Is Kidney Dialysis a Lifetime Burden?

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Many people have developed kidney problems in recent years. Hong Kong movie star Richard Ng Yiu-hon, who just passed away on April 10 at 83, suffered from kidney failure in his later years and relied on kidney dialysis to survive. However, realizing dialysis’ many challenges, such as inconvenience, the chance of infection, neuropathy, and the like, make some patients refuse dialysis treatment. Can traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) offer any alternative treatment to help patients on the verge of dialysis but unwilling to start it?

Ng suffered from severe kidney failure. In an interview, he revealed that his kidneys were functioning at only 10 percent and he had to undergo dialysis daily. As a result, his range of activities was highly restricted, and he rarely went out.

Since the pandemic, studies have found that infection with COVID-19 increases the risk of acute renal insufficiency. Other studies indicate that patients with chronic kidney disease are at higher risk of severe illness and death post-COVID-19 recovery. That makes maintaining the kidneys even more critical during the pandemic.

According to 2021 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates (pdf), 1 in 7 Americans suffers from chronic kidney disease. Today, nearly 810,000 Americans live with kidney failure, and many patients need kidney dialysis.

Why Is Kidney Dialysis Needed?

Kidney dialysis is also called hemodialysis. In a healthy body, blood passes through the excretory system, the kidneys, through which excess or toxic metabolites are prepared to be excreted from the body, while those substances that can still be used are reabsorbed and returned to the blood. The perspiration system also has a similar function of flushing out unusable or toxic substances from the body through sweating.

If the metabolic waste in the blood cannot pass through the kidneys and cannot be urinated by the bladder, lots of harmful substances will accumulate in the body. When too many of these toxic substances accumulate, they will trigger all sorts of diseases, sometimes life-threatening. This would be considered kidney failure. Western medicine treats it through hemodialysis, which can help the body expel those accumulated harmful substances.

Why do more people need kidney dialysis? In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic being one reason, the various substances we eat, drink, and breathe could also be liable. The modern-day diet and living environment are especially full of different kinds of chemical substances and pollution. These factors mean everyone should be vigilant about their physical condition to avoid embarking on the road to kidney dialysis.

Self-Examination of Kidney Functionality

Today, all diseases related to poor renal function and renal failure can be diagnosed with the help of equipment. However, one should know how to self-examine before the need for equipment.

How do you perform a self-examination to gauge kidney function? It is rather simple. For example:

• Do you feel like you have a lot of water in your stomach after drinking water or soup, but you can’t get rid of it quickly?
• Have you been urinating less frequently, but haven’t felt a full bladder for a long time?
• Do you feel like your body and legs are nearly too heavy to walk?

If any of the above is the case, the condition is known as “heavy dampness” in TCM, meaning kidney function shows signs of abnormality. A person’s intuition is often correct; to be safe, this would be a time to consult a doctor immediately.

Use your best judgment about your body. Notice changes in urination habits, or whether sweating frequency has decreased. Can you smell ammonia coming from your body besides when you are urinating? TCM examines the kidneys through the color of the skin. Have a good look at your face, the color of your lips, and the color of your tongue, and see whether it appears dark or pale. These changes may be harbingers of kidney failure.

Accelerate Recovery From Kidney Disease

If kidney function is impacted by any of the symptoms mentioned above and is found to be abnormal, here are a few things to try.

1. Avoid Drinking Too Much Water

This may seem counterintuitive; however, drinking too much water will increase the load on the kidneys to make urine, which will tire the kidneys. So drink as much water as you can, but never be swayed by the modern “drink more water” rhetoric.

2. Try Less Salt but Don’t Cut Completely

Eating too much salt will increase the kidneys’ workload, which may cause kidney failure. However, if you go to the extreme and do not eat salt at all, it will change the osmotic pressure of the blood, and the kidneys must get rid of excess water to maintain the balance. This, too, will cause an excessive burden on the kidneys and may cause them to fail.

Salt intake should be reduced in some circumstances. There is a saying in the ancient medical literature that patients with edema should “abstain from salt and soy sauce for a hundred days.” This should certainly be followed if the kidney’s diuretic function is not good.

3. Replenish Spleen Essence With TCM Treatment

TCM generally believes that kidney disease is caused by a spleen deficiency, which leads to the spleen being unable to restrain the water from the kidneys. Too much water residing inside the kidneys will cause edema. Therefore, the treatment advocated by TCM starts with reinforcing the spleen to let go of excess kidney water.

There are various prescriptions for invigorating the spleen, such as Sijunzi (the four combinations) Decoction, Shengyang Yiwei Decoction (Astragalus and Pinella combination) series, Guipi Tang (spleen restoring) Decoction, and the like. Others such as Sishen Decoction are also available to invigorate the spleen and kidney water. These ingredients are all sweet and can be made into a medicinal meal.

The above Chinese medicine prescriptions may sound unfamiliar but they are generally available in Chinese medicine stores. Please consult a professional physician or TCM practitioner before using these medicines.

Spleen essence can be nourished with Chinese medicinal soup. Shutterstock

How Does TCM Treat Kidney Disease?

Modern-day Western medicine pays more attention to the material basis; the main thing a doctor does is to look for the pathogen: Which bacteria or virus will cause which disease, or which mineral or vitamin is insufficient (or too much) that might cause the disease.

TCM, however, follows the sacred path of syndrome differentiation and treatment to deduce the cause of illness. Such etiology can be divided into the “three causes”: external, internal, and neither internal nor external. The external cause is due to weather, which refers to the six qi: wind, fire, heat, dampness, dryness, and cold.” The internal cause is due the emotions, such as the seven emotions: joy, anger, worry, overthinking, grief, fear, and fright. The last category is other things due to neither weather nor emotions.

People’s constitutions also have characteristics such as wind, fire, heat, dampness, dryness, and cold, as well as other characteristics such as joy, anger, worry, overthinking, grief, fear, and fright. Certain germs and viruses will likely infect people with a certain kind of constitution. People with certain emotional traits are also easily touched by specific conditions.

TCM Strives to Find and Address the Root Cause of Symptoms

People who are damp in nature and tend to worry, overthink, or have fears or fright are prone to kidney disease. The best way to help a person with TCM is to start with their specific constitution and take it from there. This is “seeking the good and avoiding evil.”

While the “heavy dampness type” may be associated with kidney disease, TCM would first target the spleen instead of the kidneys. This approach of strengthening the spleen can help reduce dampness, ultimately resulting in kidney improvement as well.

Kidney Disease Patients May Find Hope in TCM

If Western medicine has determined that a patient needs dialysis, is it too late to switch to TCM? Many Western doctors rely on data for diagnosis. When data say people are sick, they are sick—end of discussion.

In TCM, it is believed that disease symptoms are related to specific systems in the body. To which viscera and meridians do the symptoms correlate? Is there any deficiency or excess of cold or heat? Which of the six qi are involved? Which of the seven emotions are affected? All of these things are considered the real symptoms in TCM. Only when the disease’s root causes are identified can the disease be cured.

When Western medicine diagnoses kidney failure based on the numbers, it tries to improve the numbers, which is entirely different from TCM. TCM uses the “syndrome differentiation and treatment” method, which means treatment targets the syndrome. For example, if it is cold, TCM will try to warm it; if it is damp, TCM will remove dampness; if a viscera is deficient, TCM will nourish it. If the condition can be improved, why still go for kidney dialysis?