Kidney Stones – Medications

Transcript

Medications might be prescribed to relieve the discomfort of actively passing a kidney stone. These are directed at each symptom. Pain medications are used to control pain. Anti-inflammatories are preferred over opioid medications. But sometimes for severe pain, narcotic pain medications are required. For nausea, medications called antiemetics can relieve the feeling of nausea. And occasionally a medication is used to hasten the passage of stones or to make it pass more quickly. Although the effectiveness of these medications has been challenged in some recent studies. On a more chronic nature, when you’re not actively passing a kidney stone, medications are prescribed in some patients to decrease the risk of future stone formation. Usually the need for a medication isn’t uncovered, unless a patient has something called a 24 hour urine collection. A urologist or a nephrologist may have you do this special test to figure out why your kidneys specifically are prone to making kidney stones. Based on the data, a personalized treatment plan can be made with a combination of changing the pH of your urine, changing the way your kidneys handle calcium and other alterations that can prevent kidney stones from forming in the future.