Why can you have kidney dialysis but not liver dialysis?
In: Biology
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.
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