Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Kidney Stones

Episode Date: May 20, 2016

It's time to talk about the ailment so scary that Hippocrates told other doctors they shouldn't mess with it: Kidney stones. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, tour of Miss Garden Medicine. for the mouth. Wow. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Saw Bones, a metal tour of Miss Guyton Medicine,

I Am Your Coase, Justin McRoy. And I'm Sydney McRoy. Sydney, we've done a lot of really personal episodes over the years. And I think today's episode, when I was asking you for particulars about it, distinguishing factors, you let me know that this may be one of our personal, personal yet one that's really hit close to home. Because you said about

today's topic that it hurts and you had one once. So that's why you you come to this from a very personal angle today. Right. That's true. Justin always asks me for some facts about the topic to like come up with these very as you can tell very clever I Think like comedy masterpiece level bits that are interest your show and when he asked me about this topic in particular He said what what kind of facts can you give me? And I don't know, like they're right there in front of him. So I just thought maybe he could look at him himself this time, but he didn't. So I said it hurts and I had one. I don't like to read a

head. And I'll spoil it for myself if I read a head. So I like to keep it all fresh and new. I just feel like I do all the heavy lifting ahead of time. Like I do all the hard work. And like you could just like, aren't you professionally funny? Yeah, but that humor comes from a lot of pain. And I've had, that was really my heavy lifting was years of bullying, bullying, basically, just experiencing bullying. Would you say that that pain was as bad as a kidney stone?

I have no frame of reference, but I do want to know about a kidney stem because this seems like one of those things that you hear people talk about enough, but I really don't have much of a firmer reference for like what it is. Well, they hurt. And you have one once. Those are the two things I know about kidney stans. That's true. Well, a lot of people have asked me to talk about kidney stans. And I think in part, not everyone who suggested this, but quite a few people who have, it's been a personal thing.

It's been because they have been affected by kidney stones and probably had the same thought I did, which was, oh gosh, this is, oh no, this is awful. This is horrible, but like more dramatic. And then why is this happening to me? Oh dear God, why? Oh God, not me. This can't be happening to me. Yeah. So thank you Nicholas and Sky and Nikola and Daniel and Alexis and Nathaniel and Amanda and Vicki and Russell and Chase and Nia and add Thank all of you. Thanks everybody for recommending. Yes, and I'm sure at least for a few of you for having them. Thank you, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I think they're very painful and Sydney had one one. So you're in the company. So kidney stones, and we'll talk a little bit. Let me say just to be fair. I'm going to talk a little bit about bladder stones to same idea, just different location.

Yeah, if you expect me to learn the difference between those two, your no way. One's in the kidney, one's in the bladder. Mm, there you go. You already lost me. That's it. Nephralithiasis is the other word here we're gonna use. Are you reerol with the isis? No, that won't be necessary. Arena with the isis.

We're fine. You prefer, I mean, we're talking about stones, the word for stone, and then the location of the stone. That's really it. The tomb. Usually I find then the location of the stone. That's really it. The tomb. Usually I find that the location of the stone is somewhere buried in the tomb where in the shrine of the Silver Monkey. That's where everybody who's got stuck was in the shrine of the Silver Monkey. I'd be careful when I was very confused and the head looks like it's but it's very

confusing monkey. Much like there are several places along the urinary track where the kidney stones can get stuck. Whoa, I like that. Yeah. So your body is a temple. It's a let it's old Mac. It's the hidden temple.

The hidden temple. And there are places where you stones get stuck. Um, it's it's pretty much what you would think. So it's not and I mean, it's not a stone per se, but it is a small like clump of usually like crystal like mineral materials that, you know, they sort of precipitate out of your urine and begin to stick together and form a little hard can be sharp, can be smooth, irregular, various colors and shapes depending on what minerals are in there. So I was a like thing.

I was about to ask you if I pop one out, what would it look like, but it sounds like a quite a variety. It depends. A lot of them are calcium oxalate stones. That's the majority of kidney stones are made of calcium oxalate. And so they would look like these little

maybe like brownish or reddish brownish, I don't know, like little irregular moon rock looking thingies. Okay. But there can be ones that look sharper or more jagged or smoother or some can be like purpley in color or some can be kind of clear lighter or yellow. There's a variety, depends on what causes them. The majority are calcium.

Size-wise fairly small. Hopefully. Yeah. The majority are fairly small. They can be anywhere from like a grain of sand. You know, they can be quite, quite small, which is what you're hoping for if you have one. Cross your fingers. Yeah, or they can, they can get fairly large into the centimeters. Again, you don't want that. Yeah. The bigger the more problems they cause, of course. into the centimeters. Oh. Again, you don't want that. Yeah. The bigger the more problems they cause, of course. So obviously they form inside your kidney,

they got to make their way out of your kidney. And the way out of your kidney is down the uritor into the bladder and then out through your rethra. Okay. Which is where you pee from. Right. Right, got that. Got that. And that's why, of course, the smaller, the better. Okay, which is where you pee from right right got that got that

And that's why of course the smaller the better Hopefully they just come out Yeah, but sometimes is what we would say sometimes your your order wouldn't be big enough I think to pass that that's true. They can get hung up in there. Mm-hmm They can get they can get hung up in the yurt or they can get hung up in the place where the yurt meets the bladder. What kind of pain we're talking about these? Like burning, sharp pain, what could we look forward to? Well, the word that we would use medically is a colloquial pain, which means it kind of comes and goes as the stone moves. And it's a pretty intense pain. It's a pretty, I would say like more of a deep achy throbby kind of pain, but I mean,

people describe it as sharp sometimes, but it comes and goes as the stone moves. That's when it hurts is when it's moving. And it's, it like when someone is doubled over, clutching their, you know, midsection or their lower back and writhing, that's probably a kidney stone. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously they can, in addition to being very painful, they can lead to obstruction, so they can block the flow of urine, which is bad because it can kind of cause the

kidney to swell and that can damage the kidneys and then to infections too, because stuff builds up behind it and bacteria like to just swim around and stagnate pools of urine. That's much like any of us, really. Like how the guy had to get help from the survivor, sent him from the survivor, because the pipes were all blocked up. Sort of like that.

Yeah, I mean his prostate was still. As a knowledge prostate, but still. Right, it was blocking his pipes, but either way, you cannot get your pipes blocked up. It's a very serious problem. Your plumbing's gotta be be got to be flowing. Churrenen. So now, as you can imagine, because kidney stones, I mean, can affect almost anyone, really. They're not uncommon.

Some people seem to get them a lot. Which, you know, and I'll get into that just a little bit, but there are hereditary reasons why you might get stones. There are genetic reasons, and some people just have certain diseases that predispose them to it. But there are records of us trying to treat these guys back to ancient times, because they're very painful. And when they come out, we can see them,

so we know exactly what the problem was, right? Which is like a rare thing in medicine, where once you pee out the stone, you can pick it up and go, this was the problem. It's gonna be kind of satisfying, right? This is an easy one to crack. Like, it comes out, how often do you just take out

the bad thing, and it's just like blop? It's a wonderful, what a chance to cut as a chance to cure. That's a wonderful time in medicine, when it's that simple. It rarely is. We've seen descriptions of stones dating back to the Mesopotamians, and we found stones in Egyptian mummies. So, you know, we know people were dealing with them

and describing them and trying to figure out ways to fix them. The most common way that people came up with to fix them was surgery. Really? Frangely enough. Yes. Well, noangely enough. Yes. Well, no, physical thing.

Why not go in there and get it? Exactly. Removing stones is one of the oldest surgeries that people were trying to do. The germs hadn't been emitted yet. So might as well get in there and get it out. So Shrita, a surgeon from India, a 600 BC, wrote descriptions of lots of different surgical procedures,

including what we would call a perennial lehthautomy, which means you would make a hole in the perineum. Do you know what the perineum is? Good, ain't. Thanks, Justin. Well, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, what? The perineum. I'm not going to use that word. Okay. Well, that'll be, I'm kind of the common man here. I represent the people. Would you like to explain to people where that is? It's the taint. It's between your...

Your front butt, front butt and your back butt. Front butt and your back butt. No man's land. Between your front butt. But it's the DMZ between your, the PMZ. Between your front butt and your back butt. DoZ between your, the PMZ, between your front button, your back button. Do you know where that word tank comes from?

Yes, and I'm not going to say that because that gives me the shivers. Okay. So, so you, the way that you would do it is you would go up through the perineum. You can't actually like, wait, into that without actually saying what it is now, because there's at least one person out there is like, what is it you get to this to me? It's called the tank because it tank this and it tank that yeah, okay Anyway So you you cut a whole thing of the perineum and you could go up and try to remove the stone that way He also wrote a theory on stone formation

The idea being that if you eat foods that are considered impure or unclean and we're kind of talking from like a spiritual sense, your inner passageways would become all clogged up with flim and urine that would mix together to form these stones. It's probably so. And then you would get a kidney stone. If you didn't want to do surgery, there were some conservative treatments you could try. One just being a vegetarian diet. Okay.

It doesn't sound too bad. So like, I'll either cut whole. It sounds pretty bad, but go ahead. I don't know. I'll cut a hole in your perineum. And by the way, we don't have antibiotics or anesthesia or any sort of pain control or anything. Or you can just eat the vegetarian diet. your perineum and by the way, we don't have antibiotics or anesthesia or any sort of pain control or anything or you can just eat the vegetarian diet.

What, I'm sorry, it's 600 BC. I'm gonna live to 25. I'm just gonna ride or die. That's cool. I'm just gonna go ahead and keep eating these like mollemamostates. That's all I'm about you. You had a third choice.

Well, Doug said, he didn tell you I had a third one. A treatment of clarified butter and milk that is then loaded into a syringe and injected into your rethra. No, no, I'd rather not. No, I'd rather not become a butter poached from the inside out. Thank you. You're scampied. uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh wrote about them. It's interesting. It was specifically stating that he would not fix them with surgery.

It is actually part of the original Hippocratic oath. Really? Like cutting your own floor stuff? I will not cut for the stone, but we'll leave this to be done by practitioners of this work. Cut for the stone, of course, meaning do a surgery to remove stone. Practitioners of this work, meaning... course meaning do a surgery to remove stone. practitioners of this work meaning. So that's interesting. At the time, there were people known as stone jockies. Sure. Lathautomists.

Okay. Same thing. They were probably mainly guys who would remove stones. And that's what they did. And the reason is that at the time surgery was very risky. Right, we know that. Any surgery was. And so to do it, maybe meant, likely meant, could very well mean that you were killing somebody. So because they didn't know a good way to do it and consistently not kill people, Hippocrates basically said, look, this is not what physicians should be doing. Leave it to lehtatimists,

and they can try this risky thing. Okay. So that actually stuck around for a really long time. There's a really long period of history where doctors did not do surgery because it was kind of considered beneath them, almost, because no people are gonna die. And that's why we see that connection with,

this leads into like the time of barber surgeons and everything. So, but these were specifically people who would just quote unquote cut for the stone. In 276 BC, a monious of Alexandria came up with the idea of not just making a cut to remove the stone, but actually like using a little hook, so you'd do the lathotomy, you would stick a hook up there to kind of hold the stone in place, and then you would take a blunt instrument in and kind of like pound the stone into pieces, like break it up.

Oh, actually great, yeah, for sure. But then you wouldn't have to pull it back out. You would just let it pass on its own, which wasn't a crazy idea, considering that, through the years, we would search for, you know, safer ways to break a stone up and let you pass it on your app. Okay. But I don't know, a hook and a blunt instrument probably wasn't the best way to do it. You did better than that.

Now, Amonius did so many of these that he came to me known as Lathautamus, which I think is really funny. Is that a pretty good one? Don't you think so? Off to your word for it. I mean imagine like the modern day equivalent, like you do 70, you know, appendectomies that we start calling you appendectomists.

I mean, think about it. Yeah, I am. I'm chocolate over here. I've got my mic turned out too low to here, but I'm, I'm busing the guy. Police is tectomas. That's when you take out your gold blotter. Anyway, Celsius would later write about the best way to do the procedure,

although to be fair, he never did one. He just wrote about it. And he insisted on a couple things in addition to, this is the good. Guys, guys, this is how I dream it would go down. So it's me and I'm cruising along my sleep Lamborghini and this hot bay pulls out to me just like I'm like here let me allow me madam and also it has to be spring yeah and it's

best if it's a nine to 14 year old. Yeah. That's a great thought it was best to do the procedure on. And okay, okay, no, okay, wait. Wait, wait, no, I'm sorry, no. You can't as part of your therapy say who it would be best to have the thing. I guess if it's like a, it's all a hypothetical procedure, he's never done one. He's like dream one.

Like if this, like he would love to do one and he's sure he's great at it, but like he's got to wait for just the right one to come a lot. Well, if we don't really get it, get into the pool, wait in there with the rest of us. This is like the, the epitome of like ivory tower. That could be me. Sources. Sources. Sources?

Yeah. This guy's a creep. I don't know about this guy. Um, and that also he makes it, he makes the point that you need to have two assistants to perform this procedure. They should be strong and also preferably smart. Yeah, okay. Sure. Yeah, sure. In the medieval period, men, lathautomists would travel from town to town to perform lathautomies.

And we've kind of talked about this, like the showmanship of medicine for a while, like as we move into much later periods, like medicine shows, but like the people who would go around extracting teeth, you know, in front of crowd. Yeah, they make a big production out of it. The same thing, same idea,

except for the cutting holes in people's perineums and pulling stones out of them. So basically, if you came up to them and said you had any problem from the waist down, they were gonna cut a hole and try to pull a stone out. I only have that one trick. Yeah, so. When all you got to hammer, everything looks like a tape.

And then, plus there's big money in that. Big money. Yeah, because you get tickets and you get it front-end and back-end and in the middle from the tank. And there was like no entertainment at the time. Like, yeah, no TV. We had no, uh, Blindoku. I mean, there was nothing to do basically. So, yeah, you just watched, watched somebody. You look on me. Plastic. There are lots of people who spend their free time that way now. Yeah, it may use it mostly in second life, but they're all over. So they would do this, of course, without anesthesia and very quickly and with a lot of, I

don't know, glamor with a lot of panache. Yeah. Yeah, you know what I mean? It's a show. And for an audience, in 1215, there was a papal edict that actually, and I kind of alluded to this, for bad physicians from doing any surgery, because it was thought that it was unclean and that you would be kind of spiritually contaminated, so to speak, but if you came in contact with blood or bodily fluids, which is exactly why we had,

you know, these lathautomists doing these surgeries as well as again the rise of barber surgeons who didn't have what we would think of it at the time as a traditional medical training. They just knew how to cut things. Resins. And this actually persisted until 1540 when Henry VIII was the one who actually kind of united the professions and deserjans. Okay. We just a quick mention we talked about this in the self-surgery episode, but do you remember the Dutch blacksmith John

De Dut who removed his own bladder stone? Do you remember this story? Very vaguely, yeah. I won't belabor it because we told the whole story in the self-surgery episode. It's been years ago. Go back and listen to that one. Yeah, it's a good one But in 1651 he had a he had a huge stone in his bladder. He'd had multiple He'd had three removed before by Barber surgeons or Leothautomus and he was like forget this I can do it myself So he cut a hole in his own perineum and yanked a stone out like a hide behind the pig I believe is the way the story goes That's a lie.

That was a lie. Nice try, buddy. Listen, where are you figured, tough fella? They're out there renaissance. We got way better. Different approaches. Specifically, the big revolution was trying to get stones out by actually going,

what we call super pubically. So like from the front of the abdomen into the bladder was the way we started going for stones. And that was better. We got better tools and improved methods. We practiced a lot on criminals. Oops. That was that made us better at them.

For a while, we tried to stick a nail up the urethra and hit the stone with a hammer. That was not very successful. Luckily, we moved on from there. There have been a lot of famous people, by the way, with stones. Well, we have established sitting at home once. So obviously most famously me, but slightly less famously, Napoleon did and Michelangelo suffered from many kidney stones, Ben Franklin, Louis XIV, Isaac Newton. It is a disease of distinction, I would say. I want to hear about some of the ways we're trying to fix them.

Well, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about stones, but first Justin, why don't you follow me to the villain department? Let's go! The medicines, the medicines, that ask you lift my car before the mouth. Sydney McElroy fix my kidney stones. Bup, Bup, Bup, Bup, Bup, it's America's least popular game show. Sydney McElroy fix my kidney stones with your host, Sydney McElroy. Uh, so and Pat say Jack times a heart on all Pat.

He said it's it. It makes ends meet except for my first Trick I would like to consult urology. That's it. That's the only trick. I okay. Okay. Sorry. How do we do? I'm feeling practice doctor. Yeah, I can't remove kidneys. I don't cut for the stone. Hippocrates told me not to But like how did we so because surgery throughout time was so dangerous, and one way or another that stones got to come out of there, okay, the stones got to come out. Shows coming out. Whether it's coming out in bits and pieces or coming out as one whole thing, it's got

to come out of there. That's really the treatment. The stones got to come out. But because surgery was so dangerous, people have tried a lot of weird things from time to time. In addition to the weird butter-based milk, your rethral syringe. Some herbal remedies that have been tried,

mustard plaster were popular, which can be very irritating to the skin, by the way. So you gotta be careful with that. You just kinda slap it over like the area that hurts. Hope that that'll do something. Slap just, sorry, slap it on the area that hurts with the kitty stones. Yeah. Got it. Okay.

Well, you kind of hurt like in your like flank area and then it kind of radiates around to like your groin and then down to the nether regions. I'm with you. So you would probably like stick a mustard plaster on your back or don't, I mean don't, but like this is what people would have done. A lot of different teas have been touted as great for so, so like quote unquote dissolving

the stones. That is what people think that they're doing when they're taking these different substances. Like net old tea and celery seed tea and watermelon seed tea and parsley tea, corn silk tea. It's like what? A lot of tea, just drink any tea. Dandelion tea, just anything that's around has been said that it would, like I said, dissolve the stones, plantains were thought to do that.

Marshmallow root is a popular thing. Hey, people love that marshmallow root, huh? Yeah. I have no idea what that is, people are crazy about it. I mean, it's a root. Made of marshmallows. Or it looks like it is it, that it looks like delicious marshmallows.

I don't even have it looks like. I don't know. Why is it marshmallow root? I don't know, Justin. It seems like something that you should tell me about. I'll tell you about it, too. You go look at marshmallow root and get back to me. All right, we'll do. There were another one that I particularly liked was

a cabbage leaf poultry. Now cabbage leaves are another thing. You will see all over the internet people taking cabbage leaves and smashing them on various parts of their bodies, strapping them on to their bellies, their butts, their boobs, whatever to do various things. Great, wonderful things for them. But a cabbage leaf poultry specifically with onions and bran.

Man, I don't know, that sounds like a rough afternoon to me. That you would like cook and like slather on the cabbage leaf and like stick to your side. So like you don't feel bad enough as it is because you got a frickin' kidney stone. Now you've got cabbage and onions. Like I guess maybe that takes your mind off of it. I don't know.

It won't. And then always with kidney stones people will tell you just to drink water until it goes away. Let me give you a little piece of advice there. If you've already got the kidney stone, it's a little too late to be pounded water. If you got the kidney stone, it's too late to hydrate. And I'm not saying don't drink water, of course. Water is great. It's very important for you, drink water.

If you have a kidney stone, still drink water. That's wonderful. But really, you should have drank more water beforehand because dehydration is one reason you may have gotten the stone. This marshmallow root, quick trivia, you ready? Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm treating my word. The root, which is actually called alfaya,

alfaya, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Alfaya was used since Egyptian antiquity in a honey sweetened confection useful in the treatment of a sore throat. The later French version of the recipe, which is called, and I'm going to butcher this, but a pate de goulmove or goulmove for short, it included an egg white meringue and was often flavored with rose water. Pate goulmove, more closely resembles contemporary commercially available marshmallows, which no longer contain any actual marshmallow.

So yeah, there you go. Very interesting. I think this should be a new segment every episode that you have to do like one. Justin, we'll call it Justin Google that. Justin Google that just now. And he taught us something. Thank you, Justin. I'm bringing value.

Great job. Great job. So a couple more recipes. And they're endless. They're endless. If you want to, I mean, I don't know why. If you have a kidney stone, you do not want to waste time googling like home remedies for kidney stone.

Don't do that. Don't do that. But if you did in your free time, some things you might find kidney beans. Now I know what we're going, I know what where this comes from. We know, if you listen to this show, where these kinds of crazy ideas come from. They look like kidneys.

They look like kidneys. They're called kidney beans. That whole, the law of signatures, the idea that something that looks like something else will fix it. So you know, crushed walnuts will fix the headache because they kind of look like little brains. Gotcha. There you go.

Kidney beans will fix kidney stones. So you take 60 grams of kidney beans, add four liters of water, you heat that for four to five hours, you strain that through a fine muslin cloth, you allow it to cool and then you drink one glass of this every two hours for a week. Okay done. And then your kidney stone goes away. It didn't. I'm here for refund. Or if it's been a week and it hasn't, you're in trouble. Yeah, sorry, we tried. We did our best. Another one that I particularly enjoyed was lemon juice as a cure for kidney stones.

So in the morning, you start your day with a glass of water mixed with the juice of one fresh lemon. If like, you know, like in the morning, just your regular day. Sounds refreshing. Every day to try to hopefully prevent the kidney stones, but then let's say that you do start having some pain from a kidney stone, then you're going to take four tablespoons of lemon juice, mix it into a glass of water and drink that. Now, if your body accepts it, always so important.

If it accepts it, then your pain will go away in 20 minutes. If your body's being lame and drop the ball, then in that case, you need to add to the four tablespoons of lemon juice, you need to add four tablespoons of olive oil and you need to add to the four tablespoons of lemon juice. You need to add four tablespoons of olive oil and you need to drink this. Can you add sugar? No. Please?

No, sorry. Four tablespoons of lemon juice, four tablespoons of olive oil, mix it in some water and then also that will probably make you sick. Oh, yeah. I mean, for sure. It's also vinaigrette dressing that we probably make you sick. Oh, yeah, I mean for sure. It's also vinaigrette dressing that we had tonight for dinner. It is, yeah. In our buffet.

It's also that, it's also vinaigrette. So if your kidney pain does go away, use the rest of it on your salad. There you go, perfect. If it doesn't, go to a doctor because you should have done that to begin with. Now, I mean, now I've been best of both worlds. My kidney sense gone. I'm a joint delicious Chris salad.

What a great Thursday. Don't pretend like you like salads all the sudden. I'd love them. You want to love them. I ate several bites of that one tonight, even though I didn't like it. And that wasn't against the apron we made it bad. We did it mess up.

We did it, we did it bad. There is one last little interesting kidney stem fact before I take it today. There's a small town in Italy, to the southeast of Rome, and it is called Fugi. Fugi? Fugi? Fugi? Fugi?

F-I-U-G-G-I. And it has natural mineral springs that have been for numerous reasons, praise for having healing qualities, but specifically for the ability to dissolve kidney stones. We had to bring them up. Of course, I'll plenty the elder. Yeah, you know he's a family friend, plenty the elder. This was his recommendation for what you should do. If you have any kidney ailments,

if you have a kidney stone, if you have kidney pain, if you have any kind of urinary problems, go to Fugie. Because there's nothing you want to do more when you have a kidney stone than a road trip. Too Italy. And drink the mineral waters there and your problems will be solved.

This was made famous by a lot of royalty and important people, Pope Boniface. The eighth was cured, supposedly, of his kidney issues by the waters. And then from that point, the royal families all over Europe started like demanding that casks of this be sent through them to stock up and their castles to use for their kidney problems. I read that it may, there was somebody claiming that it cured Michelangelo stones, but then I also read somewhere else that when I was reading about Michelangelo

having kidney stones that they may have and the reason he died. So I don't know if they really cured him. She's kind of the furthest away that two facts could be from each other, huh? Basically, either it did or it didn't. Either it did or it didn't. That's two different ways of looking at it.

But there are tons of people who claim that it has magical healing powers. And to this day, people make pilgrimages there and say that they have been not just their kidney issues, but that all their medical problems have been cured by this. But primarily kidneys and kidney stones, these waters will in theory fix. It is also supposedly like a natural viagra, just throwing that out. Awesome. So there you go.

All right, so real quick, what about today? So today, just, we're much better at removing stones. We have many more techniques that are very minimally invasive. We mainly go through the erythra. Yeah. And and go up through the bladder and we can either break up the stone. We have ways to to break it up that way or we can go in and remove it that way if we need to or we can put something called like a stint inside the ureter to kind of keep the ureter open and allow the stone to pass on its own. Love it. If we have to go, what we call percutaneously,

like through the kidney to get the stone, we can, we don't do that as often. But there are many, many ways to do safe, much less painful, much cleaner surgeries now, minimally invasive to remove kidney stones. If needed, the majority still pass on their own. The majority are small enough that they're just gonna time and some pain medicine.

And they're gonna get through there, hopefully. But, and like I said, there are hereditary factors, they run in families, they run in mine. I'm not the only member of my family to have had stones. We were all given giant jugs to collect our pee when I was younger, so the doctors could study it and see what kind of stones we were forming. Okay. We didn't do it, but good.

Good. No, we should have. Like, the scientists in me now regrets that, but I mean, I was little. I mean, it wasn't my fault. I blame my family. Anyway, so there are hereditary factors. There are meds that can predispose you. Again, the main thing you should do is stay hydrated.

And if you do get kidneys going, so talk to your doctor about ways you could maybe alter your diet, or you know, like I said, the medications are something that could help prevent you from getting so many. And also, again, if you think you have a stone, don't Google it, please go see a doctor. We can help you. Folks, that's going to do it for us. Thank you. We hope you had a good time with us in the show. If you want to suggest a topic, the best thing to do is write emails, don't you think, Sid? Yeah, absolutely. I see when you tweet or when you put them on Facebook and I love, I appreciate all your comments. I read them, but I can search them much easier in the emails.

So when I'm looking for ideas, that's where I go. I'm going to look for names and people to think that's also where I go. Um, so what else we want to talk about? Oh, MaximumFun.org is the website for our podcast network called MaximumFun. Got a ton of great shows on there. Like, when I want to highlight it's the Beef and Dairy Network. It's a very funny show, which is only about 10 minutes long

and it is a show about beef, dairy, and agriculture, which is very funny. Trusting on this one. Wink. And if you like, like, funny stuff, you should check it out. Also listen to Still Buffering. That's a show

that Sydney makes with her sisters. It is very funny. My brother Griffin only listens to two podcasts. He says, and that's one of them. What's the other podcasts? It is a mystery. It's a show about dealing with team life from sisters. That's right. That's the important one. You can find that at T. Thank you Griffin. Justin doesn't listen to thank you Griffin. TeenGoogle.com is where you can find that show. It's also maximumfund.org like all our shows. Thanks to the taxpayers for less user-song medicines. It's the intro and outro of our program.

And until next Wednesday or perfect sometimes. My name is Justin Bakker. I'm Sydney McGrroy. And as always, don't draw a hole in your head. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and Culture. Artist-owned. Listener-supported.