You Don’t Need More Health Problems: On How an Improperly Labeled Dialysis Component Can Harm You

For many patients, dialysis is a life-saving procedure, one that they gladly incorporate into their lives.

Unfortunately, for some dialysis patients, that life-saving treatment comes with an unnecessary risk of cardiac arrest (often mistakenly called a heart attack). This risk is not due to dialysis itself but to a component of the dialysis process. The component is called GranuFlo — and if you or someone you know had heart issues or even died during or shortly after a dialysis treatment, there is a good chance that GranuFlo was used.

Right now, our lawyers are speaking to people all over the country who have suffered from adverse cardiac events during or immediately following their dialysis treatments. Our lawyers are helping these patients discover what fluid was used in their dialysis treatments and are talking them through their legal options. GranuFlo could be to blame.

Sadly, the manufacturers of GranuFlo have known about the product’s risk of causing adverse cardiac events in dialysis patients for some time. However, it was only after an internal company memo discussing this risk became public that doctors and patients around the country started to become more aware of the association between GranuFlo and adverse cardiac events. And that’s not just unfortunate, bad luck. Instead, that’s negligence, because doctors and patients should have been told sooner.

Had the manufacturers of GranuFlo shared what they knew sooner, many patients would have never suffered or even lost their lives at the hands of GranuFlo.

Hard to believe? Check out this New York Times article on the issue of the internal memo: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/health/fda-investigates-fresenius-for-failure-to-warn-of-risk.html?_r=0