One of the most important functions that the kidney does is to produce urine. That is, when any form of liquid goes into your body, your kidneys will produce urine from it. Not just that, the waste products in your body are also removed with the help of your kidneys. Moreover, another important task of kidneys is that they produce hemoglobin that is required for your body.
Dr. Mukesh Kumar Shewak Ram
Specialist Internal Medicine / Nephrology
Although it would be helpful to be alert of the signs that you have issues in your kidney, in most cases you will not see any signs until it is the very last stage and if you get diagnosed in the last stage it will be very critical. However, there are a few other diseases that might eventually lead to issues in your kidney. Diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure which leads to hypertension, and also other issues like drugs or extra protein diets can be the cause of your eventual kidney failure.
There are few things you can do to make sure you keep your kidney health in check. The first and foremost thing is to drink lots and lots of water. If you are a diabetic patient, you have to make sure that your blood sugar is in control and if you are someone who has high blood pressure you need to get it checked every 6 months to see if it is controlled. If you are someone who does not have any issues with your kidney, you still need to make it a habit to get it tested. But since you do not have existing issues with your kidney, you can get it tested once a year and that would be enough.
If you are in need to get your kidneys tested, there are certain blood tests for this purpose. Urine analysis is also done to check the functionality of your kidneys and only, later on, you have to do ultrasounds that too if your doctor is asking you to.
There are five stages when it comes to kidney disease. Stage 1 is normal function, stage two is mildly decreased function, stage three is moderately decreased function, stage four is severely decreased function and stage 5 is kidney failure. If the health of your kidney deteriorates all the way to stage five, there is nothing more to do other than have dialysis or kidney replacement.
One thing you should absolutely stay away from while taking care of your kidneys’ health is herbal remedies and supplements. The main reason for this is that when we consume any herbal medicine or allopathy medicines we do not know what exactly are the contents in these medicines and consuming these medicines may lead to more problems for you.
Kidney stones or kidney crystals are something you should be careful about. Certain metabolic factors or other things like uric acid that forms because of the type of diet you consume may lead to kidney stones. Passing a kidney stone can be very painful. If the size of your kidney stone is less than 5mm it will pass on its own. You may need pain killers to get some relief from the pain but it will pass without any help nonetheless. If the size of your kidney stone is more than 5mm you may need the help of a doctor to get it out.
The most important reason why people get diseases and kidney problem is that they are not doing any exercises. When the pandemic hit people starting taking less care of their body which has led to an increase in the number of patients in hospitals. It is very important to do exercises and maintain a healthy body.
