See Multiple Nephrologists | How to Get Best Care from Kidney Doctors

Today’s video I’m talking about why I really believe from a recent personal experience that I went through why you really see multiple nephrologists if you have kidney health issues. If you have a transplant I think you should see multiple transplant nephrologists; those are kidney doctors that just deal with transplants.

A couple years ago I started having a little bit of protein in my urine. It wasn’t anything anybody was concerned about, but it was there. It gradually started to increase and as time went on, I saw a couple other doctors, and got different opinions. A lot of people said it was normal because of the amount of years I had with the transplant. It might have been due to an  acute rejection episode, which just happens for a short while.

Regardless, I never figured out why and when I started having this little bit of protein tried I everything to get rid of it it. I decided to go to my fourth, possibly fifth transplant nephrologists from a new center. I just went to get the opinion and so she was the only one who gave me a different option previous to the three other people I found before who gave me no option. They just told me it was normal, and to not worry. She gave me a different medication to try and tried it and it worked. I had no faith it was going to work, and it worked. It lowered a lot of the protein in my urine, got it down quite significantly; so I went back and increased the dosage.

Now I don’t have normal amounts of protein, but i’m not too far away. If I decided not to see multiple nephrologists, I would have never figured this out. I had already looked at so many places and tried so many things.

The reason is is because the world of kidney health kidney disease transplants is huge; meaning there is so much information out there that no one can know it all. No one can know everything about kidney health because of the amount of information. There are thousands of studies that are published in the National Library of Medicine every month. A lot of those studies are medications. There’s much more medication studies than there are nutrition supplements, diet, lifestyle, so it is so hard to keep up with that and to know every single thing.

I truly believe that you need to get multiple opinions of different nephrologists. I‘ve seen about seven or eight now, and I’ve gotten a different viewpoint. I changed medication or they addressed an area that the other doctors weren’t addressing. This doctor decided to address my parathyroid hormone, this doctor decided to address my blood pressure, this one decided to do an ultrasound. Everybody practices a different way, with  different methods depending on their experience, where they went to school, and where they went learn from.

If you live in an area where there’s not a lot of kidney doctors now there’s virtual appointments. You may want to consider visiting someone. The patients that I’m seeing the longest and are doing the best have gotten the opinions of multiple nephrologists. They get an opinion from here every three months, they go to here every two months, so really do that’s the best thing you can do.