Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 23, 2014 News
“If a patient comes to us for dialysis it means that the (health) system has failed,” is the conviction of Cardiovascular Surgeon, Dr Budhendra Doobay, founder and President of the Doobay Dialysis Centre.
It is for this reason that the visionary, along with executives of the Annandale, East Coast Demerara, facility, has been working towards ensuring that persons are educated on how to help prevent them from reaching the stage of kidney failure.
Although dialysis may become imperative for some persons who suffer from kidney failure, Dr Doobay during an interview with this publication admitted that “dialysis is not a good thing.”
He explained that when a patient is on dialysis it affects their blood vessels as well as their heart and often they do not live very long.
Dr Doobay explained that when a patient undergoes dialysis their arteries become calcified (like bones) and they even are at risk of losing their limbs or sight. The possibility exists that they may become prone to strokes or even heart attacks.
“Depending on what concomitant diseases they have – if they have diabetes, hypertension plus renal diseases – the life expectancy is shorter. A patient with lupus, for example, can go on for a little while, but when you have diabetes and hypertension it really takes a toll on the kidneys,” Dr Doobay observed.
Nevertheless he assured that dialysis could considerably help to ensure kidney failure victims live a relatively improved life for at least a period.
“I am saying if we can give a patient 10 years of good life we would have done them a great service,” he asserted.
But according to Chief Executive of the Centre, Mr Vickram Oditt, “It is not that we want to have many patients but we want to educate people to look after their kidneys, first and foremost.”
Among the causative factors of kidney failure is that of diabetes and hypertension which are very common in these parts.
Moreover, Dr Doobay pointed out that aside from offering dialysis, the Centre has been seeking to educate persons so as to stave off, as far as possible, their susceptibility to kidney failure.
The education drive is expected to be further boosted when the Centre, with support from McMaster University in Canada, puts in place a ‘Prevention Clinic’. The clinic is expected to be strategically incorporated into the expanded plan for the East Coast facility, scheduled to be completed by 2016.
“If your parents have diabetes (for example) you can come to this Centre and we will educate you, even on what to eat, to help ensure that your kidney doesn’t fail,” said Dr Doobay, who is optimistic that even mobile outreaches will soon be streamlined to aid this cause.
It is the belief of Oditt that since some people are “very casual” about their kidneys they are therefore not careful with what they eat and drink. In fact he disclosed that although kidney failure is recognised globally as a major cause of death globally it is not so listed in Guyana.
“Recording of deaths on certificates in this country is recorded as organ failure nobody puts kidney failure,” asserted Oddit.
According to him, too, when moves were being made to introduce the Centre a few years ago there were no local statistics to adequately represent the state of kidney failure in Guyana.
However records for Trinidad, which is believed to have a similar situation as Guyana, revealed that one in every one thousand persons requires dialysis. Moreover, it was deduced that since Guyana may have a population of 700,000 there should be about 700 people on dialysis. This however, is not the situation that obtains here, Oditt noted, even as he speculated that many over the years were not able to access this service because it was seen as too costly. It was for this reason he said that moves were made to offer a subsidized dialysis service to the population.
However, if patients are not willing to continue years of dialysis, a successful kidney transplant may very well be their only answer. But according to Oditt, “while transplant is excellent and it needs to be promoted; it needs to be done properly and not as a publicity stunt.”
A successful transplant, Dr Doobay said, is dependent on the organ match which could, in some cases, help to prolong the lives of patients for as much as two decades.
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