I’m trying to find a renal dietitian and can’t find one

@virginia2020 welcome to Mayo Clinic Connect. Sorry to hear about your cancer. When was your surgery? What kind of follow up do you have? Perhaps you can ask your provider for a referral to a dietician or nutritionist that has experience / training in renal nutrition.

Hi @virginia2020 I also had to look for a renal dietician for my mother.

I’m in Illinois though. Are you using private insurance or Medicare? I ask because my mom has traditional Medicare and shockingly they don’t cover a dietician visit unless you have kidney failure (and maybe diabetes), and my mom has neither. Therefore we had to pay out of pocket.

If you’re paying out of pocket, then you could maybe see an RD out of state if you’re comfortable with telehealth. I can send you the practice and RD in Chicago that we went to, or I am pretty sure I used a database to search online, but I just can’t remember what it was. I’ll check.

We asked my mom’s doctors and they literally had zero recommendations so I had to do a massive Google search of dieticians in private practice (seeing someone through the academic medical center out of pocket would have been exorbitant) and go through every single person and find out or ask if they were familiar with renal.

@virginia2020 Welcome to Mayo Clinic Connect. Finding a renal dietician can certainly be a challenge. One way is to Google -renal dietician in [insert your state here] and check out the results. Another thing to try is to go to https://www.renalnutrition.org/home and look up a registered renal dietitian.

Having a sound renal diet can be a real game-changer when you are dealing with kidney issues! Sometimes we need to modify an accepted plan to fit our particular health situation, especially when we live with multiple health concerns.

Please let me know what you find out!
Ginger

@virginia2020, often cancer centers have dieticians that specialize in renal patients who have had cancer. Have you asked about a renal oncology dietitian at your cancer center? Or you can ask the cancer social worker to help you find a dietician to work with you?

@virginia2020

Just wanted to get back to you about how I found my mom’s renal dietician. I used this online directory to search by city. You can filter for dietitians and also by “issue.”

I’m not sure if you meant Richmond, VA, but these are the providers who came up:

Have you searched for books for kidney health diets? My local library has a few and you can likely buy some online. There are used books for sale on abebooks.com and thriftybooks.com. We've found having our own books proves helpful for diet design and questions as they come up. Good luck--wishing you good health...

@pat46 Welcome to Mayo Clinic Connect! I am going to be nosy here, and ask you if you are a Chronic Kidney Disease patient or caregiver? I'd love to hear your story!

Some of the older books may have outdated information, but can still offer good basic ideas for sound renal diets, and how we can modify recipes. What have you found to be favorites of yours?
Ginger

My suggestion is to search out those with the most recent copyright that are written by well-qualified medical and degreed nutritionists. Some of the books I've looked had had complicated recipes and some were more simple and do-able. Pick one or two with menus that tickle your palate! I also download some recipes from the 'net that suit our food preferences (we eat heavy vegetarian, low animal protein and whole grains). Not the typical American diet...but this way of eating works for my spouse's kidney issues--and my high blood pressure.