Nontransplant options for the treatment of metabolic liver disease: Saving livers while saving lives

Abstract

“When medicine has really succeeded brilliantly in technology, as in immunization or endocrine‐replacement therapy, so that the therapeutic measures can be directed straight at the underlying disease mechanism and are decisively effective, the cost is likely to be very low indeed. It is when our technologies have to be applied halfway along against the progress of disease, or must be brought in after the fact to shore up the loss of destroyed tissue, that health care becomes enormously expensive. The deeper our understanding of a disease mechanism, the greater are our chances of devising direct and decisive measures to prevent disease, or to turn it around before it is too late.” Lewis Thomas 1. Copyright © 1994 American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases