How to treat hepatomegaly

  Hepatomegaly, or Wilson’s disease, is a neurogenetic disease that occurs in adolescents and affects many organs such as the brain and liver. The average life expectancy without treatment is 3-4 years, and most of the life expectancy with regular treatment can be similar to normal people, but lifelong copper detoxification treatment is necessary. Since the first clinical application of penicillamine more than fifty years, in the world to save a large number of patients, of course, to prevent the induction of leukopenia, domestic and foreign successive use of sodium dimercaptosuccinate injections / tablets and molybdenum preparations, etc., of which zinc is inexpensive and good, over-the-counter drugs, mainly zinc gluconate and zinc sulfate, zinc glycyrrhizate, zinc acetate in Europe and the United States are mostly used. Of course, they gradually tend to use zinc gluconate as we do. Similar cases have been reported in foreign countries where zinc has been used to treat the disease with stable symptoms for nearly 20 years, and we also have similar cases. Surgical treatment, including liver transplantation and splenectomy, should be done with caution, as the indications for liver transplantation tend to be overly broadened in some parts of China! It is important to emphasize the need for a combination of alternative treatments for hepatomegaly, i.e., dietary therapy and herbal therapy.  Dietary therapy: foods with high copper content, forbidden to be consumed: animal offal (pig and cow liver), etc.; fish and shellfish such as crab, shrimp, squid, octopus and shellfish; beans such as black beans, lentils and cooked meat beans; nuts such as peanuts, sesame and pecans. In addition, mushrooms, oysters, centipedes, scorpions, etc. also contain high copper content; low copper content, suitable for daily food white rice noodles, radish, lotus root, skunk cabbage, celery, cabbage, lean pork, lean chicken and duck meat, potatoes, milk, etc. It should be added that some foreign scholars, through rigorous investigation, concluded that in most patients did not show a statistical correlation between dietary restrictions and prognosis, but agreed that crustaceans, liver, hard fruits, chocolate and mushrooms must be avoided; the amount of copper in food should be determined in the context of the local situation, and the copper content of local tap water should be cared for. Domestic reference can be made to the HHS version of the “Table of Food Composition”.  Copper excretion by Chinese medicine: Professor Yang et al. had treated this disease with Chinese medicine, and the average increase of urinary copper excretion was 187.6 mg/24 hours. According to the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, this disease generally has limb tremor, muscle stiffness, slurred speech, bad breath, salivation and other symptoms, some have been used to calm the liver and quench the wind to be treated with turtle plate, turtle shell, dragon bone and other drugs, but the patient’s clinical symptoms are increasingly aggravated. Analysis of the reason is that these drugs are high in copper content. Given that most of the tongue is red, moss yellow or greasy, pulse string number or string smooth, clearing heat and dampness is also suitable for the treatment of this disease, so use the method of clearing heat and detoxifying, pass the internal organs and diuretic. Modern medicine believes that copper in the body is mainly excreted from the bile through the stool, so to promote the excretion of copper from the bile through the stool or increase the excretion of copper in the urine is the main measure for the treatment of this disease. In liver and bean soup, rhubarb drains heat and toxicity as the key medicine to cleanse the accumulated dirt. Huanglian, Scutellaria and Rhubarb all have the function of promoting bile secretion, increasing bile formation, diluting bile fluid and enhancing bile excretion, which can speed up the excretion of copper from bile through bile. Of course, some international scholars and patients are skeptical about the heavy metal richness of this Chinese medicine, mainly because they are worried and afraid of contamination during the production and processing of Chinese medicine.  In fact, the clinical and basic research of Chinese scholars on this disease is also more advanced in the international level.