Lower Back Pain – Kidney Stones

Transcript

So let’s talk about things that in medicine we’d say, ooh, you don’t want to miss this as a diagnosis. Or in lay terms we’d say other things that can cause back pain that you best be at your doctor for. So those fall into a number of categories. But let’s first of all talk about kidney stones. Kidney stones typically cause one-sided back pain. It’s excruciating and as one of my surgical technicians described it, it felt like something the size of a sun made out of glass shards going through a soda straw. And it is the worst pain of your life for the most part. And it’s the the acute onset in someone who’s otherwise healthy and doesn’t really have much of a history for having had an event such as shoveling the snow or moving the rocks or whatever, the twisting and turning. And that pain is so bad that you almost aren’t gonna miss it. You’re going to end up in an ER. There’s sometimes people will pass a stone real quickly and it’ll transiently go away. But if you have suspected, especially it’s more of a flank pain, it may start up under your rib cage and go down on one side and may even feel like it’s going down into the pelvis as the stone progresses or may not progress. But usually if it’s such terrible pain, you’re going to end up in an emergency room.