by Peter Laird, MD
As a physician and as a CKD-5 patient on dialysis by choice as my renal replacement treatment, it is interesting but sad to note the attitude many of my colleagues have towards dialysis. An article in the NEJM archives recently caught my attention and graphically relates this negative attitude prevalent today in American medicine towards dialysis.
In the 2007 NEJM article titled “Concurrent Sentences — Dialysis in the State Penitentiary” Eric M. Gibney, M.D. promotes the concept that dialysis is in itself a prison sentence:
“No matter where it takes place, dialysis is itself a sort of prison sentence, tying patients to a machine for 4 hours at a time, three times a week, for as long as they stay alive. In most dialysis units, that isn't very long.”
Unfortunately, he is partially correct in his assessment of conventional, three times a week in unit dialysis, yet why he and the majority of my professional colleagues ignore the option of quotidian hemodialysis as a valid renal replacement therapy today in America continues to be a source of great wonder.
The facts of daily dialysis should supplant the negative attitudes against this most wonderful, and life saving modern medical marvel. No other completely failed organ system can be artificially replaced on a chronic basis lending patients a new lease on life. Daily dialysis does save lives and is void of the majority of side effects associated with renal transplantation immunosuppression regimens.
Thus, I am personally grateful and thankful for those such as Dr. Scribner who dedicated their lives to a medical therapy that decades later now sustains me and delivers me from what would otherwise have been a slow and anguishing demise.
No, Dr. Gibney, you are not correct to call the choice of dialysis a sentence, it is a blessing and a godsend.
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