There are thousands of diseases that hit specific organs and they have specific names. Why there aren’t many names for liver diseases and mostly the term liver disease is used. I may have a liver disease and google searches don’t come up anything besides liver disease or cirrhosis. Only sometimes hepatitis is mentioned. and it’s pretty confusing to distinguish results.
Note: I’m not looking for a medical advice. I’m just curious about this specific term naming.
Also a note to the mods: If my presumption include a false information derived from inadequate research, I’m sorry but I couldn’t find any info anywhere. This subreddit is my last resort.
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Doctors name diseases, so there are many legacy conventions. It’s not some scientific naming scheme, like we have for chemicals.
One factor in naming a disease is “should this be treated differently?”. One reason you see lots of names for a disease like breast cancer is that the treatment for HER2 positive is different from HER2-.
The various liver diseases are mo#tly treated in similar ways, so many names would hard for patients to learn and wouldn’t make much difference.
There are though? Hepatitis A through E, alcoholic steatohepatitis, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, fulminant cirrhosis, portal hypertension, infarction, autoimmune hepatitis, primary sclerosing cholangitis of pregnancy, drug-induced hepatitis, liver hemangioma, hepatocellular carcinoma…
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