Your second largest organ, after your skin, is your liver. It's the body's chemical plant, its warehouse, and its waste disposal unit. It extracts the good things from your digested food and despatches them into the bloodstream as the body needs them - especially the bursts of sugar you need to produce energy. The liver produces bile, which helps you digest fats and get the goodness from them. It transforms the raw chemicals in food into usable material. And it produces clotting factor so that if you cut yourself you don't bleed to death.
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Harmful chemicals like caffeine and alcohol are broken down by the liver
and filtered out of the body. Among these toxins are drugs, both prescribed
and recreational.
The liver can be damaged by overuse, too much booze, too many drugs, or
by infections which damage the liver cells. When damaged it can't reprocess
properly. This means waste products and toxins accumulate in your blood
when they should be eliminated, and the supply of useful substances becomes
erratic. This leads to characteristic symptoms. These are: jaundice (yellowing
of your skin and white of the eyes); fatigue and drowsiness; appetite
loss and/or nausea; and weight loss.
'Hepatitis' is the term that refers to any irritation or inflammation
of the liver, whether caused by overuse or infections. But you will mainly
hear it used as a name for a whole variety of different, unrelated infections
caused by viruses. The one thing these
viruses have in common is that they selectively attack liver cells, and often set up an immune over-reaction that also attacks cells. There are different
