“Got Kidney Stones? Ride a Roller Coaster”, 2016-09-26 (; backlinks):
A Michigan State University professor emeritus has discovered that riding a roller coaster helps patients pass kidney stones with nearly a 70% success rate. His pilot study is published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association.
David Wartinger, a professor emeritus in the Department of Osteopathic Surgical Specialties, led both a pilot study and an expanded study to assess whether the stories he was hearing from patients were true. “Basically, I had patients telling me that after riding a particular roller coaster at Walt Disney World, they were able to pass their kidney stone”, Wartinger said. “I even had one patient say he passed 3 different stones after riding multiple times.”
[But one particular gentleman really inspired Wartinger. The man rode Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disney’s Magic Kingdom, and then passed a small stone. Then he did it again and passed another. And then another. “That was just too powerful to ignore”, Wartinger said. “I’d been hearing these anecdotal stories for a couple years, and then I thought, okay, there’s really something here.” So Wartinger compiled people’s stories, and he realized that the common factor was having ridden Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. He found anecdotal reports of people passing stones after bungee jumping, but no research on this bodily-movement approach. So he decided to take things into his own hands and do a proper study.]
…The expanded study, conducted with Mark Mitchell, an MSU resident at the time, included riding the same roller coaster with multiple kidney models attached to the researchers. They discovered even better results while sitting in the back of the coaster, with a passage rate of nearly 70%. They also found that both studies showed a 100% passage rate if the stones were located in the upper chamber of the kidney.
“In all, we used 174 kidney stones of varying shapes, sizes and weights to see if each model worked on the same ride and on two other roller coasters”, Wartinger said. “Big Thunder Mountain was the only one that worked. We tried Space Mountain and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and both failed.” Wartinger went on to explain that these other rides are too fast and too violent with a G-force that pins the stone into the kidney and doesn’t allow it to pass. “The ideal coaster is rough and quick with some twists and turns, but no upside down or inverted movements”, he said.
[Of course, the researchers had to get permission from Disney World before bringing the model kidney onto the rides. “It was a little bit of luck”, Wartinger recalls. “We went to guest services, and we didn’t want them to wonder what was going on—two adult men riding the same ride again and again, carrying a backpack. We told them what our intent was, and it turned out that the manager that day was a guy who recently had a kidney stone. He called the ride manager and said, do whatever you can to help these guys, they’re trying to help people with kidney stones.” Other parks, Wartinger says, “have reacted anywhere from lukewarm to really not sure what to do with us.”
…For example, I thought I was just clarifying one such detail when I asked if the “urine” described in the model he brought to Disney was actually water. It was water, right? “No, it was urine. It was mine.” I still wasn’t sure if he was serious. I have no problem with urine, it’s just the idea of showing up at Disney with a urine-loaded kidney in your backpack. “Yeah, I used dilute urine. I spent my life playing in pee. I don’t have that aversion to urine that most people have. The reason I didn’t use water is it would’ve put another variable in there that wasn’t real. So I used real urine … to avoid criticism.”
The two held the backpack between them “at kidney height” to try to subject the model to the same forces that a person would experience. A stone was counted as “passed” if it moved from a starting location lodged in a calyx and fell down into a trap at the point where the kidney meets the ureters. None of the stones or fluid actually spilled out during the roller coaster ride. (The research protocol notes: “Care was taken to protect and preserve the enjoyment of the other guests at the park.”)
“What was amazing was within just a few rides it became obvious that there was a huge difference in passage rates whether you sat in the front or the rear of the coaster”, Wartinger tells me. “There was a lot more whipping around in that rear car.”]
It’s estimated that around 300,000 people per year go to an emergency room suffering from kidney stones and the cost for treatment could range anywhere between $6,253.17$5,0002016 to $12,506.33$10,0002016.
[Still to know if this works for sure, he’d need a prospective clinical trial using real people with real kidneys. I suggested that would be difficult. He said no, he has it all planned out: Take people with kidney stones and do an ultrasound before the ride and after, and see if the stone moves. Wartinger couldn’t do that right away because universities’ institutional review boards would require experimental evidence to prove the concept first.]
View HTML: