Dr. Yaniv Larish sees dozens of patients every week at his Fifth Avenue Urology Department in New York City. As a urologist and surgeon, he treats a variety of conditions, from complex kidney stones to urinary incontinence to urinary tract cancers. But no matter why someone comes to his exam room, he asks the same question at every initial consultation: “Is your bladder treating you well?”
That’s what he told us recently — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts of HuffPost’s “Did I Do Something Wrong?” Podcast – When he comes to our studio and talks about all the ways we might be peeing wrong and how to do it better.
“They’ll ask, ‘What do you mean?'” Larish said of his patients. “This should be an open question, right? Now it’s time for you to tell me about what’s going on with your bladder. So, is it good or bad?
It turns out that “good” and “bad” can apply to a lot of different things — like how often we pee, how we feel when we pee, and what we might see when we look in the toilet when we’re done — and More organs than just the bladder may be involved.
As for how many times a day you should pee, “there’s no magic number,” he told us.
“There is no ‘normal’. But that’s not the case, because if you’re stuck under the Sahara desert sun in 120-degree heat, your kidneys are going to do their best to conserve every drop of water,” he said.
“The other extreme is, if you’re a frat boy or girl in college and you drink beer on Saturday night… you’re going to make more. So I think the question is not, ‘How often do you pee? “What’s more important is ‘are you well-hydrated or over-hydrated,’ and when everything is normal?”
One thing Larish is sure of is what a typical healthy person should experience when he or she urinates.
“Most people associate peeing with pushing, when actually, peeing is associated with relaxation. … The most important thing is that you should relax,” he told us. “And you will know [that everything is working correctly] If it comes out easily, if it comes out all quickly then stop. We don’t want to see any hesitation before it comes out. We don’t want to see you standing there for long periods of time. …Finally, we don’t want to drool after peeing, nor do we want to feel the urge to pee two seconds after peeing. So the question isn’t “Am I doing this wrong?” and more “Is there a problem?” If you’re not peeing in a relaxing way all at once, there’s probably a problem that can be solved.
We may also become aware of a problem based on the way our pee looks or what we see in the bowl.
“Blood in the urine is not normal – it always is,” Larish told us. “This needs to be investigated…whether you see red in your urine or not. When we find a young person has blood in his urine and the urine is concentrated, that’s a good predictor [kidney] Stones. If you are an older person with blood in your urine and a history of smoking, this could be a good clue that something more sinister is going on, maybe there is cancer somewhere.
Other things to watch out for are the presence of any type of slime, which Larish says is “alarming,” and gravel or sand at the bottom of the toilet.
“If you see very few grains of sand in the toilet, that’s a very big red flag that kidney stones are starting,” he said.
Another unexpected sign that something might be wrong? If you fart every time you urinate.
“The bladder needs to contract on its own—it’s a muscle in itself and not connected to anything else,” Larish points out. “So if you fart, that means you’re using your abdominal musculature, right? You’re increasing your overall intra-abdominal pressure to squeeze your bladder. So I tell people, if you find yourself farting is it to start peeing, or to expel the last third of urine, then there needs to be an assessment of what’s going on.
Ultimately, Larish’s advice for keeping everything “good” in urology as possible boils down to a few tips.
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“[You] When you should not think about anything [you’re] Pee,” he said. “It should be blank zen. That’s the golden rule. I think you want to hydrate, but don’t over-hydrate. Everything has to be in moderation. Don’t overdose on supplements if you don’t have to. Getting used to your body is probably the most important part . If you notice something has changed, like, “I haven’t woken up at night to pee in 20 years, and for the past three weeks, I’ve been waking up 3 times a night and it’s really bothering me,” is , the baselines are very different. This is not normal, so something is going on. If your body has undergone changes that you are accustomed to, it is reasonable to seek expert advice and determine if there is a problem.
We also discuss why some people are shy (and how to help overcome that feeling), whether urine is truly sterile, whether you should drink it if you were stranded on a desert island, and more.
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Need help fixing something you’re doing wrong? Email us AmIDoingItWrong@HuffPost.comwe may look into this topic in the next episode.
