Alcoholic Drinking
THIS IS not a Prohibition treatise. If you drink alcoholic
beverages-and it is certainly possible to do so intelligently and, in our
opinion, rewardingly-it is important from the standpoint of preventive medicine
to understand certain facts.
Drinking can begin moderately and remain moderate, and all
will be well. But the number of people who fall into the trap of excessive
drinking, who end up as alcoholics with a disease serious in it and serious
because of other grave health problems it can trigger, has been increasing.
Alcoholism ranks today as the fourth most important health problem in the
United States, afflicting between 5 and 6 million persons, and exceeded in
importance only by heart disease, mental illness, and cancer. One of every 13
adult males over 20 years of age is an alcoholic.
There are many women alcoholics-an unknown number because
they come less to medical and public attention. Only 3 percent of the total
alcoholic population is on a Skid Row. Alcoholics are to be found in every walk
of life, in all occupations, races, and social strata. Drunkenness is only the
most obvious manifestation of alcoholism. A slow, insidious, malignant
disorder, alcoholism is a major cause of death in the 35 to 65 age group. The
life expectancy of alcoholics is 10 to 12 years less than that of others.
Common causes of death include liver and heart failure,
gastrointestinal hemorrhage, accident, suicide, and acute intoxication itself.
Many if not most heavy drinkers are poorly nourished. One reason is that
alcohol may dull the appetite so that food is forgotten after several drinks.
In addition, alcohol can irritate the stomach lining, and the resulting pain
may make the thought of eating repulsive.
Drinking heavily and failing to eat
properly, the alcoholic suffers malnutrition though taking in several thousand
calories daily (each fluid ounce of alcohol has an Drinking energy content of
150 calories-"empty" calories which provide no sustenance for body
tissues).
Delirium tremens may follow an excessive siege of drinking.
This can be a temporary disorder, lasting several hours to a week, during which
the victim talks incoherently and usually has visual and aural hallucinations,
sleeps with difficulty, experiences nightmares. But for a person already
seriously weakened by malnutrition, the DT's can be fatal. Chronic alcoholics
are about eight times as likely to fall victim to cirrhosis of the liver as
other people.
The liver degenerates, sometimes so seriously that function
ceases completely and the victim dies. Excessive drinking can have nervous
system effects, producing painful nerve inflammation as well as impairing
memory and intellectual powers. Resistance to infection is impaired, so that
lobar pneumonia, for example, is more often fatal among drinkers than among
nondrinkers.
Alcoholic psychosis-serious mental disturbance-constitutes
about 5 percent of all mental illness. Unhappily, too, alcoholism affects not
only the victim but Spouse and children as well, often leading to emotional or
psychosomatic illnesses among the latter.
