Diuretics
The water pills — where in the kidney each diuretic works, and what it does to your salts.
Loop & Thiazide Diuretics: Where the Kidney Loses Salt & Water
A patient is drowning — not in a lake, but in their own fluid, lungs filling as a failing heart backs blood up. One injection makes them pour litres of urine and, within the hour, breathe easily again. That's the raw power of a loop diuretic. Its gentler cousin, the thiazide, is the world's most-prescribed blood-pressure pill. Same idea — block salt reabsorption in the kidney — but at different spots, with opposite effects on your calcium.
Potassium-Sparing, Osmotic & Carbonic-Anhydrase Diuretics
Loops and thiazides have one nagging flaw: they flush away potassium. The fix is a class of diuretics that does the opposite — it holds potassium in. One of them also, surprisingly, treats acne and grows breasts on men; another shrinks a swollen brain; a third stops mountain sickness. Three small classes, each with a party trick that reveals exactly where and how it works on the kidney.
