Urologist advises Nigerians to drink plenty of water

National Hospital, consultant urological surgeon, Dr Celsius Undie, has advised Nigerians to drink up to three litres of water daily to keep their kidneys healthy.
Undie on Friday in Abuja said that low consumption of water could lead to the development of kidney stones, as the small particles that got into the body could form substances as hard as stones found on the streets.
He said that kidney problems requiring surgical attention usually came with lots of pains and people were more aware of them than other kidney medical problems.
“The kidney is an excretory organ and the job of the kidney is to filter things that can dissolve in water that we don’t need in our body.
“The kidney works only when it has to conserve water; when water is just passing through and coming out the kidney is resting.

“For surgical problems affecting the kidney, we see kidney stones much more than we see any other problem and chronic pyelonephritis, we also see as a surgical problem.
“Chronic pyelonephritis is a scar in the kidney resulting from infection in the urine, when that individual was a child; so it presents in an adult as pain in the kidney and obstruction to the flow of urine.
“For us in surgery, kidney problems come at a time that the kidney can still be salvaged, but the physicians see a different set of things all together.
“Medical problems are slow, the kidneys are destroyed slowly and it gets to a point where up to half of the kidney function is gone before the patient starts have swelling in their body when they are almost at the point of death; then they know there is a problem.
“Sometimes there is no pain whatsoever. “The message to Nigerians is that they should drink lots of water, the more water you drink the less work your kidney does
Undie explained that many people erroneously believed that frequent passage of urine was bad, whereas it is actually a sign of a kidney that is perfectly functional.
He added that seemingly unrelated things like diabetics and high blood pressure eventually affected the kidney.
Undie advised Nigerians to be health conscious and go for yearly medical checks even if they felt healthy. (NAN)