What is hemodialysis?
Hemodialysis is a medical procedure which is a type of dialysis to treat those people who have chronic kidney disease or whose both kidneys are not working properly. This process is done to remove excess water and toxic products from the human body. In this process the human blood of the patients are circulated through the filter called dialyzer via dialysis machine to remove waste product and excess fluid from the blood and the clean blood is returned to patients body again.
At first a doctor places a vascular access point such as fistula into the patient’s bloodstream and this point allows blood to be removed from the body and returned to the body . In this Hemodialysis process the patients blood pump through the machine and run through the dialyzer. A dialyzer is a filter that works as an artificial kidney. Then a chemical flows through another side of the dialyzer removing the waste product from blood by the process of osmosis. Once the blood is clean the purified blood enters into the patient’s body through the access point.
Hemodialysis is usually performed at the dialysis center or hospital by trained healthcare professionals. The process of hemodialysis required two to three hours . Depending upon the severity of the kidney disease people required hemodialysis once in a week to daily dialysis.
Warning signs during Hemodialysis
- Pain or bleeding in the fistula
- Chest Pain
- Palpitation
To know about the care after Hemodialysis you can read here.