Non-obstructing Stones
Dr. David Tzou
Video Transcript
Hello everyone, my name is David Tzou,
I’m a urologist here at the University of Arizona.
And today’s question is
why do doctors tell kidney stone patients
that their stone is
not causing them pain when it’s just hanging out in the
kidney and not obstructing their ureter, that tube
that connects the kidney to the bladder?
I think we’re all in agreement that when the stone generally
causes obstruction
and there’s like swelling of the whole fluid part
of the kidney, that patients can experience some
of the worst pain of their life.
But when the stone is just hanging up inside the kidney
and the CT scan
or some sort of imaging shows
that it’s not causing a whole bunch of swelling, uh,
I think traditionally that has been said that
that doesn’t cause pain and urologists even have said, oh,
that’s gotta be in your head.
I personally don’t agree with that.
I’ve seen enough patients to know
that there are can be stones that are not causing blockage
that do cause a lot of pain.
And when you can get in there, we can actually see some
of those stones have very kind of spiky appearance
to their exterior and that can really make it so
that you think that about that rolling around
inside the kidney and the kidney inside is very inflamed
and it seemed like it would be very painful.
So I do agree that there are patients who
removing those stones can be in their best interest
and can cause that pain to go away.
We’ve certainly seen that and agree with that
counseling is important right, to share
with the patients that while the stone surgery,
can remove it.
It does come at a cost of having the surgery,
having the scope go in there, but it can pay off
and remove that pain so that they don’t have
to continue to experience it.
And we know that when we go in
and actually remove these stones,
these patients feel better.
So, I can’t imagine
that being just all from it being in their head.
in general, I now am willing
to operate on those patients even though they might have
smaller stones with the full kind of counseling beforehand,
that yes, while our experience has shown that a lot
of patients improve in their symptoms
and have relief of their pain afterwards,
that it’s not a guarantee, right?
So that counseling beforehand has set expectations to know
that, well, yes, this is a very likely outcome,
that their pain goes away, I can’t guarantee it beforehand.
And if they expect that afterwards no matter what,
then we’re a little bit on different expectations.
So I think as long as that counseling is in place,
I think patients can really benefit sometimes from having
these non obstructing stones removed.