Your gallbladder is a small pouch under your liver. It stores bile, a juice that helps you digest fatty food. Sometimes the bile hardens into little stones — anywhere from a grain of sand to a pebble. You can have one stone or dozens.

Lots of people carry gallstones and never feel a thing. For a deeper look at how they form and what the gallbladder actually does, see the full Gallstones page (linked below). Here, we’re focusing on the question everyone really wants answered: do you operate, or do you wait?

This is the biggest myth Dr Kumar hears, and it’s worth saying plainly: a gallstone is not, by itself, a reason to operate.

Many gallstones are “silent.” They were never causing you pain — they just turned up by chance on a scan you had for something else entirely, like a routine health check or a different stomach complaint. These quiet stones often sit there for the rest of your life and never make trouble.

So if you’ve been told you have gallstones but you feel completely fine, don’t panic. You may simply need watching, not an operation.

For most people with silent stones — no pain, no complications, found by accident — the sensible plan is often to leave them be and keep an eye on things. Dr Kumar won’t push you toward an operation you don’t need.

In this situation, surgery isn’t urgent. You carry on with normal life, and you and your surgeon simply stay alert for any change. If the stones ever start causing trouble, you can deal with them then.

A quick word on “dissolving” stones or flushing them with special diets or medicines: for the vast majority of people, this doesn’t work reliably. The stones come back. So if your stones are silent, the honest answer isn’t a magic medicine — it’s often just to watch and wait.

The picture changes the moment a stone starts causing problems. Here’s the rule of thumb Dr Kumar uses: once gallstones have caused trouble, the trouble usually comes back — and the next episode can be worse than the last.

Please don’t tough these out. If you have severe constant pain, fever, yellowing skin or repeated vomiting, that’s not a “wait and see” moment — contact Dr Kumar’s team on 9013818845 or get to the nearest emergency department.

When stones do need treating, the proven, lasting cure isn’t to remove the stones and leave the gallbladder behind — they’d just form again. Instead, the whole gallbladder comes out, stones and all. And these days that’s almost always done by keyhole.

Laparoscopic gallbladder removal means a few tiny cuts instead of one large wound. For you, that usually means less pain, much smaller scars, and a far quicker recovery than the old-fashioned open operation. Most straightforward removals are done as day-care or with a short overnight stay — many patients are up and walking the same day and home soon after.

Gallbladder and bile-duct surgery is core to Dr Kumar’s everyday work as a GI and HPB surgeon. That experience matters most in the tricky cases — a badly inflamed, scarred or ‘stuck’ gallbladder, or stones that have escaped into the bile duct — where a steady, practised hand makes all the difference.

The question almost everyone asks, often a little nervously: “Will I be able to manage without it?”

The reassuring answer is yes. Your gallbladder only stores bile — it isn’t essential. Once it’s gone, your liver simply sends bile straight to your gut, just as before. The vast majority of people eat normally and live a completely normal life afterwards.

A few people notice slightly looser or more frequent stools, or some sensitivity to very fatty meals, for a little while after surgery. This usually settles on its own. There’s no special lifelong diet, no missing out — most people barely give their absent gallbladder a second thought.

It comes down to one honest question: are your stones causing trouble, or not?

The wrong move is guessing. Some people worry themselves sick over harmless silent stones, while others ignore warning pain that really shouldn’t be ignored. A proper assessment clears all of that up. Dr Kumar will look at your scans and reports, listen to your story, and tell you honestly which group you’re in — with no pressure either way.