Home Dialysis Quotes

Some older or very ill patients may not be suitable candidates for fecal transfer. Colonoscopy is an invasive procedure, especially for those patients who are too ill with other conditions like cancer, heart failure, dialysis, or Alzheimer’s.

When I think of Mr. Madani now, I am reminded of a joke I heard sometime after I was involved in his care: An oncologist walks into a funeral home, looking for his patient. The casket is closed. He opens it and is surprised to find it empty. “Where is my patient?” he asks the attendant. “I wanted to give him one more round of chemo.” “Oh, they took him to dialysis,” the attendant replies.

A 2009 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that almost two-thirds of elderly nursing home patients were in worse shape—either less able to take care of their own basic needs or dead—within just three months of starting dialysis, suggesting that treating such patients with dialysis was in direct violation of one of medicine’s guiding principles: primum non nocere, first do no harm.