Our experience has shown that once a patient starts on a home hemodialysis program, within a few short weeks they request to increase their treatment regimen to five or six times a week. This is indicative of the fact that patients feel better as they perform dialysis more frequently. In fact, not long after being on short daily dialysis, some patients ask to dialyze all night (nocturnal) while sleeping to maximize the benefits to their health and wellbeing.
Many of the patients who have adopted home hemodialysis therapies have taken themselves off the transplant list because they feel so well.
We have also yet to see a patient trained to do home hemodialysis in our program to request a return to in-center dialysis.
"It is the only time in my Medical career" explains Dr. Raffi Minasian, that I see patients coming in and saying the want more treatment. We train patients to do 4 or 5 treatments a week and they come back asking to do 6 times a week.
The benefits are so clear to home patients that the one thing they all say is they would never skip dialysis 2 days consecutively. They feel "bad". That "bad" feeling is the typical condition of patients on conventional three times a week dialysis.
