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CANARY IN THE MINESHAFT
The painting by van Gogh, The Sower with Setting Sun (1888) Kroller - Muller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands, has no obvious connection to this article unless you have read Nellie Hermann's essay on the former mining district of Belgium called the Borinage. Writing in...
How To Count Kidney Stones
The aims of stone prevention are to reduce the number of new stones formed, and to reduce the growth of stones in kidneys by lowering supersaturation. This means we gauge our success by counting and measuring stones. Mostly, radiologists measure and we count. That is...
THE TRUE MEANING OF RENAL CLEARANCE
I put my youngest image here because the groundwork of what I offer belongs to 1965 when I first thought about the problem and 1968 when my paper about it was published. I should have put in as a bookend my latest and oldest image, too, for I completed the thought...
How Plaque Forms
The white clouds you can easily see on this human papillum are Randall's plaque, named for the man who first described them. Stones grow on them. You can find bits of plaque and on such stones where they were once attached. Because plaque forms in and lies in the...
Kidney Stones, Stroke, and Myocardial Infarction
In other articles I have reviewed evidence associating kidney stones with high blood pressure and kidney disease. One might well extrapolate from these two associations that stone forming will also associate with vascular complications such as stroke and myocardial...
PRETTY PICTURES, NO NEW TREATMENT – Yet
I rarely write about new science in stone disease because this site aims mainly at patients and clinicians who want stone prevention now, not in some glittering and distant future. But this article is in the newspapers and promises - as if imminent - something far off...