It is now neither necessary nor desirable to have surgery for kidney stones, because cutting into a kidney can reduce its effectiveness by as much as 20% a time. So less invasive methods have evolved. Among these are a number of home remedies to get rid of kidney stones.

One alternative to surgery is shock treatment (extracorporeal shockwave lithotripsy -- ESWL). This literally shatters the stone into small pieces. Carried out under local anesthetic, the feeling of having been run over by a truck persists for some days afterwards.

Another procedure involves the insertion of a probe into the urinary tract. As this allows direct contact with the stone, it needs a less powerful shockwave, so the residual pain is less. A laser is sometimes used to fragment the stone.

These procedures, necessitate a visit to the hospital and are painful to a greater or lesser degree, so medication is increasingly being used.

The pharmaceuticals often used were originally created to treat hypertension and are known as calcium channel blockers and alpha-blockers. When used as medication for kidney stones they work by relaxing the ureter: the tube, linking the kidney with the bladder. It is the narrowness of this tube in relation to the size of the larger kidney stone that causes all the pain.

This medication also increases liquid pressures. So the stone can often be flushed out by simply drinking large quantities of water.

However, this method is only reliable when the stone has nearly completed its painful passage down the ureter anyway and so is close to the bladder -- in the bottom section, called the distal ureter. And, by then the stone will have already caused a lot of pain and maybe some damage to the delicate urinary tract.

A better solution is to use home remedies to get rid of kidney stones, because -- if taken as soon as the first symptoms are experienced -- these get to work immediately, dissolving the stone, so it can pass easily down the ureter and flushed from the body without causing damage. These can remove the stone within about 12 hours, which is very much faster than the alpha-blockers or calcium channel blockers.

Because the home remedy methods use regular grocery items, there are no side effects. With the alpha-blockers or calcium channel blockers there are some side effects, although they are relatively mild, when compared with most pharmaceuticals. A few patients reporting a feeling of light-headedness, when using alpha-blockers, although users of the calcium channel blockers do report more disturbing symptoms, such as giddiness, when rising quickly from a sitting position (postural or orthostatic hypotension). This is because calcium channel blockers were originally designed to lower blood pressure in patients with hypertension, so -- under reduced pressure -- the blood tends to drain from the brain by gravity, causing the temporary giddiness. Both sets of side effects disappear when the medication is stopped.

The good news is about 85% of stones have a high calcium content and these respond very well to home remedies to get rid of kidney stones. In the majority of cases the stones can be dissolved and passed harmlessly out of your system in as little as 12 hours. And, because the treatment consists entirely of regular grocery items, costing only about ten dollars, there are no side effects and no big doctor bills.

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