Treating Kidney Stones in Elizabethtown, KY

Kidney stones are stones that form within the kidney. They're typically formed of calcium and some other substance, that binds with the calcium. There's a lot of different factors that can cause kidney stones to form, but when they do form in the kidney, there's the potential that they can pass into the ureter and cause issues.

Typically, someone will have pain or blood in the urine are usually the common presenting signs of kidney stones. And then the way that we diagnose that there are actually stones present is usually either an x-ray called a KUB or more commonly a CT scan. There's not any way of getting rid of kidney stones typically once they're formed without doing some kind of surgical procedure.

And there's three main ways that we treat kidney stones. There's something called an ESOL or a shock wave lithotripsy where we use ultrasound to break up stones. We can do ureteroscopy to remove stones, which is where we pass a small camera into the ureter and use a laser to break the stone up. We also treat kidney stones with percutaneous nephrolithotomy or PCNL. And in that approach, we go directly through the back into the kidney, which allows us to remove bigger stones. The operating rooms here at Baptist Health Harden are really tailored to be able to do any type of kidney stone surgery that we need to. We have the ability to treat all stones no matter the size in our operating room facilities here.