How much do you know about dialysis?

  When renal insufficiency develops to the end stage, conservative therapy using medication often fails to alleviate the symptoms and other methods must be taken to excrete the metabolites from the body, improve the symptoms and enhance the quality of life. You can choose any of the following methods: 1. Hemodialysis: Commonly known as artificial kidney, dialysis, is a kind of blood purification technology. It uses the principle of semi-permeable membrane to purify the blood by diffusing and convecting various harmful as well as excess metabolic wastes and excess electrolytes out of the body, and to correct the water-electrolyte and acid-base balance. Hemodialysis is the main method of life support for patients with end-stage renal disease, but there are many problems.  Performing hemodialysis does not mean that uremic patients can rest easy from now on. Quite the contrary, dialysis is only a means to relieve patients’ symptoms and cannot be compared with kidney function, nor will uremia be cured by it. After a long period of hemodialysis, patients with advanced uremia will experience significant systemic organ damage, serious increase in complications, poor quality of life, short survival time, and depletion of their original kidney function. Not only that, as the number of dialysis increases, patients will become strongly dependent on hemodialysis. With the further deterioration of kidney function, the frequency of dialysis will be higher and higher.  2, peritoneal dialysis: similar to hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis is a catheter placed in the abdominal cavity to instill peritoneal dialysis fluid into the abdominal cavity, relying on the semi-permeable nature of the peritoneum, so that the contents of the blood and peritoneal fluid exchange to discharge toxins from the body, replaced 4-6 times a day to replace the kidneys to maintain life. Peritoneal dialysis is also an important life-sustaining tool for end-stage patients, as it has less impact on patients’ learning and lives than hemodialysis. However, peritoneal dialysis also has significant shortcomings, such as induced infections, increased body weight and blood triglycerides, and excessive protein loss.  3, kidney transplant: kidney transplant is commonly known as “kidney replacement”, but this is not the replacement of the original kidney with a new kidney, but the new kidney is implanted into the patient’s body, usually the iliac fossa, to replace the original kidney work. The human kidney cannot be replaced by any sophisticated instrument, so kidney transplantation is recognized as the best treatment for chronic renal failure uremia. Kidney transplantation has been used in clinical practice for more than 40 years, and among all organ transplants, kidney transplantation has the best results and safety.