It is estimated that there are over 1.7 million people worldwide suffering from End Stage Renal Disease (Bendorf, 2013). America is no stranger to this epidemic. Each year, more and more people are being diagnosed and added to the transplant list. Unfortunately, there is no cure for this disease and the best treatment, a kidney transplant, is difficult to come by. Mostly because we cannot keep up with the demand for kidney transplants in this nation. There are many possible solutions on how to best increase the donor pool so that more people can receive their life saving transplants. One of the most effective solutions would be to start offering compensation to living organ donors. Paying donors for their kidneys will assure that more ESRD patients are receiving healthy transplanted kidneys in a timely manner thus increasing quality of life and decreasing costs for the transplant patients and society.
Being diagnosed with ESRD completely derails the life of the patient and often affects the family members as well. In an instant their whole life is forced to change to included the need for chronic dialysis that occurs for most patients three times a week. This type of drastic lifestyle change can lead to severe cases of anxiety and depression. In addition to suffering from changes in …show more content…
The reason for this is because people are being added to the kidney transplant list faster than we can find them healthy kidneys. According to the National Kidney Foundation, as of October 8th of this year, there were 101,189 patients waiting for a life saving kidney transplant. Even though over 17, 000 kidney transplants took place last year, there are over 3,000 people added to the transplant list each month (NKF). In doing the math, that means that twice as many people are being added to the list each year than are receiving
Being diagnosed with ESRD completely derails the life of the patient and often affects the family members as well. In an instant their whole life is forced to change to included the need for chronic dialysis that occurs for most patients three times a week. This type of drastic lifestyle change can lead to severe cases of anxiety and depression. In addition to suffering from changes in …show more content…
The reason for this is because people are being added to the kidney transplant list faster than we can find them healthy kidneys. According to the National Kidney Foundation, as of October 8th of this year, there were 101,189 patients waiting for a life saving kidney transplant. Even though over 17, 000 kidney transplants took place last year, there are over 3,000 people added to the transplant list each month (NKF). In doing the math, that means that twice as many people are being added to the list each year than are receiving