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
Your body decided that something bad is in your stomach and needs to be expelled ASAP. The best way to do this is to flood your digestive system with water and flush it out.
Your intestine is a semi-permeable layer that allows water to flow through. Your body creates as osmotic imbalance that makes it so you constantly suck up water from your poop as it travels through you. This is to conserve as much water as possible because you had to add water (and proton pumps make it acidic) in your stomach in order to digest your food. Also it’s the main way you add water to the system.
When you have an inflammatory response, your body creates an osmotic imbalance on the other side that sucks water from your body into your intestine to “flush it out”. This is like the water in the tank of your toilet being used to wash your poop down. That response can happen for a number of reasons, but it’s often because of the cells in your gut detecting toxins or your immune system fighting a pathogen.
I found this old post that explains it well. I don’t know how to link so here is a copy paste
ReshKayden
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6y ago
Reposted by u/jiggity_gee
So your bowels are like a long train track and your food is like a set of cars on the track. Transit time between Point A, your mouth, and Point B, the chute, is a bit flexible but normally operates on a regularly scheduled basis.
When you eat, you put cars on the track and send them to Point B. As these cars go to Point B, they lose passengers (nutrients) at various points in the thin tunnel portion (small intestine). The journey isnt complete and the journey has already altered the shape of the car pretty significantly giving a rusty color. Once in the larger portion of the tunnel, the cars are checked for stray passengers and are hosed down a bit so that transition out of Point B isn’t so bad. Sometimes, the train cars park juuust outside the gates of Point B so they can exit at the best time for the operator (toilet).
Now, all of this goes fucking nuts when you load a bad set of train cars at Point A. The track sensors located everywhere along the track, detect this alien set of cars and sends a distress call to the Supervisor (your brain). The Supervisor wants to handle the situation without having to phone the Manager (your consciousness) about the craziness on the tracks and also wants to make sure you never know it was on the tracks. It has to make a choice now: send it back to Point A violently and somewhat painfully risking tearing the tracks, or send it to Point B as fast as fuck? Depending on where it’s located on the track, it’ll choose the best route.
Let’s use the destination Point B. The Supervisor hits the panic button and puts all the train cars that are on the track (in your body) on overdrive. The tunnels are flooded with water and lubricant to speed all the cars up and get them the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Cars collide with each other, and previously well formed cars are just flooded with water and lubricant that they are just a soggy, shadowy reminder of their former glory state.
The Media (pain) hears about the car collisions immediately begins filming live the high speed, flooded train cars out of control. They want to knos how an alien set of train cars were put on the tracks and they want someone to pay for such carelessness. The Manager is just watching the horror unfold on Live TV but cannot do anything to stop it, because the Supervisor was deaf and he had not installed a means of communicating with him after hours in the office.
I hope this answers your question.
TL;DR when you get diarrhea, everything gets pushed out, one way or another. There are no passing lanes.
Source: medical student
Diarrhea can start higher up with an early reaction to unwanted food or a viral infection. In that case you might empty your gut from both ends.
Or it can start lower down, to correct constipation. Poop has built up in your colon and is not moving fast enough, so your body decides to flush it by pumping water into the colon to soften it up, and then expelling it.
The Intestines absorb water and nutrients.
If the poop speeds up, less water is absorbed. If the poop slows down, more water is absorbed.
Intestines speed the poop up if it senses something bad is in it(or you use a stimulant). They slow down for lots of reasons(including drugs).
Fast poop – diarrhea. Slow Poop – constipation. Faster = more watery. Slower = more dry/impaction. Intestines are gonna suck water regardless but if there’s nothing to suck, then no water.
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