The liver has amazing regenerative abilities, but scarring is just too much for it to handle, why is that?
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Scar tissue on your skin is like skin, but worse. It doesn’t regulate temperature well and the rest of your skin has to work harder to do the same stuff.
Scar tissue on your heart is like skin, but worse. It doesn’t help the heart work and the rest of the heart has to work harder to do the same stuff.
Scar tissue on your liver is like skin, but slightly better. It doesn’t filter as well as your normal liver, but it tries its best.
Your body only creates scar tissue when it is damaged and feels like it needs to repair quickly. For cuts your body wants to close it up quickly so that it doesn’t get infected.
For your liver, well your body doesn’t understand poison all that well. It doesn’t know if your being forced to consume poison every week to survive or if your just drinking for fun on the weekends. From its perspective it might think that your poisoned multiple times a week with some poisonings being much more dangerous than others. In between filtering your blood, it regenerates itself. If it expects that it might not have time to perfectly heal itself, it works faster and creates scar tissue. The more scar tissue it has, the more paranoid it becomes about its ability to keep you alive, and the more it will try and rush repairs. That can leads to serious liver diseases, alternatively some people have very confident livers that do not scar so easily.
Also sometimes liver scars are like skin, but worse. These scars do not help your liver do it’s job, and actually get in the way of your liver. When this happens it can become impossible for the liver to keep up with its normal jobs, let alone process alcohol.
Your liver is designed to repair itself well, but it isn’t designed to destroy scar tissue and replace that with healthy tissue. That is why your liver can repair itself really well, but also sometimes not so well.
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