I'm Bodo Knudsen, I'm the Director of the Ohio State Comprehensive Kidney Stone Program,
and I work in the Department of Urology.
My practice is 90 percent kidney stones. We focus on both the surgical management of kidney
stones as well as the medical management and prevention of stone disease. We do about 500
surgeries a year related to kidney stones and this breaks down into a number of different
procedures.
So our research program ties in very closely with our clinical program. We're involved
in a number of clinical trials looking at new devices to help break up stones, to clear
stones. We're also involved in some drug trials, looking at new medications that might help
kidney stones pass so patients could avoid surgery altogether. We also do a lot of work
with lasers and new devices in a more of a lab setting for that. I've been in practice
at OSU for almost seven years now. We do about 500 surgeries a year related to kidney stones.
The bulk of these are flexible ureteroscopy, where we go up to the kidney with a little
camera and break up the stones with a laser. We also do percutaneous surgery, where we
make a small incision over the kidney and go in with a camera directly, and this works
extremely well for large stones. So we do about 125 of those a year. We also do a small
amount of shock wave lithotripsy.
We've seen in the past a lot of patients treated with shock wave lithotripsy, and well shock wave
lithotripsy is still a good treatment for certain stones. There are other options now
that are available. We see a lot of patients who had shock wave lithotripsy elsewhere and
have failed and have now come to OSU for treatment to try and get rid of their stones. The area
that has really grown and expanded is flexible ureteroscopy. That's a procedure where we
go up to the kidney with a tiny, little camera on a giant video screen and find these small
stones in the kidney that we can break up with a laser. Not only can we break them up,
but we can actually take a little tiny basket and remove the fragments from the kidney afterwards
to truly get the patient stone-free. And for us, that has really been a major breakthrough
in the way we treat patients.
Our goal is really to try and personalize the healthcare that we deliver to the patients,
and that means looking at them as an individual, finding out what their problems are, looking
at their imaging studies and coming up with a treatment plan appropriate for them for
their stones. After we treat the stones, that's when we focus on the preventative side. So
we do two, 24-hour urine studies after patients have recurrent stones, and that allows us
to identify individual risk factors that we can try and reduce so that hopefully they have less
stones in the future.
The great thing with stone practice is that we can really make a difference for the patient.
Somebody can come in in pain and lots of problems and poor outcomes in the past somewhere else,
and we're able to come up with a treatment plan to get rid of the pain and improve their
life afterwards. For me, this is extremely rewarding because you really can make a
difference in a patient's life.
We've built a program that's based on all the latest state-of-the-art equipment. Our
operating rooms are second to none in terms of the equipment that we have there and how
to treat the patients. But also we have support from other departments, we work very closely
with nutrition, we have a dietician who comes to our clinics several times a month. We also
have now been working on building an outpatient surgery center, which will make surgery even
more convenient for patients, allow them to get in and out quickly. Our clinical engineering
department at OSU, who's really key to all the technical equipment that we use, has been
extremely supportive. So overall, it's been a fantastic partnership between myself and
the medical center.
My wife also works at OSU. She's a family practice physician at the Upper Arlington
clinic. We're very involved with OSU. We both have learning communities of medical students,
so usually two or three times a month we have medical students over our house for dinner,
so that's a big part of our lives. We like to travel, so in our downtime, we do like
to get away, see different places. I go to a lot of meetings related to kidney stones
around the world. We often travel together to these things.