Beer after poisoning

When asked whether it is possible to drink beer when poisoned, any doctor will answer negatively.

The diet for poisoning imposes a taboo not only on strong alcoholic drinks, but also on low-alcohol drinks, including beer.

In addition, in case of poisoning, you should not drink milk, caffeine-containing drinks or carbonated drinks.

Why is drinking beer prohibited in case of poisoning?

Food poisoning leads to nausea, vomiting, stomach and intestinal spasms, increased gas formation in the intestines and diarrhea. The mechanism of development of these symptoms is associated with the impact of toxins that have entered the systemic bloodstream.

Ethanol penetrates cell membranes and, when it enters the blood, can penetrate almost any cell in the body. You might say, how much alcohol is in beer!

Indeed, the ethanol (ethyl alcohol) content in beer ranges from 4 to 14%, but we must not forget about carbon dioxide...

Why do you get drunk quickly from champagne? Due to CO2 bubbles _, which accelerate the absorption of ethanol from the gastrointestinal tract into the blood.

So the ethyl alcohol in beer increases the load on all systems and organs that suffer from food poisoning, primarily the liver and kidneys. The carbon dioxide contained in beer not only enters the systemic bloodstream, but also, by expanding the vessels of the gastric mucosa, stimulates gastric secretion, increases flatulence, which already occurs with poisoning, and also disrupts intestinal peristalsis.

In addition, vomiting and diarrhea in acute poisoning dehydrate the body, and to combat the disruption of the water-electrolyte balance, appropriate therapy is carried out - to compensate for the lost fluid and salts. And beer, as is known, has a diuretic effect, which can be very harmful to patients with poisoning.

For the same reasons, health workers give a negative answer to the question: is it possible to drink beer after poisoning. Read more - Diet after poisoning.

How did beer save a patient from methanol poisoning?

In Southeast Asia, Vietnam is recognized as the second country in terms of the number of citizens who drink alcohol excessively. And a serious problem in this country – where alcohol is produced in large quantities by handicraft methods, sold in markets and poured in bars – is methanol (methyl alcohol) poisoning.

In the first half of January 2019, many European publications, citing VietNamNews, [ 1 ] reported that a patient in Vietnam had been saved from methanol poisoning, which was in alcohol. On December 25, 2018, three patients in a coma were taken to a hospital in Huong Hoa County, Quang Tri Province (as it turned out, the men had been drinking on the eve of Catholic Christmas). Methanol was detected in their blood.

Doctors know that the antidote for methyl alcohol poisoning is 5% ethyl alcohol, which delays the metabolism of methanol to formaldehyde and methane (formic) acid. Usually, ethanol in combination with a 5% glucose solution is administered intravenously in the first three days of poisoning. [ 2 ]

Since three patients needed first aid and treatment for methanol poisoning at the same time, the hospital, according to local doctors, did not have enough pure medical ethanol. Given the critical condition of the victims, one of them was given a tube of ethanol through which they calculated the amount of ethanol in the beer over several hours (while simultaneously cleaning the kidneys through dialysis). A total of five liters of beer, or a dozen and a half standard cans, were used. And the amount of ethyl alcohol contained in it was enough to save the patient's life, although one of the hospitalized patients reportedly died.

And this case is not the only one: in the fall of 2008, more than a dozen people in the Vietnamese capital were saved from fatal methanol poisoning in the same way.