Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Treatments and drugs
By Mayo Clinic staffThe first goal is to treat the illness or injury that originally damaged your kidneys. Once that's under control, the focus will be on preventing the accumulation of excess fluids and wastes in your blood while your kidneys heal. This is best accomplished by limiting your fluid intake and following a high-carbohydrate, low-protein, low-potassium diet.
Your doctor may prescribe calcium, glucose or sodium polystyrene sulfonate (Kayexalate) to prevent the accumulation of high levels of potassium in your blood. Too much potassium in the blood can cause dangerous irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias).
Dialysis
Most of the time, you also need to undergo temporary hemodialysis — often referred to simply as "dialysis" — to help remove toxins and excess fluids from your body while your kidneys heal. Dialysis, which is a mechanical way of filtering waste from your blood, is an imperfect but lifesaving substitute for kidney function.
In acute kidney failure, dialysis is usually done at a hospital or dialysis center, not at home. The treatment relies on an artificial kidney (dialyzer) to take over kidney function. Blood is pumped out of your body to the artificial kidney through one of two routes — a catheter placed surgically in one of your main blood veins, or a surgically created junction between a vein and artery in your arm. Inside the artificial kidney, your blood moves across membranes that filter out waste before being returned to your body. Less than 1 cup (237 milliliters) of blood is outside your body in the dialyzer and tubing at any one time.
