This well-presented story from facts shared of stage-5 kidney disease needs to be enhanced with more specific medical knowledge (“‘Silent disease’: Many have kidney disease, but don’t know till it’s too late,” The Herald, April 10.)
Using an automobile as a metaphor, we treat automobiles with more service and care than we do our bodies. Automobiles need service and so too the body. Remove service and the car winds up on a junk pile, where as the human body also begins to fail and after the body factory is closed, replacement parts are few and far between. The case needing to be made is preventative care beginning in childhood. Regular checkups and doctors’ recommendations need to be followed no matter how we feel. Kidney disease doesn’t happen overnight. Contributing problems unattended to are obesity, high blood pressure, ketonuria, gout, and rarely autoimmune disease.
Alcohol is a major contributor. Simple medical chemistry of the blood tests will give doctors early warnings of problems, which if tended to prevent end stage renal disease and the high cost of dialysis and/or medication needed to prevent the body from joining the car on the junk pile.
To fail human health monitoring advice by physicians is to begin your trip to the boneyard. It is your decision to live or to die. So, pay the small cost now to avoid the major cost later.
Samuel Bess
Stanwood
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