Expert: Rebos - 11/25/2006

Question
Iam an regular and compulsive alcoholic for the past 4 years, smoker for the past 10 years. last 4 years, i have been drinking daily in the nights and if possible i start the day with alcohol and continue till night and since last 1 year it is going heavy. now, i need min. qty of 360 ml per day without that life looks boring.this had affected me in many ways. both financial,career and health wise.i have not progressed in my career, iam suspecting of medical complications like Diabetes, High Blood pressure, nervous weakness(if i hold a glass of water and try to drink it, i see my hand trembling.) iam also feeling pain in the side of kidneys.iam loosing interest in sex also. i know everything but iam still abusing it. i want to recover.please tell me what medical tests have to be done to check all these symptoms. while continuing medication and with will power I know i can kick the habit. Pls advice. Thank You !

Answer
Good morning Prashanth, and thank you for your question.

You should first ask yourself a question, “What are you willing to do to stop drinking permanently”? If your answer is, “Anything” then I would suggest that you go to Alcoholics Anonymous. If you continue on the way that you have described then I would say that your answer to that question is, “not very much”! Not that you should discontinue going to your doctor, but to also go to AA. In more than thirty six years of experience in dealing with alcoholism, I have never seen an alcoholic stop drinking for the long haul on their willpower! So even though you are sure that you can “kick the habit” on your willpower…I doubt it! Even with some sort of medication involved in your so called recovery…without AA, I still doubt it! The addiction is more powerful than you are in making the decision to take your medicine as prescribed. The American Medical Association says that alcoholism is a disease. Do you expect that you can cure your alcoholism, like it is just a habit?

It is believed by many in the field of alcoholism that it is a three-fold illness…mental, physical and spiritual.

The “mental” part of the illness refers to an alcoholic’s mental obsession to drink. If you will, the thought that precedes the first drink... a pre-occupation with thinking about drinking which is so powerful that an alcoholic must drink. In so many words, thinking about the drink in between the drinks. An alcoholic never seems to worry about the drink in front of them, but they continually think of the next one. The “physical” aspect of the disease is that once the first drink is downed a physical compulsion takes over in the form of a deep incessant craving that an alcoholic must continue to drink until some outside incident stops them or they pass out. The “spiritual” part of the illness (not spiritual in a religious way) is in the loss of an alcoholic’s values, and a willingness to settle for less and less as the drinking continues. It becomes difficult for an alcoholic to determine the difference between right and wrong or good and bad. An alcoholic develops a change in priorities where drinking becomes more important than health, family, job and friends. A determining factor of alcoholism is that it makes no difference… how much you drink, where you drink it, what you drink or who even who you drink it with, the key is; what does it do to you when you drink? If drinking causes problems then it is a problem! But, I don’t have to tell you what you have already experienced.

Stopping drinking is not a matter of willpower. Alcoholism is a disease. Drinking alcoholically is but “a symptom of a deeper underlying problem” that you must be face up to in order for you to recover. With or without medications by not learning what that problem really is, trying to stay away from a drink is known as "white knuckle sobriety", or being on a “dry drunk”. It isn’t very long before you will drink again. There is an old saying; “that once you turn a cucumber into a pickle you can never change it back to a cucumber again”. With an alcoholic there is no such thing as cutting down… or even switching to “near beer” with 0.05% alcohol. For an alcoholic nothing will work that is short of total and complete abstinence from any thing that contains alcohol or other mind-altering substances (drugs). Unfortunately, you will have to hit your bottom before you really do anything about stopping drinking, and be sick and tired of being sick and tired. A bottom can be likened to going down on an elevator. You can get of at any floor you want to. There is no need for you to go all the way to the bottom floor. I am sorry to say that hitting a bottom for some may mean going as low as a person can go...plus six feet! There is hope though, for there are many active alcoholics who have stopped drinking and stayed stopped under the right conditions. On the other hand, even when a person is in a recovery program and has stayed sober for an extremely long period of time there is little guarantee that they can stay sober unless they remain vigilant and continue with their recovery on a one day at a time basis. There can be no let up, not even for a moment!

I am not a doctor so I can’t give you any medical advice, but medication is usually only a temporary stop-gap. I can’t imagine that you would want to rely on medication and fighting booze for the rest of your life when there is Alcoholics Anonymous that can and will help you if you are serious about wanting to stay sober for the long haul…one day at a time.  

Rarely have I seen a person fail to stop drinking who thoroughly followed the AA program. Those who do fail are people who are incapable of being honest about their drinking problem. I would be interested in the route that you decide to take with your recovery. I hope that I have not offended you with my answer, but I am concerned with all those who are fighting for their recovery from alcoholism. Thank you Rebos