Demystifying Kidney Disease for the Average Joe!

Certain types of CT scans will often require that the patient get intravenous (iv) "dye" or contrast to make the organs stand out and delineate them better. This usually would lead to better images with greater sensitivity that help the radiologist in picking up features that would otherwise get missed. The downside however is that this very contrast could sometimes cause damage to the kidneys. The medical term for this is " contrast induced nephropathy " (CIN). What do you then do in a situation where iv contrast is necessarily required? Lets try and understand a few nuances about contrast-mediated kidney damage, and what you can do about it?

I set off to try and answer this question after one of my patients brought along an article that claimed that " nettle leaf lowers creatinine level in the blood ". This by extension would mean that it could perhaps cure CKD? I was quick to admit that not once during my typical "western medicine" training had I heard of that claim. To me, CKD had always been this inexorable malady that can be, at best, controlled or slowed down from progressing further. "Cure" is not a word that gets thrown around a lot when you talk about CKD. As I had discussed earlier , once kidney function declines chronically, it can typically not be regained.    But I do try to have an open mind, the good old scientific temper and all that. So rather than dousing disdain over my patient's excitement, I tried to look for evidence to see if the article's claim was indeed true.