Hu Songwen from Jiangsu Province was diagnosed with kidney failure 20 years ago and for six years underwent dialysis blood-filtering treatments in a hospital 13 times every month – an expensive treatment that used up all his family’s savings.
So Hu started putting together his own dialysis machine, buying the necessary parts and solutions to carry out the blood filtering treatment at home.
He says his homemade dialysis only costs around 60 yuan (B280) for each treatment – an eighth of the cost of a hemodialyisis treatment in a Chinese hospital.
Hu said the secret to his money-saving method was to pare away the expensive extras found on “gold-plated” hospital dialysis machines – leaving only important parts like the blood-filtering dialyzer, which can be purchased for as little as 100 yuan (B450).
Although home dialysis kits are more common in other parts of the world, in China they must be imported and are expensive.
But Chinese nephrologist Sun Wei warned that Hu’s method could easily lead to infections and should not be imitated.
Sun explained that Chinese state medical insurance would generally reimburse over 90 per cent of the cost of hemodialysis.