How much booze is too much booze?

The white Pfizer robe does not grant moral authority nor superiority, yet doctors dish out guilt by the handful.

But like you say, not all doctors are like that, although my experience is that the majority are lazy thinkers like that.
A doctor recently told me that if, let’s say you’re gonna go out on a Friday, first have a solution of Sorbitol and B-complex, it’ll protect a bit from damage and the hangover. A doctor that doesn’t preach moralistically, how refreshing!

That’s a great point, and as someone who is a happy Fluticasone user I know exactly what you mean. It took me about a week or so to become fully used to fluticasone, and ever since then my allergies have been mostly non-existent. I can breathe normally practically all the time, something I didn’t realize was normal!

But yeah, my doctor didn’t say much about it other than “you need to have a checkup every year so we can review your nasal passages and mucus membranes.” She said “Two sprays every day” and when i said, after a 3-month checkup, that it didn’t seem to be doing much, she asked if I was doing it every day. I said “no, I forget some days, it’s been more like every other day when I feel a little allergic.” She just reiterated “Do it every day.”

It would have been nothing special for her to spend 10 seconds saying “This drug requires a build-up in your body for it to function, so if you skip days, it reduces its effectiveness.” Instead, I just got a rule that I was told to follow with no real explanation.

I’ve had one doctor who was really, really good, and sadly I only saw him twice. I went for a checkup, and when he asked about my exercise level I told him I had just run a marathon a month ago. He said “Why didn’t you tell me that at the beginning and we could’ve skipped all of this! Why are you even here? You don’t need a physical!” That’s when I told him I needed to have a physical just for the fluticasone… I did see him again to get a prescription for anti-malaria medicine, and he told me about the 3 current ones, the side effects, when to start taking them, and after selecting one he said “this will make you feel a little crappy. You should take it for 3 weeks after you get home, but if you don’t go out in the countryside and you’re feeling crappy, just take it for a week after you get home.”

1 Like

It used to be easy to tell what “moderation” was. I would just drink until Anitous told me to stop. Now I’m all confused and I keep puking on myself.

7 Likes

My doctor switched me from Allegra (which stopped me from sneezing, but I still had a runny/stuff nose most of the time) to Flonase and it was like magic … I remember being stunned at how much easier my breathing had become. I don’t remember it taking very long to build up, but I also had been living in allergy hell for years and years so a week or two would not have made much of a difference. I did wonder, however, why she had not given me the stuff before.

Is Antinous gone?

1 Like

Not only is the advice massively contradictory, the reasoning behind each individual level set is fairly dubious as well. I recall reading an interview with the medical advisor behind the previous UK weekly alcohol guideline, who said that the figures that they set were more or less plucked from the air, because politicians wanted some guidelines.

And in all the recent “moderation” worrying, I think I detect a nasty little streak of neo-puritanism. Lots of things are relative risk factors, but the ones that get talked up as threats are the ones that people enjoy.

2 Likes

Excellent question, one I’ve been asking myself for weeks.
Where the hell is the gruff yet loveable all-seeing eye?

2 Likes

He resigned a little while ago :confused:

I remember attending a meeting of health and marketing professionals years ago where the topic of discussion was where to set the definition of “binge drinking”. The goal was to ensure that it encompassed a large enough percentage of the population to provide alarming headlines, while not making the percentage so large that the newly-defined binge drinkers would find themselves in the majority.

man, that’s why we’re all turning into a bunch of tinfoil hats lately. “authorities” straight-facedly serve us bullshit right and left. we know it’s bullshit, but in the absence of actual knowledge we collectively make up a bunch of folklore to explain why they’re bullshitting us. it’s exactly the point @L_Mariachi made about DARE. god, Idiocracy was a prophecy, I swear. Terry Crews for president! Terry Crews STRONG!

I had my annual physical last week and the nurse told me that whatever people put on the form as to how many drinks they have in a week, their staff doubles that amount as everyone (according to her) lies about it. Things like that tend to screw up any drinking statistics that are based on what people tell their doctor.

By the way, I also see a spinal surgeon every few months and he says that he automatically triples whatever the patient tells him - most long term patients of his are on maintenance dosages of narcotics due to spinal problems like mine: three surgeries on the same disk that resulted in a fusion and can no longer be operated on since there isn’t enough bone left to do anything with.

Now THAT was a SENTENCE!

1 Like

“A man drinks a cup of sake.
The first cup drinks the second cup.
After that, the sake drinks the man.”

I’ve never understood the attraction of getting drunk. I count myself lucky.

As far as pregnancy goes: Remember that homo sap spent centuries using wine as a way of making water safe to drink. That doesn’t mean it’s safe to overdo – not by a very long shot – but does tend to convince me that the risk of one drink now and then is probably close enough to nil as to make no difference.

Oh no! He is missed!

Honestly, the attraction for me was the fact that I was in the Army, stationed in Germany for ten years. Everyone up to, and including, the Base Chaplain drank. Most to excess - Army excess where it wasn’t unusual to see two people (me and my roommate) down a half gallon of Jack Daniels and two or three cases of beer. Every night. Seriously. I have no idea how the hell we lived through that. You’d think my liver would run away screaming but according to my doctor, it’s just fine. If I were to even attempt to drink like that now, I’d most likely die.

Scheiße :frowning:

This. I’m no doctor of biologist, but I have a good grasp of most of how my body works, and enough general knowledge to spot idiocy and jackassery. Whenever I need a new doctor or specialist, I tend to go through 2 to 3 before I find one who seems intelligent, and actually tells me what they’re doing and why, and seems to actually hear the things I say to them. For 20 years I had really bad year-round allergies, enough that it interfered with sleep, and my sneezing and nose blowing bothered everyone around me, but my doctors just kept me on claritin and flonase, saying that shots or anything else wouldn’t help me.

Then I went to grad school and worked in a clean room. After 8 hours in there, I felt what it was like to breathe normally. I got another new allergist and when I described my symptoms he immediately said most of them were caused by a non-allergic response. He gave me ipatropium and in 4 hours I felt better than ever before. Later on, he did put me on allergy shots, and six months later I live with a dog and a cat and no year-round symptoms. At peak times (like now) I’m about as bad as an average-or-slightly-better day used to be (and should get better over the next few years as I keep up the shots).

賢しみと 物言ふよりは 酒飲みて 
  酔ひ泣きするし まさりたるらし
【意訳】さかしらがって、あれこれ言うよりも、
  酒を食らって酔い泣きする方が、まだましなのさ。

It seems that saying this and that wise thing is still not as good as drinking sake, getting drunk, and weeping.
– Ōtomo no Tabito

1 Like

Where is Antinous? It’s like you don’t even read the forums any more, man.

The phrase nobody seems to have mentioned yet is “liability insurance.”

Quoting from Frank Hayes’ song, The Cheap Lawyer:

Ask a housewife how much two and two is
Without hesitation, she’ll tell you it’s four
Ask an accountant, and he’ll say “I’m fairly certain,
But let me run through those figures once more.”
Ask a doctor, and he’ll think about malpractice
And tell you that he’s fairly sure, at the very least, it’s three
But ask a lawyer, and he’ll bar the door and draw the curtains
And whisper to you, “How much do you want it to be?”

In our litigous society, experts are being encouraged to build in safety factors on top of safety factors on top of safety factors. Doctors in particular – it isn’t just about more tests being more income, but about being able to prove more-than-due-dilligence should something go wrong and an insurance company try to blame them for it. So official advice is generally going to err on the side of safety.

What we need is a good expert-but-unofficial channel. “I’d have to advise you to do X. But I’d advise my sister to do Y.”

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.