When a person in the hospital is given fluid intravenously (an i. v), the fluid is typically saline (salt) solution with about the same water concentration as human body tissue. explain how the use of distilled water in place of this saline solution would be expected to upset the patient's homeostasis.

The distilled water is hypotonic in relation to the plasma present in the blood of the body. Thus, the process of osmosis would make the water to  get into the cells and makes them to swell, which eventually would burst them.  

•In case, if distilled water is used in place of saline and get administered intravenously then the RBCs of the body of the patient will begin to swell.

•It occurs as the blood's osmotic pressure is very much more in comparison to that of distilled water.  

•Therefore, to sustain homeostasis, a solution of 0.9% NaCl is used as saline as RBC is isotonic with 0.9% solution of sodium chloride.  

Thus, distilled water would upset the homeostasis of the patient as it is hypotonic in relation to the plasma present in the blood of the body.  

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Distilled water would cause the cell to enter the osmosis process. This would be because distilled water has no salts, but the patient's cells have a high concentration of salts. To balance the concentration of salts inside and outside the cell, the cell would end up receiving water by osmosis, it would end up swelling, cracking and causing a collapse in the body.

Explanation:

Osmosis is the movement of water molecules (or a solvent) through a selectively permeable membrane, from an area with a high concentration of solvent molecules to an area of low concentration. This is what happens when a cell is brought into contact with distilled water.

In living systems the main solvent is water. The plasma membrane is more permeable to water than most other small molecules, ions and macromolecules. This permeability occurs due to the simple diffusion of water that occurs through the plasma membrane and the presence of protein channels (aquaporins) in the membrane.