How To Combat Kidney Stones

The clue is in the name - sort of. Kidney stones aren't made out of the same material as pebbles on a beach, but they're just as hard. And while they form in your kidneys, they often don't cause problems if they stay there.

In fact, many people have kidney stones without ever knowing it. The excruciating pain of 'renal colic' happens when a kidney stone is being passed out of your kidney enroute to your bladder.

Kidney stones can vary in size from a couple of inches down to the size of a grain of sand. They're made from different chemicals that occur naturally in your body and are passed out via your kidneys. Your kidneys are constantly hard at work filtering waste products from your blood - they contain a million tiny filters and 140 miles of tiny tubes, processing 180 litres of blood a day.

The chemicals filtered out by your kidneys are usually dissolved in your urine. However, sometimes they can clump together to form deposits rather like limescale depositing in water pipes. In fact, the most common form of kidney stone is made of calcium, just as limescale is. The deposits form tiny crystals, which can attract more of the chemicals to stick to them, forming larger stones.