Why does the colon neeed laxatives to treat them constipation? Why can’t simply drinking lots of water dissolve and flush the constipated feces out of the body?
In: Biology
Drinking water does help.
However most of the fluid in your body has already been absorbed by the time the waste gets concentrated down to poop. When you drink a lot of liquid, too much to absorb, it goes through your kidneys and you pee it, it doesn’t go down the colon and flush everything out.
Staying hydrated will ensure your body makes mucus, which helps move things along, and it helps your body not try and squeeze every drop out of the foods you are eating, keeping stool a bit softer.
Water is important regardless if you take a laxative or not. In fact, not drinking water can cause a laxative to be ineffective – laxatives are merely a suppliment to assist in the (speedy) treatment of constipation – they do not “*cure*” it alone.
Constipation is most commonly caused by a lack of hydration of stool present in the colon. The goal of a laxative is to either *increase the amount of water present in the colon itself* **or** *improve the ability of stool to retain water and soften*. The latter is usually a fiber-increasing laxative, since fiber helps stools to retain liquid.
Because excess water doesn’t end up in your colon, your kidneys process it and excrete. Only the water needed for the functioning of the colon tissue will be delivered there, through the blood supply to the intestine. You don’t need laxatives; severely constipated patients that for various reasons cannot be given laxatives sometimes end up with physical extraction…it’s extremely unpleasant for both the person doing it, and the patient.
Edited for clarity
The large intestine’s main job is to reabsorb water and minerals left over by the small intestine so you don’t lose immense amounts of it as diarrhea, just drinking a lot of water helps but a lot of it will simply be absorbed by the intestines before it can really soften stool further down and will be excreted via urine.
Different laxatives work can work in several ways: increasing water secretion in the small intestine, increasing water and fat incorporation into the stool in the small intestine, osmotically minimizing water absorption in the large intestine, or increasing intestinal muscle activity.
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