What's the Pain in My Abdomen? Is it Cramps or Gallstones?

Are you experiencing abdominal pain that lasts anywhere from 15minutes to five hours? Or do you often feel nauseous? Always waking up in the middle of the night due to the pain in your abdomen? Adjusting your sleeping position to get the most comfortable position.

If you are experiencing the above symptoms, you might be experiencing gallstones. What are gallstones? Gallstones are collections of hard, solid material that form in the gallbladder. The size of the gallstones might be in the form of a grain of sand, or size of a golf ball. Human have the possibilities to develop a large stones, or hundreds of smaller stones or combinations of both type of stones.

Gallbladder is connected to our liver, pancreas and small intestine via ducting. Gallbladder is to store bile, a thick, brown and bitter liquid made by the liver to help body digest fats. Bile consists of cholesterol, bilirubin and bile salts dissolved in water. Bile salts help body to digest fats while bilirubin and cholesterol are waste materials which eliminated from our body.

How gallstones are form in our body? It is form where there is too much cholesterol in the bile. Excess cholesterol drops out of the liquid part of bile to form tiny crystals that will group together to become larger masses which known as gallstones. Whereas, cholesterol stones will also form when gallbladder does not empty as normal and the bile is stored for long period of time. People infected with gallstones will be diagnosed with cholesterol stones.

Gallstones form from bilirubin, a pigment the liver removes from blood as old red blood cells die and break apart. They are called pigment stones, individuals can also have mixed stones, mixtures of cholesterol, bilirubin, calcium and other material.

Gallstones will stay in our body silently. But once they become symptomatic, they will cause biliary colic or a severe and sudden pain in the middle or right upper abdomen. Usually, the pain cause by gallstones is often accompanied by nausea.

Gallstones can be treating either via oral medication or surgery.

If the mere mention of surgery scares you off, consider oral medication. But oral medication only helps to dissolves small, non calcified cholesterol gallstones. And this method is not so effective because only less than 50 percent of the stones dissolves while 50 percent of the stones tend to recur. Apart from that, it can take from months to years for the stones to dissolve.

The common treatment for gallstones will by surgery or cholecystectomy where the gallbladder is removed. Gallbladder is not an essential organ in our body so it can be removed.

Lastly, there is an alternative solution for treating gallstones. This is by using natural cleansing of the gallbladder and liver by using olive oil and lemon juice.