Imagining a world without kidney disease

Dr. Katherine Tuttle, clinical professor (Nephrology) and executive director for research at Providence Health Care recently participated on a Northwest Passages panel discussing kidney diseases and fellow panelist Tom Mueller’s book How to Make a Killing.

Panelists also included two dialysis patients, Washington State University biology professor Andrew Storfer and culinary arts instructor Duane Sunwold.

In How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine, author Tom Mueller details the commercialization of the dialysis industry and its negative impacts on kidney disease patients.

Tuttle agrees that while dialysis is an important life-saving treatment, wider-spread prevention of kidney disease in the first place should be the goal. 

"An expert researcher and kidney disease health care practitioner, Tuttle said the reason preventive treatment of kidney disease is not more widespread is because of the for-profit nature of kidney disease treatment in the United States.

"It is much more profitable to treat someone 'at the precipice of death' than preventing kidney disease through diet or medical intervention."