How Medication Effects the Kidney and Liver Essay Example

How Medication Effects the Kidney and Liver Essay Example How Medication Effects the Kidney and Liver Essay How Medication Effects the Kidney and Liver Essay The kidney and the liver are two of the four major routes a drug takes when trying to leave the body. If someone has kidney or liver disease, how a person’s body handles that drug is greatly affected. Drinks, food and or lifestyle habits that put added stress and cause damage to your kidneys or liver, foe example alcohol abuse or chronic exposure to toxins such as paint fumes, can affect how well you process drugs. Kidney and or liver stress/damage usually raises drug levels a lot higher than normal by slowing down the excretion process.The aminoglycoside antibiotics such as Streptomycin, Kanamycin, Gentamicin and Garamicin can cause kidney damage in 15 percent of patients treated with them, but thousands of drugs cause less than obvious stress on your kidneys. When your drug information says Renal (kidney) problems, you should always be aware that drug is most likely going to be hard on your kidneys. Check with your pharmacist before mixing any drugs, prescription and or over-the-counter drugs.Drug Labels that warn of things like hepatic (liver) toxicity, injury, and dysfunction which is medical use for liver poison, should flash a red light in your head. (http:/www. liverdisease. com/medication_hepatitis. html) Your liver is the busiest organs in the body working non-stop to process food to transport through the bloodstream and to metabolize waste matter for excretion through urine and or feces. (http:/www. liverdisease. com/medication_hepatitis. html) The list of prescription drugs that can stress or damage the liver is most likely longer than the list that dont.If you drink alcohol all the time and take a liver stressing drug you can be doing lots of damage to your liver. Some signs of liver damage are swelling and redness in the palms of the hands, yellowish skin and whites of eyes, itching, small benign fatty tumors and reddish spots on the skin or lumps under the skin of damaged blood vessels. ( aakp. org/aakp-library/medication-effects/)One mostly used drugs that damages the liver is acetaminophen (Tylenol) which is loudly talked about in advertising for pain relief.What the ad doesn’t tell you is that acetaminophen is hard on the liver. Recent studies show acetaminophen can inflict most if not all of its damage on the liver by blocking the making of antioxidant glutathione. Without the glutathione the livers ability to break down toxins for disposal is weakened. According to a study published in the journal, Free Radical Biology amp; Medicine, one hour after an injection of acetaminophen, glutathione levels decrease as much as 83 percent! If some stress is placed on the liver (alcohol) at the same time the acetaminophen hits it the damage could be fatal.If you take acetaminophen, take a liver protecting herb milk thistle’ before and add 500 mg of the amino acid cysteine to your daily vitamins. Cysteine is the precursor to glutathione. Also be sure to do not drink alcohol when youre taking acetaminophen. ( hepcnet. net/drugsandliverdamage. html) Kidneys plays a big part in body function by filtering the blood, getting rid of the waste products, but also by balancing the levels of electrolyte levels in the body controlling blood pressure, and stimulating the production of red blood cells.