By Nina L. Paul, PhD from "Living with Hepatitis C For Dummies"
Conventional, or Western, medicine is the major type of medicine approved by health plans, hospitals, and doctors in the United States. Hepatitis C is treated with a two-pronged approach by doctors who practice Western medicine.
Using Drugs to Treat Hepatitis C and Symptoms
The types of drugs conventional medicine practitioners prescribe for treating hepatitis C include
* Antiviral medicines: These drugs seek to eliminate the hep C virus. The current best treatment is a combination of pegylated interferon and ribavirin.
* Medications to treat symptoms: These drugs treat symptoms but don’t eliminate the virus. For example, the drug lactulose is used to treat encephalopathy arising from cirrhosis.
* Anticancer medications: Chemotherapeutic agents haven’t been very successful at helping people with liver cancer. But we can all hope that the future brings more effective and safe drugs for this type of cancer.
* Antirejection medications: These drugs, also known as immunosuppressive medications, allow a transplanted liver to thrive in your body.
Having Surgery to Treat Liver Disease Associated With Hepatitis C
A skilled surgeon can treat liver cancer or end-stage liver disease associated with hepatitis C two ways:
* Resection: This term refers to the cutting away of liver tumors if you have liver cancer. Transplant surgery has a better longer-term success rate, but donor livers are in short supply.
* Liver transplant: Surgeons can transplant a whole liver or part of a donated liver in a person with liver failure (end-stage liver disease) or a person who’s in certain stages of liver cancer.
