Cure for Jaundice

If you have yellowish skin and eyes, and if it’s not Halloween and you’re not an alien, you may have jaundice. The yellow color indicates that excess bilirubin, a by-product of old blood cells, is floating around your blood stream (as you learned earlier, the skin reflects the condition of the blood).
Three classified types of jaundice exist:

1. Obstructive jaundice: Caused by obstruction of the small ducts that allow bile to flow into the intestine. Often, gallstones are a cause of this problem. Symptoms include dark urine, pale feces, and itchy skin.
2. Hepatocellular jaundice: Occurs because of a disease of the liver cells, which makes them unable to utilize the bilirubin. (Remember, the liver is a filter.) You may experience hepatocellular jaundice when and if you have hepatitis. Symptoms include dark urine, but the feces remains the same in color.
3. Hemolytic jaundice: Occurs when a destruction of red cells occurs in the blood, such as in the disease hemolysis. With this type of jaundice, the color of the urine and feces remains the same, but the problem usually leads to anemia.

Hemolytic disease—and thus, jaundice—can happen to a newborn child because of the incompatibility of the mother’s blood and her baby’s blood. A blood test taken by your doctor early in your pregnancy can detect the possible problem, and it can be handled at that time. Now that you understand the three types of jaundice a little better, you can see that the first type is caused by problems in or of the gallbladder causing an obstruction of bile flow, the second is related more closely to the liver, and the last is a rare problem associated more closely with the blood. We will primarily discuss how to prevent gallstones that can cause a problem in the first place. Let’s take a look.