A 38-year-old unnamed businessman from Chongqing had been suffering from severe pains caused by kidney stones for years, the South China Morning Post reported.
When he was examined two years ago, he was told that he had at least 10 stones in his kidneys. However, the man was afraid of undergoing surgery, so he decided to cure himself with a home-made elixir: beer.
The man, who was a beer lover, was delighted to hear from his friends that his favorite drink could help to dissolve kidney stones.
The man normally drank 3-5 bottles of beer a day, the report says. But as part of his rigorous therapy regimen, he decided to increase this number to 10 bottles a day. Let’s just suppose that it was one bottle for every kidney stone he had.
He was following his course of treatment accurately for a month, but the pain only got worse. On Sunday, when the pain finally became insufferable, the man went to a hospital and gave his consent for surgery.
Doctors extracted “a plate full of stones”, the report says. Doctors said that the man’s therapy only made his problems worse, because purine – a crystalline compound found in beer – actually increased the risk of developing kidney stones.
