Have you ever wondered if your back pain was actually due to something more
than just normal back pain? I'm Dr. Rena Malik, urologist and pelvic surgeon,
and today we're going to talk about urologic causes of back pain four surprising things
you probably never thought about if you're new here I make content every single week on
things like bladder health sexual health and so much more make sure you subscribe
and share this channel with your friends so everyone can learn and educate themselves
there's several things that can cause back pain and I want to touch on today four different things
that in urology we see that can cause back pain number one is something i've talked about quite a
few times on my channel is kidney stones so kidney stones are little tiny calcifications that can be
found anywhere along the urinary tract typically they can be found in the kidney in the tubes that
drain the kidney or the bladder sometimes you can have symptoms and other times they might just be
there and not be bothering you at all a lot of it depends on exactly where they're located and the
size of them but typically people who present with back pain and kidney stones will notice a couple
things one they'll have pain in their upper back or their flank and that pain may radiate
from their back all the way down to their abdomen sometimes even radiating into the labia for women
or the testicles or scrotum for men this pain is usually pretty sharp and severe and comes and goes
and if you're passing a kidney stone i've been told that the pain is as bad as giving birth you
can also have pain with urination or blood in the urinary tract so you might see blood in urine and
sometimes this is accompanied with nausea and vomiting if you think you might have a kidney
stone particularly if you're having pain that can't be controlled with pain medication at home
you're having a fever chills nausea or vomiting and can't keep food down or having pain with
urination make sure you come to the emergency room even young healthy people can get very
very sick if that kidney stone is obstructing or blocking the urine from flowing to the bladder
and so you definitely want to get to the emergency room as soon as possible to get evaluated number
two is not very different in the way it presents to kidney stones it's called pyelonephritis and
this is an infection of the kidney tissue very often again it presents with pain in the back in
the upper back called the flank but usually people feel really really bad when they have this they'll
feel chills nausea vomiting fevers usually higher fevers and you'll see with kidney stones unless
they're obstructing this can make you also very very sick sometimes you can get away with seeing
your doctor in the office and getting antibiotics and getting taken care of with antibiotics at home
but in some cases it might require that you get antibiotics through an iv or a line into a vein
into your arm and needing these iv antibiotics may require you to be admitted to the hospital
and a couple reasons you might get hospitalized if you're not responding to antibiotics by mouth
or you're very very ill where you might have a very high fever and not be able to eat or drink
anything or have a very high heart rate or a very low blood pressure these are signs that you may
be more sick and need observation in a hospital also if you get a culture or urine culture back
and it shows a bacteria that is resistant to oral antibiotics meaning that it cannot be
treated with antibiotics by mouth then you might require what's called intravenous antibiotics
number three is pelvic floor dysfunction i talk about this one a lot pelvic floor dysfunction is
extremely under-diagnosed and under-treated and it's a very common cause of a lot of problems
that i see the muscles that sit at the very bottom of your abdomen called your pelvis these make up
your pelvic floor and their job is to hold up all the organs on the inside the bladder the rectum
the small bowel and the uterus for women and also plays a role in things like defecation which is
having bowel movements or going poop urination or in women holding a pregnancy or holding support
in the vagina and sometimes people can carry a lot of stress in their pelvic floor just
like people get a tight jaw when they get stressed and they might have clenched their teeth at night
similarly you can be clenching those muscles in your pelvic floor and if you are doing that you
might get symptoms and some of those symptoms can include back pain which of course was what the
purpose of this video is about but also you can have difficulty urinating or sometimes you can
have overactive bladder like you're going to the bathroom more often or more frequently so urgency
frequency sometimes you can have constipation or difficulty emptying your bowels and other times
you might just experience pain for women pain with sex or for men pain with ejaculation or pain with
erections and so if you are experiencing these situations the best thing is to see a urologist
and talk about these issues and ideally see a pelvic floor physical therapist who can help you
treat these problems and help you relax the muscles in the pelvis and teach you some exercises
to help with that and number four is a rare one but certainly something to look out for especially
if you have a family history of prostate cancer is actually prostate cancer can present as back
pain and this is for a couple reasons so one is because prostate cancer when it spreads spreads
to bones and specifically in prostate cancer one of the bones that it spreads to is in the spine
and in fact in patients who have advanced prostate cancer meaning those who have prostate cancer
of high stage can actually have back pain in 60 of patients so things to look out for if you're
having back pain have a family history of prostate cancer and other symptoms such as having blood in
the urine weight loss having difficulty urinating and occasionally just other urinary symptoms like
going to the bathroom more often having urgency or having issues with erections all those things
together can be signs of prostate cancer and luckily the screening is pretty straightforward
it's a simple digital rectal examination to make sure we don't feel anything abnormal
on the prostate and also a psa which is a prostate-specific antigen a blood test which is
a screening tool that tells us what your risk of having prostate cancer might be and based on that
we can have a discussion with you about what the next steps are so with all four of these things
certainly the first two you will obviously know that you have something else going on because you
might have urinary symptoms or fevers or chills or other things and with pelvic floor dysfunction you
may know but you may not know because you might not have any other symptoms so with
all four of these things it's very likely that you're gonna have back pain with other symptoms
but sometimes it's hard for people to realize that hey maybe these two things are connected
your back is over here and your bladder's up here why would an issue with one be related to an issue
with the other so it's important to talk to your primary care doctor and if you're concerned see a
urologist make sure that you get evaluated and see if there's anything we can do to help you overall
i hope this was helpful and as always remember to take care of yourself because you're worth it