Does Safe Alcohol Use Exist? Aurelijus Veryga at TEDxVilnius

hello everyone and it's great pleasure for me to be in this nice auditorium and talk with you about a topic which is at the same time hard to talk about and easy to talk about easy it's because most of you have some connections to this topic and complicated because all of you have your own meaning about the topic and about the use itself and I'm going to talk about this substance that is officially recognized as a carcinogenic it is officially recognized as teratogenic it's officially recognized as a psychoactive substance causing classical addiction and at the same time the substance is still on the food list this substance is still sold almost in every shop in Lithuania so I'm going to talk about alcohol and a few words about my background why I'm talking about this I'm medical doctor and I'm psychiatrist so I work with the patients that are addicted to different kind of substances and at the same time I'm busy in public health and I'm doing research in public health and working with the students so that's the general background where I work with and I would like to start my presentation to telling that I will not talk about different kinds of alcohol drinks I will not talk which one is the best one which one is better than others it's not like talk about beer wine vodka or other drinks by meaning alcohol or ethanol I mean everything because ethanol in beer and wine is just the same as it is in what car as it is another different kind of alcohol drinks and I would like to start by asking you the question would you ever agree to be treated by medication from pneumonia if you would have a choice for a telnet alternative that would treat you from pneumonia but in two years you would get the brain cancer from this medication and probably without any explanations and discussions you would say that you would not agree because you are all educated and very literal people you know the information and you will never go for this treatment and I'll come back to this question later but now let me step a little bit to the history and today that was already told that like 10,000 years ago the beer was invented I don't know the exact day when when it happened and probably nobody knows but you can see in the pictures that those pictures are telling a story about the wine history when the wine was produced how it was used so those thousand years of history tells that we know alcohol for many years so probably we have learned something about that from this history but my question would be does anything has changed in those thousand years and today of listen the presentations about the future about the technologies and you believe in technologies that's why you are here that's why you are you know very innovative persons but when it comes to personal behavior most of us we like to believe in the things that were thousand years ago and when you ask does something changed in alcohol understanding probably yes something has changed about mainly about the design of the bottle most of us like the different kind of bottles that it was like a thousand years ago but that's probably all and I would like to give another example for you is those are two pictures of surgery rooms and first one is an old-fashioned surgery room in black and white and the next one is the modern one and again if I would ask you which one you would choose if you would need to go today for the surgery probably all of you would choose the second one and there are many reasons to do that first of all is because this this one is driven by the new technologies it's an evidence-based and so on and so on but when it comes to alcohol again we like to believe in things that were thousands years ago because somebody is saying that the doctors thousands years ago were treating the diseases with alcohol and we are likely to believe in that because that time that was true but at that time surgery was done without general anesthesia would we like to go back and to do it and to repeat it with us and in order to explain how it happens that somehow we come to idea that I'll save how could all use exist is that we are pushed to believe in that even the recommendations that are produced by public health people produced by doctors they tell you the story about alcohol units and you probably know the unit's the alcohol units is they are just calculated in order to compare the different kind of alcohol you know in order to calculate what really what what kind of really amount you are getting from alcohol because a litter of beer has different quantity of alcohol than one liter of vodka so one alcohol unit contains 10 grams of pure alcohol so what usually public health people say they say that it's something like you know one alcohol unit per day is safe for adult women and units of alcohol per day it's relatively safe for men per day you cannot collect that till the weekend and then they use all of them so not that's not the case yeah I'll do 24 hours but still how that happens that we believe in those things and another one example I will tell you and those units are calculated for thousands of people that's you know different kind of calculations it's not personal based it's based on the populations so let's imagine this is a some kind of new general anesthesia machine that you can find in a surgery room and those buttons or those data that I wrote like age gender wave hate I wrote myself if you would go to this machine you will never find those on the machine because if that would be true if the only thing needed to start this machine would to enter the data of the person then the doctors would be no longer needed because you know any one of us can go to this machine and push those buttons and just push the start button and then the general anesthesia begins but that's not like this what happens in reality in reality then astrologist the doctor comes to you the day before and Lithuanians are joking just that it comes the person comes to take money from you but it's not about just taking money from the patient it is to do something more and it is to take a blood sample to take your in sample to take to make electrocardiography and the doctor will ask you what kind of diseases you had before so it means that the doctor will make the personal evaluation and only then it will give you a general anesthesia based on the concept on the health consequences that you personally have at that moment so tell me how it happens that the unit's calculated for the thousands of people as averages comes to personal use how way I know that this particular person for this particular person is safe to use like two units or one unit per day if I never ever evaluated this person personally so that is the question and that what drives me to question all those surveys that tells what are the safe limits another thing that drives us to believe that alcohol use can be safe because somebody is telling that alcohol can be even used as a pro health product that helps and improves health how way that comes to us and being a doctor I know only one official indication to use alcohol in a medicine and that indication is intoxication with methanol and you probably know the story just a few weeks ago from Czech Republic when 20 people died from intoxication of methanol so ethanol the alcohol that most of us using as alcohol drink is an antidote so you can save people if you would give in time the ethanol for the people that are intoxicated with methanol so that's the only one official indication but are there other other indications yes for sure and if you would ask doctors they will tell you that alcohol is good for your heart because wine is reducing risk of ischemic heart disease alcohol is good to improve your sleep because pills are bad but alcohol is good and there are even jokes that you can mix in the evening you know beer vodka champagne at the same time but you have to filter water from the tap so that's the general understanding what is good and then again it's good to take alcohol if you are called and even today when we were coming here with other speakers it was told that it would be good to take some alcohol for one of the speakers because the speaker felt cold so does that really work like that and then again if you would ask Lithuanian doctors especially China colleges they will tell you that it's good to take for the pregnant women a three spoons of brandy per day in order to reduce at onus of uterus if it if that is increased let's go to the scientific literature you will never find any evidence on that there is nothing the doctors are likely to believe in that and again it comes from the very old times when there was no other choice to do and this picture is just to explain one of those myths that the doctors still believe and this picture shows the relative risk the association of ischemic heart disease risk to alcohol consumption and this shows mainly that those that are not using alcohol has relatively higher risk to die from ischemic heart disease than those that are using in moderate quantities or those that are using in high quantities alcohol so how high that comes it looks like these studies are done for healthy people these are not patients they just general population so how way that comes let's imagine if this substance alcohol would be needed for you to keep you healthy unning to keep you healthy probably that would exist in your body already or that you could get from the natural food that is in your place of living and another thing which is important if that particularly substance would be needed for you if there will be a lack of this substance you will feel the symptoms like you feel symptoms when you have a lock or insufficiency of vitamin C you are getting the symptoms what kind of symptoms people have when they don't drink of course they're alcoholics they have the symptoms but we're talking about normal people not alcoholics there are millions of people that live all the life without any alcohol so what all they are ill they are dying from ischemic heart disease all the day every day all the people young dying in this areas is that true okay if we come back to Lithuania if that would be true the death from myocardial infarction in Lithuania would be science fiction because we are using alcohol for so many years so intensively that probably and you know people say no no it's just a very few people that are addicted others are using moderately so that means that all of you would go to this slide with lower risk but is that true probably not because the myocardial infarction and Stroke is the number one killers in Lithuania still so probably it doesn't help and look the scientists they really went to this question that something probably is wrong with that and what they found that the people that were taken to those studies as abstainers most of them were former drinkers say they already couldn't drink because of health problems or they repeated reported wrongly that they are abstainers but they were in fact alcohol users so what the researchers found that those studies are simply based on errors and the studies that doesn't include this error and are taking the real abstainers that didn't found those j-curve in this hemic heart disease so would that be a time i would explain all of those myths but this is not the reason for me to be here and now i want to come back to my first question you remember about the medication from pneumonia so this is the risk that alcohol is causing for other diseases so even if that would be true that alcohol can reduce is having heart disease risk it is increasing risk of sixty other diseases and it's proven so is it truly ethical for the doctor to say to the patient that it's good for you to have a glass of wine in order to prevent heart diseases so what about other diseases and if that would be my choice I would really think if which way to die is the best one myocardial infarction or liver cirrhosis and being doctor you know I would really choose the first one so that's again about the choice so is there a safe limit to what addiction and I will not go into details and I will tell you that none of today addicted people had ever planned become an alcoholic or a dictate person all they started to use alcohol in small quantities they do that in a moderate way in a nice way the way using all those nice glasses not those no salt in a plastic in in our kiosks everything was nice but now I have them as a patients so there is no safe limit and every specialist in addiction will tell you because everyone is at risk the only way to avoid the risk is not to take alcohol and if you take you take the risk and in fact we talked about modern technologies and the evolution and in reality human beings developed some natural protective mechanisms to survive and that's why when you're standing somewhere on a high and watch down if you know what kind of feeling is coming feel adrenaline coming you feel some kind of fear and you know that you have to step back in order to survive so that our natural protective mechanism and alcohol is only taken for a thousand years and there was no enough time to develop those natural protective mechanisms to survive that's why we are dying for those substances and of course you are free people to choose what risk to take but if I want to choose I have to have information so thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 86,726

Rating: 4.6827588 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxVilnius, ted x, tedx talks, ted talks, Biomedicine, Medicine, English, Alcohol, ted, tedx talk, Science, Lithuania, tedx, ted talk, Health, Addiction

Id: uyHb4XsqABQ

Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2012