The aim of this book is to provide a systematic survey of the established pathophysiological principles along which patients on dialysis should be treated. For several reasons, these were insufficiently applied in many centers, leading to excessive and at least partly preventable cardiovascular damage. Since the first edition, more reports have appeared supporting the importance of volume control and the concepts are more widely accepted, be it not so quickly as Scribner hoped for in his foreword. There are at least two reasons for this delay. First, due to the extreme difficulty to compare treatment strategies according to the rules of ‘evidence based medicine’, randomized controlled studies are still lacking. Second, because of understandable preference of investigators to publish new findings instead of ‘old truths’, attention has shifted to a variety of ‘risk factors’. Although some interesting aspects have emerged, none of these have yet opened effective ways of treatment, let alone contested the above-mentioned principles.