Like if you have sickle cell or blood cancer or things can you not just like use a dialysis machine to take out your sick blood and do new clean blood?
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Dialysis does not remove blood. Dialysis is for the correction of blood chemistry, removal of waste products, and removal of excess fluid volume. Typically no blood is lost. This is done through a semi-permeable membrane that conserves large sized molecules and passes what is needed to correct blood chemistry etc. If the membrane was permeable to red cells, it would be permeable to pretty much everything and be useless.
I used to do red blood cell exchanges for sickle cell. This is a very rough-shod treatment. Over a series of treatments, when a sickler was in crisis, what would happen was exchanging their blood volume with normal blood. The sickle cell trait is genetic and cannot be fixed. It corrupts how the structures inside the red blood cell on how they microscopically move and function. With exchanges, the percentage of the blood volume with sickled cells was reduced.
Blood cancer – the other responses are correct. Blood cancer is not like tumorous cancer and is far more tricky. Calling it a cancer is kind of a misnomer in how it works.
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