This is the podcast, Surgery I See Rounds. My name is Jeff Kye.

Today I want to talk about the issue of renal replacement therapy.

In one of the earlier podcasts, we talk about renal failure and the high mortality associated with that.

If you recall from that podcast, we said roughly about 50% of people who develop renal failure, develop fatal complications of renal failure.

And we just briefly introduced the idea of renal replacement therapy.

70% of people who go into renal failure will require some form of real replacement therapy.

And renal replacement therapy can be reasonably intimidating to most people who don't

spend a great deal of time in an intensive care unit or a dialysis unit. I'm not a

nephrologist, so my understanding of renal replacement therapy is only superficial compared to

someone who does nothing but dialysis for a living. But one of the problems with renal replacement therapy is there's a lot of different machines,

there's intermittent dialysis, there's continuous dialysis, there's a lot of acronyms,

and a lot of initials.

And how do we kind of trudge through all that information to know what is physically going on

with the patient with interbidden versus continuous dialysis

or sled or scuff or some of these, all these other names that we use,

and which one might be better for your patient at that particular time?

So through the next 20 minutes or half an hour,

I'd like to go through what those different types of dialysis are,

what are their advantages and where their disadvantages, and how the nephrologists actually go about deciding which one might

be best for a particular patient at a particular point in time.

The ideal renal replacement therapy controls issues of volume, people who are volume overload,

people who have acid-based abnormalities.

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