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How To Wean Off Sugar
Who doesn’t love dessert? I, for one, thoroughly enjoy cookies, cake, and ice cream, but I keep it for here and there and not everywhere. I know that many of you love it, too, because you tell me everyday that this is the hardest thing for you to avoid. But I am...
Randall’s Plaque
This is our main article on Randall's plaque, a papillary nidus that fosters growth of calcium stones. Other articles on this site illustrate plaque, and discuss plaque as a mechanism of calcium kidney stone production. But these have used plaque as part of...
Sugar: The End of Our Love Affair
We love it. As a people Americans eat 66 pounds of added sugar a year per person. Each one of us eat that much added sugar. Yes, that much table sugar, sucrose, the bad stuff. It may be bad but I love it, passionately, and with the fondness only time can add to a...
Mechanisms Causing Uric Acid Stones
My book chapter makes the prime point that low urine pH causes uric acid to crystallize in urine and produce kidney stones. But it does not detail what lowers urine pH to such an extreme. In part, bowel diseases lower urine pH. That is another subject altogether,...
Chapter Seven: Primary Hyperparathyroidism
In my very long and complicated article I detailed primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT) like a good scientist should. With all my heart I tried to make it plain enough for people in general to get a sense of how things work, but looking back on it, I doubt many will....
PRIMARY HYPERPARATHYROIDISM
Primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT) is a systemic disease caused by an excess of parathyroid hormone secretion. It causes calcium kidney stones but also multiple other abnormalities, especially of bone. Here, I am concerned with that subset of PHPT patients with kidney...
Supersaturations Match Kidney Stones
This is a story about how well the supersaturations we measure in 24 hour urines reflect the average supersaturation in the kidneys of patients, whether supersaturations match kidney stones - match the crystals stone contain. If they do match well, we can trust...
KIDNEY STONE PREVENTION COURSE
Our newest venture - the Kidney Stone Prevention Course. It arose from this idea: Kidney stone prevention depends a lot on proper diet and fluids, which patients control. This site tells people what that diet and what those fluids should be, but not how to eat that...
WHY EAT A LOW OXALATE DIET?
Do you need a low oxalate diet? Who does? Who does not? How can you tell? I chose the gorgeous painting by Raphael that hangs in the Musée Condé Chantilly because three surpasses one. https://youtu.be/5p_1VvLuJ_A Who Needs Low Oxalate Diet? Most of all, those...
STONE OBSTRUCTION INJURES KIDNEYS
The old fashioned intravenous pyelogram pictured in the header of this article depicts the normal left kidney of an 18 year old woman, and her severely obstructed right kidney - from a stone. That kidney has lost some of its tissue. In his review of stone pain, Mike...