What Happens If a Person With Renal Failure Doesn't Do Dialysis?

Sabrina Martin
When a person has renal failure it means that the kidneys are no longer functioning properly or doing the vital job of filtering out and disposing of wastes in the blood.

That means if the kidneys fail, the toxins and wastes remain in the blood and over a short period of time the amount of toxins in the blood will increase.

Many individuals with renal failure are also unable to urinate, which means not only are the wastes not being disposed of, but fluids build up in the body.

This is why dialysis is necessary. Dialysis provides a way for the wastes and toxins in the blood to be filtered out and disposed of. Although dialysis doesn't work quite as well as the kidneys do in this regard, it is necessary to keep the person alive.

What Happens if a Person With Renal Failure Doesn't Do Dialysis?

Understanding what the kidneys do for the body and how dialysis mimics the kidneys function shows how important dialysis is.

If a person with renal failure doesn't do dialysis the following will happen.

To begin with, the individual will most likely start to feel nauseous and experience vomiting. Consider what happens when we get food poisoning. We usually get sick, vomit, and have diarrhea. This is because the body is responding to the toxins that have entered out system and is trying to dispose of them.

Although the situation with renal failure is not the same as food poisoning, the person's body, since it cannot dispose of wastes in the natural way, will respond by vomiting and perhaps diarrhea in an attempt to get rid of the buildup of waste. Most people will not be able to eat much if at all, since they will become ill after eating.

If a person with renal failure doesn't do dialysis, vomiting and diarrhea will not get rid of all the wastes that are accumulating in their system, because most of it is in the blood. The toxins and fluids will continue to accumulate, since they have no way of being disposed of.

Eventually the person will begin to swell from the retention of fluids, and will be poisoned by the toxins. Since the fluids have nowhere to go, they will begin to fill parts of the body such as the lungs.

On Divita.com and article titled, What Happens if Someone Stops Dialysis says, "Without life-sustaining dialysis or a kidney transplant, once a person with kidney disease reaches Stage 5 (end stage renal disease (ESRD)), toxins build up in the body and death usually comes within a few weeks."

Sources:

What Happens If Someone Stops Dialysis, Davita.com

Published by Sabrina Martin

Sabrina has published hundreds of articles for various websites. To see further samples of her work or contact her, please click 'contact' above.  View profile

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