In the 1980's, Ronald Reagan eliminated federally-funded asylums for the insane in the United States. Before that, most of the patients in these facilities didn't develop their condition from some genetic predisposition or unfortunate roll of the dice. Most of the occupants of these asylums actually acquired their condition from drinking too much alcohol.
Obviously we're not talking about some weekend benders here, we're talking men and women who drank far more than they ate for several years or even decades.
Apart from the obvious, the biggest problem with this particular lifestyle choice is not just that the person is deprived of nutrients, it's that alcohol actively destroys several important vitamins. Such vitamins include folic acid, vitamin C, B2 (riboflavin), B6 (pyridoxine), and most important in this case: vitamin B1 (thiamin).
When a person with a history of alcohol abuse enters the ER, one of the first things given is an injection of B1. Thiamin, among other things, is necessary for proper metabolism. Your body has energy, but it can't use it because one of the many linchpins of the complicated chemical pathway is missing. In some cases, a man in a near comatose state will be miraculously revived only a few minutes after repletion of thiamin.
Thiamin does many other things as well. Scarily, many of them have to do with the brain. When that alcoholic woke up on the table in the ER, he woke up with a few less marbles than he had before.
Memory is what separates animal from insect. When a person's memory centers of the brain melt away, so with it goes their humanity. Thiamin, for reasons we don't understand, is essential to those parts of the brain. Having deficiency for any length of time will permanently cripple the capacity to form new memories. Old memories are polluted and cannot be recalled properly. Fantastic but meaningless gibberish replaces what used to be a human's mental voice. This is called Korsakoff syndrome, and unfortunately it is common.
All this is well known. What is not well known is why it is that alcohol manufacturers don't fortify their beverages with thiamin. It would not affect flavor, and the cost would be miniscule. As with any obvious idea, someone's already thought of it. In this case, it was the alcohol manufacturers.
At one point, many alcohol makers were actually considering adding thiamin to their products. This would have a benign effect on sales and costs, but could save tens of thousands from debilitating illness. What they decided--or rather what was decided for them--is that they couldn't afford to do so.
It was posited that adding thiamin to alcoholic beverages could potentially lead to alcohol being taken out from under the umbrella of the relatively impotent Alcohol & Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau and it being placed under the jurisdiction of the FDA. This would mean alcohol would have to be treated and regulated as if it were a food (or worse: a drug), which carries with it expensive and pointless changes to facilities, licensing, marketing, and retail sales.
There is a small island of unregulated anarchy the alcohol industry lives on, and they can't afford to swim away to better land for fear of the sharks.
It's sick and wrong, but nonetheless it is less discomforting to know that a man is dying based on the path he has chosen for himself rather than the cards he's been dealt. However, when his pain and suffering (and that of his family) could have been averted so easily, it still makes sense to want to find out why it wasn't. (85,689)
Occupation: Daniel is Medical Resident from the southwest US. Prior to medicine, he worked in IT as a consultant, programmer, web designer/developer, and technician.
Share
