Only cigarettes are deadlier than alcohol. The research shows that in 2017, alcohol proved to be even more deadly than illicit drugs, including opioids. That year there were about 70,000 drug overdose deaths — about 2,300 fewer than those involving alcohol Death certificates spanning 2017 indicate nearly 73,000 people died in the U.S because of…
Make no mistake, we are in the midst of an alcohol epidemic. Social drinking has increased dramatically since the early 1990s, accompanied by a similar increase in problem drinking and alcohol use disorder, especially among women and minorities. The alcohol-related death rate for women increased 85% from 2007 to 2017! This may have started with…
Katherine Karriker-Jaffe, a senior scientist with the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute in Emeryville, California, who was an author of the study. “So it might be an underestimate of the negative impacts of alcohol on people other than the drinker,” she said. Aesoon Park, an associate professor of psychology at Syracuse University in New York noted…
The most common type of harm reported was threats or harassment. Forget secondhand smoke. Now you have to worry about the secondhand drinking. One fifth of adults — or an estimated 53 million people in the United States — suffer from other people’s boozing annually, making this “a significant public health issue,” according to a new…
Such is life for millions of service workers, from baristas to customer service reps. Personally, I’ll never forget how frustrating it was to smile and say “sure!” Significant patterns arose confirming that employees who more frequently reported surface acting/concept creep [the emotional weight carried by service-industry workers, like bank tellers and flight attendants, who are…
“No matter the efforts of brewers and vintners, we found that it is incredibly difficult to avoid the troubling reality that consumers will likely drink glyphosate at every happy hour and backyard barbecue around the country.” -Kara Cook-Shultz The last thing you want to think about when you pour yourself a glass of wine or…
Alcohol, he says, targets the Gaba (gamma-aminobutyric acid) receptor, which sends chemical messages through the brain and central nervous system to inhibit the activity of nerve cells. Put simply, it calms the brain, reducing excitement by making fewer neurons fire. “Alcohol stimulates Gaba, which is why you get relaxed and cheerful when you drink,” explains…
The international medical journal The Lancet published a study showing that any level of alcohol consumption, regardless of the amount, leads to loss of healthy life. “The health risks associated with alcohol are massive,” said Dr Emmanuela Gakidou of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington (United States of America),…
In this new study, a large group of Brazilian scientists carried out the first randomized placebo-controlled trial with ayahuasca, treating 29 patients with treatment-resistant depression. Half of the patients were treated with ayahuasca, and the other half with placebo. “We observed a significant placebo effect, but the effects of ayahuasca were superior, and lasted longer,”…
Sessa told TalkingDrugs that the similarities between alcoholism and PTSD suggest that the treatment could also work for both conditions. “Alcoholism is PTSD as far as I’m concerned,” Sessa told TalkingDrugs. “The vast majority of my patients with alcohol and other addictions are essentially ‘PTSD plus.’” -Dr. Ben Sessa, a consultant child psychiatrist and senior…
