If you order your research paper from our custom writing service you will receive a perfectly written assignment on Disease. What we need from you is to provide us with your detailed paper instructions for our experienced writers to follow all of your specific writing requirements. Specify your order details, state the exact number of pages required and our custom writing professionals will deliver the best quality Disease paper right on time.
Out staff of freelance writers includes over 120 experts proficient in Disease, therefore you can rest assured that your assignment will be handled by only top rated specialists. Order your Disease paper at affordable prices !
Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse
Myths about alcoholism
Myth #1- Only people who are morally weak or have emotional problems can become alcoholics.
Fact- Studies show that there is no particular abnormal personality traits that cause alcoholism to occur. In most cases, emotional problems are the result of alcoholism, not the cause. What’s important is how much and how often someone drinks, not what kink of person they are.
Custom Essays on Disease
Myth #- Alcoholics do it to themselves. Nobody forces them to drink. They could stop is they wanted to.
Fact- Different people respond to alcohol in different ways. Again, we can choose how much and how often we drink, but we can’t choose how our bodies will react to the alcohol. Some individuals can drink more than most people and never become alcoholic. Others, with a higher lever of risk due to there biological risk, can become addicted much more easily, even though they consume less alcohol, less often
Myth #- Alcoholism is in your genes; if your not born alcoholic, you’ll never become alcoholic.
Fact- Research with identical twins indicates that alcoholism is not genetically controlled- as is eye color (Identical twins always have the same eye color; however, when one identical twin had alcoholism, the other twin had it only % of the time . If alcoholism were genetically controlled, the ratio, as with eye color, would be 100%) On the other hand, the research does reveal that people have different levels of biological and/or behavioral risk, called trigger levels for alcoholism. This means that if you drink enough alcohol often enough to reach your trigger level, you run the risk of developing alcoholism. 1
When drinking begins to interfere with any aspect of a person’s life, this can be social, emotional, professional, financial, legal, or physical; it is considered alcohol abuse.1
If you behave in any of the following ways, it could be an indication that your drinking may be progressing into alcohol abuse
• You need alcohol to cope with strong feelings, either positive or negative
• You drive a car while under the influence of alcohol
• You gulp drinks to feel the effects more quickly
• You become angry or depressed while drinking
• You cant remember what took place while you were drinking
• You neglect people and events that don’t involve drinking
• You use alcohol to relieve stress or sleeplessness 1
Alcohol abuse would be the category that most people would agree college drinkers fall under. A lot of college students abuse alcohol almost every time they drink (five or more drinks in a day for a man, and for or more for women.) When this happens on a regular basis drinkers suffer consequences such as impaired concentration, slowed reflexes, disrupted sleep, and high blood pressure . This behaviar clearly puts a person at risk for alcoholism.
Some 14 million people in the United States are alcoholics or abuse alcohol . When drinking becomes addictive, either psychologically or physically, it’s considered alcoholism. Alcoholism is easy to define It’s a progressive, often fatal disease that causes a person to lose control over his or her drinking. If you are an alcoholic, you may be aware of the negative effects drinking is having on your life, but you’re still unable to stop 1 . An alcoholic has a pre-occupation with the drug alcohol, use of alcohol despite it’s consequences, and distortions in thinking, most notably denial. Each of these symptoms may be continuous or periodic.
Just where alcohol abuse crosses the line into addiction remains blurry. An alcohol abuser might get stopped once while driving under the influence, and the experience will be terrifying-and sobering. For an alcoholic however the embarrassment is not enough. An alcoholic will keep racking up the DUI’s with no thought what so ever until the option is non-existant, and then still keep drinking.
Ask any recovering alcoholic trying who is taking it just one day at a time, and he’ll tell you that compulsive drinking is a disease-period. Alcoholism is a disease that interferes with home life, work, interpersonal relationships, and eventually health 4 .
Alcoholics may have many excuses for there behavior. They may tell themselves they are not alcoholics because they never drink before 5 p.m., or because they make it to work every day, or because dinner is always on the table, but their excuses can’t overcome the damage they do. It destroys marrages, friendships, and careers. For active alcoholics, drinking overcomes reason. It distorts judgment. It cuts the connection between behavior and consequence . For alcoholics, love and logic can’t even compete with liquor. Addiction becomes a stressfull trial for the drinker, an alcoholic may hide alcohol from loved ones, lie about the number of drinks they’ve had, how often they may drink, or make excuses for their constant obsession.
Only 1 in or 15% of people who drink continues the path to alcoholism 4 , and an estimated 50 percent of those who become alcoholics have a genetic predisposition . This is most likely due to exposure. Alcoholism is a disease that can start with the first drink. With that drink, one fork in the road appears, leading some to down the road to alcoholism, and others to a lifetime of enjoyable, moderate drinking. The brains of people genetically predispositioned to alcoholism may be unable to naturally produce adequate dopamine-one of the brain chemicals that give us the ability to feel pleasure. For them, the first drink is a hit of dopamine, and of pleasure. The result is love at first drink. However it starts, heavy drinking eventually robs alcohol of it’s value as a brain treat. Want becomes need. Need becomes obsession. The drinker needs more and more alcohol to provide the same high until, eventually the high is gone.
There has been many instances of brain damages detected in cases of long-term alcoholics. After alcohol is drank, it goes right into the stomach and little of the alcohol goes through the wall of the stomach and into the blood stream. From the stomach it travels down to the small intestine. The alcohol goes through the walls of the small intestine and into the bloodstream. The bloodstream then carries the alcohol to all parts of the body, such as the brain, heart, and liver. The liver changes the alcohol to water, carbon dioxide, and energy. This process is called oxidation. The liver can oxidize only about one-half ounce of alcohol an hour. This means that until the liver has time to oxidize all of the alcohol, the alcohol keeps passing through all parts of the body including the brain . The brains numerous encounters with alcohol can cause problems, and in many cases brain damage.
For the first time, advanced brain imaging techniques have presented detailed, real-time pictures that provide knowledge on how chronic alcohol use may damage the brain . At first, the alcohol just hits the pleasure center. But long-term heavy drinking cuts new pathways to the areas of the brain involving attention and judgment. Some researchers also believe it moves into areas that turn drinking into a compulsion.
Once in the bloodstream, alcohol heads straight for the mind’s home of emotion and pleasure, called the nucleus accumbens, which also houses the gratification of hunger, thirst, and sex. Here, like other addictive drugs, it increases the concentration of dopamine, the chemical responsible for pleasure.
After that, alcohol reaches the Frontal Cortex, where we learn about the world, make judgments, and control impulses. After years of drinking the initial hit of pleasure becomes passive, but the frontal cortex has encoded a memory of the experience of pleasure.
After long time drinking the alcohol may carve a pathway to the Basal Ganglia, this area controls movement, repetitive tasks, and, in the extreme, obsessive/compulsive behaviors. Some researchers believe that alcohol may capture the same pathways as does obsessive/compulsive disorder, leading to compulsive drinking despite the dinker’s wish to stop.
Alcoholism cannot be “cured”, if it means the ability to return to normal social drinking. Many people prefer to use the term “recovering”. Once returning to sobriety, staying sober by coping with personal and social issues that contribute to drinking is an on going effort.
Some people summon the will to stop from within, in fact, the vast majority of people who recover from alcohol addiction never persued any treatment at all . The ability to stop is as individual as each person’s internal motivation.
About half a million people each year make a similar decision, seeking a treatment slots at Betty ford. Up to a million more get in touch with Alcoholics Anonymous . For the heavily addicted, the first step is abstinence. This is the time when patients show signs of arm scraching, face-touching, and obvious signs of inattention. They can have tremors, hallucinations-even seizures. The brain has grown accustomed to an artificial balance between chemicals that cause excitement and those that cause inhibition. Sudden withdrawal of alcohol alters the balance in favor of excitement .
Withdrawal is the relatively easy part, usually lasting three days or less. It’s dealing with life situations that is the hard part. The brain has been reprogrammed to compulsively want a drink, and hundreds of individual thoughts or actions can trigger the craving; a walk past the bar, a beer ad, or even an old friend.
Mark George, at the Medical Univesity of South Carolina has done some of the first brain imaging showing the power that the mere thought of a drink can haave on a recovering alcoholic’s brain. He put alcoholics and nonalcoholics inside an MRI, then showed them photographs of martinis, beer bottles and glasses of wine. They were
Please note that this sample paper on Disease is for your review only. In order to eliminate any of the plagiarism issues, it is highly recommended that you do not use it for you own writing purposes. In case you experience difficulties with writing a well structured and accurately composed paper on Disease, we are here to assist you. Your persuasive essay on Disease will be written from scratch, so you do not have to worry about its originality.
Order your authentic assignment and you will be amazed at how easy it is to complete a quality custom paper within the shortest time possible!
