Kidney Stones Treatment
Kidney Stones Treatment
All kinds of Kidney stone treatment is aimed at kidney stone removal from your body.
Passing A Kidney Stone By Water
The most painless way to do that is to drink lots of water everyday and the kidney fragments would flush out with the urine. You may feel some discomfort when the kidney stone fragments pass out so the doctor would give you some painkillers.
This treatment for passing kidney stone would normally work when the stones are small or can be dissolved with medicines. For example, uric acid stones are softer than other types of kidney stones and can be made small enough to pass with urine by dissolving them by alkaline fluids. For this, the doctor may ask you to take some medicine along with lots of water to make your urine more alkaline which helps in the process of dissolving the stones.
But when the kidney stones are big and don’t pass with urine or caught in a difficult place in the urinary tract, the kidney stones may require surgery for removal.
Other Kidney Stone Removal Procedures
Here the good news is that while surgery was the only option for kidney stone removal in the past, now there exist options which do not require open surgery or incision of your body.
Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL)
Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL)is the procedure that is used very frequently for the removal of kidney stones. In this procedure, shock waves are created outside the body of the patient. These shock waves pass through the skin and body tissue to the dense stones. These waves hammer the stone breaking it into small particles which can easily pass through the urinary tract in the urine and are flushed out.
Various kinds of ESWL devices are used for kidney stone treatment. Most of these make use of x-rays or ultrasound for the process of stone fragmentation.
Though no body incision is made in this process, the patient does feel some pain and sometimes anesthesia is needed to make the patient unaware of the pain.
Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy
When the kidney stone is quite large or if it is located in the place where ESWL procedure cannot be used effectively, a process called Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy is used.
In this procedure, a tiny incision is made in the back to create a tunnel directly into the kidney. The surgeon uses an instrument called a nephroscope to locate and remove the stone. If the stone is large, some type of energy probe is used to break down the stone into small pieces. The advantage of this procedure is that most of stone pieces can be removed during the process, unlike in the ESWL in the procedure where the removal of stone particles is done through passing the urine.
Ureteroscopy
If a kidney stone is stuck in middle or lower part of the ureter, it may not be possible to use the ESWL procedure to remove them.
Instead a procedure called Ureteroscopy is used in which a long thin telescope called ureterscope is passed through your urethra into your bladder and up into the ureter where the stone is located.
The kidney stone is then removed with a cage-like device or shattered by shock waves produced by a special instrument.
A small tube or stent may be left in the ureter for some days for helping the flow of urine.
Traditional Surgery
When none of the above methods for kidney stone removal can be used, the usual incisive surgery may be required. Here an incision is made in your back to reach the kidney and the ureter to take out the kidney stones.