What Alcohol Does to the Human Body

Alcohol in large quantities can cause brain damage. It can also damage your liver, by causing cirrhosis. While in Europe, drinking alcohol is a cultural norm, in the United States many people go for total abstinence. Alcohol affects your neurotransmitters, the communication pathways in the brain that allow your body to work while using your brain. Drinking can cause heart arrhythmias or an irregular heartbeat. It also causes a stroke and high blood pressure. My own high blood pressure got treated this year and I’ve had it for many years without knowing about that.

Liver problems from drinking cause fatty liver, alcohol-related hepatitis, fibrosis, and cirrhosis as mentioned above. Fibrosis is connective tissue that can happen due to injury, which is scarring. If related to alcoholism, fibrosis comes from damage. Alcoholism can cause alcohol-related pancreatitis. The symptoms of pancreatitis include abdominal pain behind the ribs and spreading through the back, nausea, vomiting, and a fever. Chronic pancreatitis can cause jaundice or yellow skin and eyes. You can get back pain and other digestive symptoms that smell along with weight loss. A person with diabetes can gain a complication of chronic pancreatitis or sacks of fluid that develop on the surface of the pancreas.

People who consume three and a half drinks, a day can also develop cancer as a side effect of their illness. Alcohol consumption can cause head and neck cancer, esophageal cancer, liver cancer, breast cancer, and colorectal cancer. Alcohol does more harm than good despite claims to the contrary from drinkers. Alcohol can affect your immune system, which makes your body a target for disease. Alcohol can cause “bodily harm." The body becomes damaged from drinking, causing much bodily harm that drinkers do not realize. Some do not recognize they have a problem.

Alcohol causes depression, anxiety, social withdrawal, and violent behavior, as well as getting into the habit of unprotected sex. Alcohol can slow your reflexes, which is the last thing that someone like me needs if I’m into martial arts. You put yourself at further risk for suicide, car accidents, injury as well as domestic violence, and even drowning. Alcohol is bad for people all around, period. But you see, Prohibition never worked anyway, since people just got around it. Drinking releases endorphins, which also happens from exercise, having sex, or eating. Too many endorphins, however, can cause depression, lower sex drive, low testosterone, infertility, and extreme fatigue.

Drinking can also cause the liver to accumulate fat. It is only by stopping your drinking habits that your organs can recover from the damage you did to them with the drinking. Drinking can cause breast cancer, as well as gastritis, which can lead to ulcers and bleeding of the stomach. The symptoms of gastritis, cause indigestion in your upper abdomen, that may become better or worse with eating, nausea, and vomiting, as well as feeling full after eating.

Drinking can put someone at risk for pancreatic cancer, in addition to pancreatitis, which can lead to diabetes from the pancreas getting inflamed and unable to produce any more insulin. Alcohol can negatively influence neuropathy that causes feelings of weakness, burning, pain, and numbness in the feet and hands. Alcoholism can also leave a person with adenomas in the colon, which are polyps that have to be removed if pre-cancerous, even if they aren’t cancerous. So yes, I quit drinking in 2010. For good, forever, and I’ve gotten out of going to Thanksgiving. I’m formally protesting certain things like the drinking that goes on. I swung it so I don’t have to go. And cause me pain over a holiday? It is better to be alone in a non-toxic environment.

Works Cited

https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/alcohol-facts/health-effects-of-alcohol/diseases/alcohol-and-pancreatitis/

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gastritis/symptoms-causes/syc-20355807

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/alcohols-effects-body

https://www.quitalcohol.com/the-truth-about-what-alcohol-does-to-your-body.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrosis