What happens to body during diarrhea? Especially the water part? Normaly, the water we drink is absorbed in the body and most part of thrown removing toxic elements via urine. But, during diarrhea body losses lot of water and we become dehydrated and weak. Suppose due to some process let’s say like Osmosis the water travels thru membrane and finally transforms into another substance, blood. So, during dehydration, does this process reverse? Why do we feel weakness? Also, when body knows it’s getting weak why it is still dehydration without absorbing any water? Someone please explain whole process.
In: Biology
Normally, the small intestine absorbs most of the nutrients and the large intestine absorbs water. Diarrhea can happen for a handful of reasons:
* You eat something nasty or toxic, if your body “detects” that, it makes you throw up and/or makes so the food goes trough your guts as fast as possible, in order to absorb less of the toxic stuff. This also means there is less time to absorb water.
* Bacteria and viruses can cause your cells to suffer or go into “defense mode”, which causes them to work less, so they absorb water at a slower pace.
* One of the effect of inflammation is dilating blood vessels and the gaps between cells, so that your immune system cells can exit from your blood and fight better the cause of inflammation. It is generally helpful, but if the inflammation is very bad, they dilate so much that lot of water goes trough those gaps, so not only you absorb less water, but you also lose water
Diseases like cholera generally kill you because there are so many bacteria and inflamation in your intestine that it’s no longer able to absorb water and you even lose some water trough it, so you die of dehydration.
The opposite of diarrhea is constipation, in some cases, if the intestine is too long (very tall people) or lazy (old people), the food travels too slowly trough the intestine, which absorbs too much water and causes poop to become very hard, which makes it difficult to expel it. In some cases it becomes hard as a rock (coprolith) and impossible to poop, which can also kill you.
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