Addiction Treatment
Yes, Alcohol Can Kill You
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In a basic sense, alcohol is a foreign substance. Your body treats that substance as a poison or toxin and metabolizes it through your liver. In very large quantities, alcohol will overwhelm your body and your liver’s ability to metabolize it, and those large quantities of alcohol will kill you. This most often happens when a person binge-drinks and consumes a very large quantity of alcohol more quickly than his liver can process it. Statistics suggest that more than 1,000 people die every year from this form of acute alcohol poisoning.
Dangers of Alcohol Abuse
Binge drinking is only one of several ways that alcohol can kill you. In spite of efforts to curtail drunk driving, more than ten thousand people die annually in accidents that are caused by people who are operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Many thousands more suffer serious and often permanent injuries as a result of those accidents.An intoxicated individual is also more likely to participate in other risky activities that can lead to injury or death. Alcohol reduces inhibitions and impairs judgment that might otherwise keep a person from doing something that he would never think of doing while sober. Alcohol also impairs physical coordination and response time, thus further increasing the likelihood of fatal accidents and injuries.
Alcohol Can Kill You
Individuals who have succumbed to alcohol addiction and alcoholism will suffer a slow death from alcohol consumption. Regular consumption of large quantities of alcohol will damage a person’s liver and circulatory system, impair his nutritional health and weaken his immune system. Alcoholics are statistically more prone to certain types of cancer and other systemic illnesses that occur when an impaired immune system cannot fend off those diseases.Individuals who turn to alcohol to medicate themselves as a means to handle depression, anxiety, or other psychological disorders are more prone to early deaths due to lack of appropriate treatment for those disorders. Alcoholic intoxication is only a patch that temporarily pushes those disorders aside. The problems that they cause will not disappear in the haze of an alcohol binge. Rather, they can come back stronger when a person sobers up, leading to health problems that can cause an early death.
Consequences of Alcoholism
When combined with other drugs, alcohol can suppress a person’s metabolism below a point of sustainability. Many prescription pharmaceutical products include warnings that they should not be used in combination with alcohol. Street-level recreational drugs pose an even greater risk of adverse reactions, but those drugs never come with warnings. Individuals who mix alcohol and any drugs are exposing themselves to a greater fatality risk.At the far end of the spectrum, individuals who are going through detox from a severe alcohol problem might suffer convulsions and seizures that can lead to death. Addiction counselors and physicians who treat these high-level alcoholism problems will generally keep an alcoholic under close medical supervision while he goes through a detox phase.
Please call the Last Resort Recovery Center near Austin, Texas, at 512-360-3600 for more information and to answer any additional questions you might have about the fatality risks of alcohol. We can provide a confidential consultation to answer your questions. If you are experiencing any problems with alcohol, this consultation may well help to save your life.