by Dr Fredric Coe | Oct 2, 2015 | For Doctors, For Patients
It has always seemed to me that medical practice is a dance. One leads, perhaps, but the other does, too. If physicians know more steps, patients can prepare their parts in advance and organize their large roles in long term treatments so the final result is graceful and ultimately elegant in obtaining the best results with the least extra effort and resources. After all, it is patients who know the past and will determine the future. Here are lists for you, ways to think about time with physicians, and especially a way to think about your treatment over the long years of stone prevention. For it is years, this being a chronic and recurrent disease, years of work by you with only a rare burst of medical guidance here and there. Yet so important as rare needs preparation and curating so what transpires is not lost. What is here is my own ideal of how things should happen, how the dance is conducted – so brief, so important.
by Dr Fredric Coe | Aug 29, 2015 | For Doctors, For Patients, For Scientists
Idiopathic hypercalciuria may well be the most complex and important issue in all of medical management of calcium kidney stones. It arises within the elaborate systems that regulate calcium metabolism and produces both a risk of stone formation and of bone disease with fractures. IH is strongly familial, almost certainly genetic in origin, and present in children as well as adults. Treatments used include high calcium – moderate protein – reduced sodium diet, moderation of dietary sugar loads, and potassium citrate, and thiazide type diuretics, each of which act through different and reasonably well characterized pathways which cannot be understood without a knowledge of how IH works in the first place. Unlike stones themselves, supersaturation, or citrate, each a very large and important topic, IH cannot be presented well – at least by me – in separated linked articles but only in one article that carries its many intersecting physiologies along side by side and uninterrupted. Being a long and comprehensive article, foundational for this site and – to me at least – for comprehension of the whole topic of pathogenesis and treatment of nephrolithiasis, this article is not necessarily meant to be read all at once but rather used as a resource. I will cover the treatments of IH later on, in separate articles.
by Dr Fredric Coe | Jul 25, 2015 | For Doctors, For Patients, For Scientists
Being so important, the very force that drives crystal and stone formation, supersaturation has enjoyed considerable attention on this site and it seemed time to gather the articles about it into a coherent narrative. The walking tour seems apropos as such tours visit a group of related sites and have, or should have, a guide to put each one into perspective and extract from the entire group some large and generous idea about the world from which they arose. My prior one on stones themselves attempted the same.
by Dr Fredric Coe | Apr 19, 2015 | For Doctors, For Patients, For Scientists
This is the essential basis for modern kidney stone prevention. I review its limitations, and how much information it provides on the pattern of stone risk factors for a given patient. Also, I show how much variation within a day hides in the 24 hour averaging and what you should do about it, and point out why you need at least two 24 hour urines before treatment. If you have signed up for my emails, read the one for this article because it explains how it is put together and best read.
