for treating a yeast infection. There's a couple of different ways that you can go. The most common is to take some sort of a probiotic, which has acidophilus in it, which is a natural bacteria that is occurring in our body. And this will help balance the bacteria and the yeast because when you have a yeast infection, there's an overproduction of the yeast. So one of them is...one of the ways is just eating yogurt, a probiotic. Another form is using vinegar. You can use any kind of vinegar. They say apple cider is the best. But what you do is you take a cup of vinegar and put that in warm bath water and soak for about 20 minutes. And then when you come out, you obviously want to dry off really well. And you can do this once a day or twice a day if the symptoms a little...are a little bit more uncomfortable. Another form is using honey. This one, I'm a little skeptical. I'm not quite sure how efficient it is because it's pretty sticky. So you put the honey in the affected area where you have the itching and the irritation and let it sit for 20 to 30 minutes, and then rinse off with warm water and pat dry. Another form that is extremely effective, but it's a little more invasive, is taking a tampon -- just a regular tampon -- and dipping it in any sort of yogurt or a probiotic, which is going to have the acidophilus component in it. And you soak it in there, and then you insert it just like you would a normal tampon. You want to leave this in for an hour or two so that it's absorbed back into the vagina, and that's helping to kill off the yeast. You can do this two to three times a day. Another form is boric acid, which you can get over-the-counter at your local pharmacy. And you can also get capsules. They're just like gelatin capsules, and you make the boric acid yourself and you insert that vaginally, and that kind of helps with the pH and the overproduction of yeast as well. So those are just some of the home remedies that you can do. You're probably going to determine which one you want to use according to how bad the infection is. Is it mild or is it really uncomfortable? So those are just some ideas for you."