Home remedies · Stomach, gut & nausea
No home remedy here replaces treatment, and none is talked down. What has done good for generations does good — even if no one ever measured it. Where something is well studied, it says so. Where it is only experience, it says that too.
Drink enough to make at least two to two and a half litres of urine a day — usually a good two and a half to three litres of fluid, spread over the day and into the evening. Plus the juice of two to four lemons daily, diluted in water and spread out. The urine should be pale; the colour is the measure, not thirst.
The substance is called citrate. It binds calcium in the urine before it can meet oxalate, and it attaches to growing crystals and slows them — which is why a low urinary citrate is one of the commonest findings in stone formers. Lemons hold the most citrate of the fruits. The second part is dilution: the more water passes the kidney, the less concentrated the substances a stone grows from. Of the two, the drinking volume is what shows fewest new stones in the trials.
It does not dissolve an existing stone and does not help in the colic — drinking is even unpleasant then. It is about the time afterwards: making sure the next one does not come. And it depends on the type: with calcium oxalate stones citrate makes sense; with other types other things apply, which is why stone analysis is worth it. The acid attacks tooth enamel — drink it diluted, rinse with water afterwards. With kidney or heart failure the drinking volume is not freely chosen but discussed.
A colic with nausea, fever or chills must be seen at once — fever with a stone is an emergency. Likewise blood in the urine that is new, and pain that runs into the groin and does not let up.
Do not treat yourself: strong, increasing or suddenly starting abdominal pain, a hard belly, blood in the stool or black stool, vomiting blood. With diarrhoea it is fluid loss that counts — dry tongue, little urine, drowsiness. In children and older people this happens faster.