Drugs for liver disease – a Hepatologist’s perspective

Your task: Watch the video interview with Dr Holt which serves as an introduction to how doctors can look after your liver. You may want to contrast this later with those steps in which we consider how you can look after your own liver. Reflect on any new information or ideas and share your thoughts with other learners in the comments area.

In the first series of steps this week we will consider treatments for liver disease. We will divide them up into drug-based treatments (which can either be used to treat the disease, or the symptoms it causes) and surgical treatments. We will do this by discussions with some of the staff from the Liver Unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. We will mention many of the diseases we have covered so far and will remind you of features of liver and gallbladder anatomy that we covered in the first week of this course.

You may remember that as we progressed through our earlier steps, we commented on how some diseases can be tricky to treat and diagnose. We also noted how sometimes the only way to help someone is by performing a liver transplant. You will hear a little about transplantation here and we will also show you some new treatment options which may improve the situation for patients with advanced liver disease.