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Pain Relief for Liver

Your liver is critical to your well being. Your liver has many functions, including processing all of the foods you eat, storing iron, vitamins and minerals, making bile to help digest food, detoxifying poisonous chemicals, making protein, and storing energy. If your liver is unable to do one of these tasks, it could cause significant liver pain and other problems.

  1. The Underlying Problem

    • Determine what is causing your liver pain. There are a number of problems that can affect the liver and cause pain and other undesirable symptoms, including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, cirrhosis, cancer and hemochromatosis. Your doctor can determine what is causing your liver pain (through a liver biopsy or another method). From there, you and your doctor can discuss treatment options.

    Quick Pain Relief

    • Do not simply take an over-the-counter pain-relief drug. Taking a pain-relief drug will only help you ignore the actual problem, which is likely to get progressively worse. Moreover, in June 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration held a joint meeting with several advisory committees, including the Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee, to discuss the public-health concern that acetaminophen (found in Tylenol and at least 200 additional over-the-counter pain relievers) may actually cause acute liver damage if taken in too high a dose.

    Surgery

    • Consider surgery. Depending on what is causing your liver pain, surgery might be an option. Transjugular Intrahepatic Portosystemic Shunt (TIPS) surgery is a minimally invasive procedure used to minimize the problems associated with cirrhosis, including intestinal bleeding and the build-up of fluid in the abdomen. TIPS involves placing a small metal device (stent) in the middle of the diseased liver in order to permit blood flow to bypass the liver. While this surgery is beneficial to some, it is not for everyone; it can actually worsen the problems for people experiencing certain liver problems. Again, depending on what is causing your liver pain, there are many additional surgical options. This may include resection, where a portion of the liver is actually removed.

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