As some of you may know, I started a thread about my Samba's urinary tract
infection last week. I want to thank all of you who responded to that thread
for a lot of useful information!

I had a conversation with a friend, Clive, who had an idea for an unusual
treatment for urinary crystals today and wanted to see if anyone here knew
whether this might work.

Clive said that a very promising treatment for the equivalent disease in
humans, kidney stones, was to give the patient cranberry juice, which did a
wonderful job of balancing the patient's pH and dissovling the stone. He
wondered if the same thing - or a cranberry pill, which apparently also
exists - might possibly work for cats.

I thought I'd ask here since neither Clive nor I has any idea if cats can
safely consume cranberry juice. Does anyone know if cranberry juice is
dangerous to cats or if it has ever been tried for reducing urinary crystals
(Struvite)?

If it is safe and does work, does anyone know if cats will willingly drink
cranberry juice or would it be a matter of forcing them to take the
cranberry pills?

I'm certainly not going to try this until I hear from people that it is safe
and even then I will probably double check with the vet just to be
absolutely sure. But I don't want to waste the vet's time if cranberry juice
is known to be toxic to cats or shown to be completely ineffective with
struvite crystals.


--
Rhino