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| Exercising needn't be naff | |||||||||
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Following on from her successful cycling while dialysing regime[link to article in June update], clinical scientist at the Lister Hospital, Stevenage, Chiew Kong is encouraging patients to exercise between dialysis sessions. | ||||||||
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Her poster presentation at Nephrology in Practice 2001 described how she had linked up with a local health club to arrange three-months free use by 10 patients. Each had pre-training assessment and a fitness test by a fitness instructor and a training programme was drawn up for each individual patient. At the end of the three months the fitness test was repeated. The patients were also asked their views of their physical fitness both before and after the trial. Five patients completed the course, and all said that they not only enjoyed the experience, but also felt very positive about themselves. Assessment showed that their exercise tolerance had increased, too. Chiew Kong believes that exercise is very important for kidney patients. She told nephronline: "It's a commonsense approach. We all know that exercise does you good and the same applies to patients with renal failure. "We have to make a concerted effort here because they are so left behind in rehabilitation. And they certainly need to get fitter. "It seems to me that with this group of patients we work so hard and we spend so much money on their dialysis treatment on their drugs to make them well, but we don't actually make them well with a better quality of life. "We dialyse them well but we don't actually make them fit for very much. "Admittedly a lot of patients do go out to work and have a full life, but you'll find that these patients are the ones who are active. We've neglected a lot of patients but I don't know why they get overlooked. "I think my explanation could be that the medical profession, the healthcare profession has accepted that this is part of the progression of renal failure and there is nothing much you can do about it. "I want to change all that. I think that patients being wheeled into the dialysis unit should be a thing of the past. And we've seen from experience that we can reverse this trend." Her idea of linking up with heath club was to overcome resistance from some patients to exercise, especially the young, she explained. "Some people consider cycling during dialysis as naff, especially the younger ones or maybe the bike doesn't give them the level of exercise that they want. "Another reason is to shift the emphasis or focus from sickness to health. It might make exercise more appealing, more sexy to them. 'I want to be with these healthy people exercising.' So, that was the rational behind getting them to the gym to exercise. "The problem with this group of patients is that they don't perceive them selves as having to work at getting fit because they don't feel unwell. Yet if they do so they feel a lot better," Chiew Kong concluded.
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