Word: avram
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Handouts. For the majority of regular dialysis patients who are still treated in hospitals, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare estimates the average cost per patient at a forbidding $15,000 a year. In light of this, Dr. Morrell M. Avram points with satisfaction to an annual average cost of only $5,000 for patients treated in his dialysis department at the Prospect Heights Division of Long Island College Hospital. This is hardly more than home treatment would cost, and since most of Dr. Avram's patients are poor, home treatment would not be practical. No less remarkable...
...Avram, 38, who is an assistant professor at Downstate College of Medicine as well as head of his hospital's mechanical-kidney unit, began his economical setup with Army-surplus water tanks for mixing, storing and delivering dialysate fluid to his eleven artificial kidneys. He uses gravity feed to save pump costs. He has fluid strengths tested manually instead of by sophisticated and expensive gadgets. How safe is this penny-pinching corner-cutting? Losing one patient a year, the unit has a 3% mortality rate, against a national average of 20% reported...
...Avram sees it, the doctor's job is not only to treat as many patients as possible but to get them back to work. For some, this would be difficult if they had the usual plastic tubes permanently implanted in their arms, with the ends exposed for hooking up to the machine. Avram uses instead a technique of joining an artery and vein inside the forearm, which causes the veins to enlarge. For each treatment, one needle is inserted near the site of this internal shunt to withdraw blood, and another higher up to return it. Thanks to this refinement...
...Avram has applied for a state grant of $30,000 to expand his unit to a capacity of 42 patients. Thousands of kidney-failure victims are dying each year, he insists, for lack of such facilities. A further drawback is that each patient is tied down to within easy reach of his own unit. Avram looks forward to the day when there will be "dialysis hotels" or "human Laundromats" where patients can check in at night, wherever they happen to be, get hooked up and dialysed, and leave in the morning...
...AVRAM DAVIDSON New York City...