One of my pet peeves is taking in vitro or out of context laboratory research and applying it authoritatively to clinical work. I think physiology is fascinating, and even so it kills me when we act like an herb (or worse yet, a single constituent or nutrient) will behave in the human body the way it does in a petri dish, a test tube, or a cellular model.
I have strong feelings about uva ursi in this regard. It's the classic UTI herb, and you'll often hear people saying that it should always be taken with baking soda or another agent to alkalinize the urine, since one of its key constituents, arbutin, works best when urine is alkaline.
There is some truth to this, and I still think asking everyone to take baking soda with it is a huge leap that isn't justified. I explain why in the latest episode of my podcast (~10 min).
The short version is that we don't have any evidence in humans that alkalinizing the urine helps uva ursi to be more effective, there are possible downsides, and arbutin isn't the only part of uva ursi that matters (not to mention that uva ursi isn't the only herb to consider when someone has a UTI).
Hope you enjoy my mini rant on the subject 
Take care,
Camille
p.s. I haven't been great about letting you know when I publish a new podcast episode. I also published one about dosing herbal extracts recently that might be of interest.
