Choosing a Treatment Option When Kidneys Fail

Choosing a dialysis treatment option requires some planning. When your kidneys do not work as fast as they should they may reach a point where they are too weak to keep you healthy or even too weak to keep you alive.

There are three basic ways to treat kidney failure:

1. Hemo-dialysis (HD) involves passing the blood through a filter in a machine and then returning it back to the patient.

2. Peritoneal dialysis (PD) uses the body's own membrane in the abdomen to substitute for the machine

3. Transplantation

4. Conservative Management is an option when someone with advanced kidney disease chooses conservative management instead of dialysis, focusing on medical treatment, symptom control and quality of like without using dialysis to replace kidney function.

Please watch the following videos courtesy of Dr. Mike Evans from Canada and from our partners at Davita for more clarification:

FAILING KIDNEYS & DIFFERENT TREATMENT OPTIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi34xCfmLhw

For more information about types of dialysis click here.

For more info in Spanish click here.