Diagnosis & Disease Information

Be Ready to Give Up Beliefs

Physicians practice medicine with great sincerity. They want to help their sick patients get well and stay well, and they dole out treatments in good faith and with the best of intentions. From time to time, however, data emerge suggesting that the treatments upon which they rely are of little or no benefit.

Expanding the Use of ECD Kidneys

Two articles in this issue relay new findings on one of the most pressing and controversial issues in nephrology: increasing the number of donor kidneys available for transplantation. The solution examined in each article is the use of more kidneys from expanded criteria donors (ECD).

Shaping the Future of Kidney Care

The kidney-care community can point to more than 30 years of clinical accomplishments. In particular, the past 10 years have been marked by steady improvement in patient access to dialysis centers and improvement in clinical outcomes. Still, important challenges remain.

A Closer Look at Home Hemodialysis

As patients, physicians, dialysis providers, and payers search for more favorable outcomes in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), alternative dialysis regimens have gained popularity. Among these therapies are dialysis treatments that are performed more frequently, for longer periods of time, and/or at the patient’s home.

Why the OR Just Doesn’t Pay

Clinicians in virtually every medical and surgical specialty would have little trouble citing services for which they considered third-party reimbursement woefully inadequate for the time involved.

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