A Humber River Regional Hospital doctor is the first physician from the Greater Toronto Area to deliver a speech at an annual conference on kidney disease.
Dr. David Mendelssohn was the keynote speaker at the Uldall Dinner June 16 at the Sheraton Toronto Centre Hotel downtown.The dinner, which began in 1997, celebrates the work of Dr. Robert Uldall, the first doctor to train a patient to self-administer dialysis treatment at home during the night.Mendelssohn spoke about whether the practice of evidenced-based kidney treatment is a dream or a nightmare."Society judges research and has to decide what it will pay for. The rules for doing that get stricter and stricter and so a discipline like nephrology (treating kidney disease) comes up against many challenges because we don't have access to the funds to do good research and our therapy is already one of the most expensive therapies," he explained in an email."We dream about evidence-based nephrology (and whether) these rules will become our nightmare and they will prevent us from achieving."Mendelssohn is the chief of nephrology at Humber River and is a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.He has been active in many aspects of his field, including serving as chair of the Ontario Medical Association's section of nephrology, chair of the Specialist Coalition of Ontario, chair of the Toronto Region Dialysis Committee and co-chair of the Toronto Dialysis Task Force.He is also president and chief medical officer of Nephrolife, a not-for-profit corporation formed by a group of doctors who promote expanding a model of providing kidney care for patients in independent facilities rather than hospitals.