Protecting your kidneys is protecting your heart

Little is said about the kidney. This day comes to repair this injustice every year, to make us aware of the importance of kidney diseases, most often silent and therefore diagnosed too late.

Our current lifestyles, with an overly rich and unbalanced diet, a sedentary lifestyle, are aggravating factors. Especially in diabetics and hypertensives. Protecting your kidneys is protecting your heart.

Nature has blessed us with 2 kidneys, the only truly vital 24-hour organ that is duplicated. However, many people are born with only one kidney and never realize it, like those who have 3! The kidney is a filtration plant of such quality that man has never been able to reproduce in our communities. We rarely think about what the simple phenomenon of digestion and the supply of energy needed by all the cells of our body represents.

The digestion

We start from the mouth… Which is a more important area for digestion than we think. We must take the time to chew, it will be that less to do for our stomach; it is in the mouth that the first degradation products will act. Then you swallow, and everything goes down into the esophagus, which is not an inert tube but a very powerful muscle. The proof, if this muscle were not so effective, we would be very annoyed when we do the handstand after a meal, which is not frequent but just an image to illustrate the role of the esophagus.

We then arrive in the stomach, which is also a muscle but what is more is a container which contains acid even more powerful than hydrochloric acid. A porridge comes out ready to be sorted.

blood cleansing

Digestion continues with a fantastic sorting where everything is separated, absorbed or rejected. The residues go to the stool. Liquids and good products pass at this level into the blood. The blood circulation takes care of the passage after having deposited the essential elements to take up the residues of the boiler.

First the liver, then the 2 kidneys, are in charge of purifying, in which enters a blood loaded with waste which leaves completely purified.

Everything looks like an ultra-sophisticated and microscopic water treatment plant. The kidney has after filtration its own system for transporting useless products; this is called urine.

When the kidney goes wrong, nothing goes

With the kidney, we enter the field of high-tech computing. For example, it is the kidney that controls the acidity of the blood. A fundamental, vital piece of data… The kidney also controls the concentration of sodium and potassium, essential elements for exchanges within our body. Without a kidney, the body can no longer live because the accumulation of waste quickly results in a very serious coma. A sewage service which cannot know the strike and which, to work at a good level, must eliminate a liter to a liter and a half of urine per day.

This answers the age-old question: how much fluid should you drink per day?

There is not a number to remember because it depends on the heat. In fact, the only way to check it though is to check that the output translates to a liter, a liter and a half.

The main diseases of the kidneys are extremely numerous, too numerous to go into detail.

The treatments are also just as numerous and rather effective, but when the kidney can no longer function, what is called renal failure: then you have to resort to an external device to do its job, that’s what it is called dialysis.

The “artificial” kidney

Dialysis used to be called artificial kidney. A perfectly developed method, except that it is synonymous with upheaval in daily life and quite hard to bear for years.

The living donor

Transplantation may also be preferred. Indeed, the term transplant is improper, for the sole reason that the diseased kidney is not replaced; we leave it in place but we bring in a new one; it is for this reason that the correct term is “kidney transplant”.

Kidney transplantation was invented in France. It is perfectly developed, not very difficult to carry out and causes only few rejections… Only the donors are missing. It is true that the organ being double, this allows for example the use of living donors, whose results are also better… If there were more transplants in 2019 in France than the previous year, the number of living donor kidney transplants has been declining for several years. A disturbing phenomenon for doctors. It should be noted that this decline in living donors is not linked to organ removal refusals. They have remained stable for several years (30 to 30.5%).

Taking care of your kidneys means taking charge of your health tomorrow!

Doctor Jean-Francois Lemoine

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