Why can you have kidney dialysis but not liver dialysis?
In: Biology
Because kidney filters blood…..so in kidney dialysis we bring a machine that filters blood for us instead…..but liver produces bile …which break down fats for better purification ….we don’t have a machine to do that for us ….
Because we have invented a machine for kidney dialysis and we haven’t done that yet for liver dialysis. That’s the short of it. The kidneys’ job is pretty simple: Take everything out of the blood, then put the good stuff back in. You can do that via machine without too much trouble. The liver isn’t just taking stuff out of the blood, it’s transforming and storing stuff. For example, everything you eat visits the liver after being digested, and the liver figures out what to do with it, which mostly means storing it for later use. A machine can’t do many of the jobs a liver can do, because if you store stuff externally you haven’t really stored it at all, you’ve just removed it.
They do phlebotomies for liver problems, a quart of blood is removed and your body makes new blood, dialysis removes the urea and puts the blood back. I’m not exactly sure about the difference but my father had Hep-C and his liver didn’t filter out iron and his blood was basically poisoning him, they didn’t have the technology to remove the iron from his blood stream other than just removing some blood once a month via phlebotomy. Dialysis works more like the machine they use to spin plasma out of blood when people donate but it removes what would otherwise become urine and the blood goes back into your body.
There is no rule against having liver dialysis…. although when it comes to liver failure, organ transplant is the best cure for it but since it will take time to find a donor and is also expensive, liver dialysis can be conducted to prolong individual’s life while waiting for liver transplant
The kidney is basically a filter- it screens out wastes and balances the components of the blood continuously. That is pretty easy to do with an external machine- just run the blood through a filter and add electrolytes, water, etc as needed to maintain specific blood characteristics.
The liver is more like a reactor. Inside it are innumerable enzymes and specialized cells that serve to perform complex biochemical reactions that range from digestion of nutrients to metabolism of chemical compounds like pharmaceuticals.
It also plays a critical role in other bodily systems- it’s a strategic reserve for critical nutrients, produces key components of the blood and immune system, and even regulates blood pressure.
Humans haven’t managed to build a machine that can replicate all those functions, at least not one that can allow a person to live a relatively normal life indefinitely as they could with kidney dialysis. It’s simply too complex of an organ.
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