A Whole New World

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I am surprised, that there are blogs for and about doctors, nurses and other medical professionals. Hooray for the net.

Cruising around those blogs, I found this fun little medical find about drinking:

    Binge drinking 5 drinks in an hour gets you much more drunk than if you were to have the 5 drinks over the course of a night-but why?

    It turns out that the enzymes that allow you to digest alcohol get fully saturated when you drink. So once you have your first drink, any more that you have sits around in your body, making you that much drunker, raising your blood alcohol level that much higher, making your hangover that much nastier, and making potential mates that much hotter. All because your body can't process the alcohol any faster. It's like pouring more water into a funnel than the funnel can drain out the bottom: the excess water starts to fill up the funnel. This, my chemistry kiddies, is zero-order kinetics.

    It also happens with aspirin and phenytoin (Dilantin), an anti-seizure drug.

...from Over My Med Body.

3 thoughts on “A Whole New World”

  1. Gordon

    Here’s something else: Have you ever noticed how alcohol seems to “hit” you in a big way all at once sometimes? Like, you go from being a little high to knee-walkin’, commode-huggin’ drunk all at once? Here’s why:

    One of the characteristics of alcohol is that first it irritates, then it numbs. Hold some Listerine in your mouth for a minute and you can prove this.

    There is a sphincter between your stomach and your intestine. It’s purpose is to keep bad stuff out of your system. Effectively, your stomach is outside your body for this purpose.

    With me so far? OK, then. The liquor irritates this sphincter. It sees a threat to the body and slams shut, trapping the alcohol in your stomach. A little is absorbed into your body through the stomach walls so you feel a little high.

    Then, the alcohol numbs the sphincter. It sees no more threat (it’s drunk, too, by this time) and opens wide, admitting the alcohol into your intestine all at once, where it is absorbed much more rapidly and the effect is nearly instantaneous. Bingo. Then it’s “one tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor”. :)

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