Originally Posted by
switchboard 
If you have a wife, kids, and family, your drinking has negative effects and feelings on their level, no matter how much you believe (or want to believe) that they accept it. You are undoubtedly causing unhappy thoughts and stress for them that they keep to themselves. Alcoholics are selfish, often without realizing ...
People are selfish period. You can argue that every time I throw my leg over a bike, I'm causing my wife to have unhappy thoughts, and worry that she'll be left without a husband, and the kids without a father. So, following your logic, people should stop all activities that their significant others find too risky and disapprove of. I don't agree with that.
Originally Posted by
switchboard One big thing that stands out to me is your acceptance of taking 10 years off of your life in exchange for drinking alcohol .. I wonder how your wife is picturing her life, old and without you, when that time happens.
...
My grandparents have strong genes, all died deep into their 80s. My wife's didn't live too much past their early 70s. Even if I shave 15 years off my life, we'll still likely go at about the same time. I'm happy about that.
Originally Posted by
failedtaper Bike,
Why the hell do you need a FORUM to make it okay with you that you are what you term a "heavy drinker"? My guess is that you drink FAR more than once a month, which is what you just admitted to in your last post. One thing you learn quickly in working with a broad spectrum of patients is that nearly ALL of them under characterize their actual drinking behavior. People who are "casual" drinkers don't spend time calculating how much or how often they drink. People who self-classify as "heavy drinkers" just don't want to have the label alcoholic applied to them, which is what they really are. Seriously, dude.
As to "harm reduction", either you can't read or don't want to read the alcohol statistics. I don't mean car accidents or accidental injuries from alcohol, which are clear enough. I mean slowly, steadily killing your liver. You think you are having fun now? Come back and tell us about that again when you can't have fun EVER because you are in liver failure. Which you will eventually be on your current course. YEARS of liver failure is what you are looking at, which is YEARS of misery in the latter part of your life. Losing 5 or 10 years? Yeah, right. You say that as though your final years leading UP to your last breath will be fun-filled, alcohol drinking years. Think again, my friend. That isn't realistic.
Personally, I am all for people's rights, including to drink and to smoke. I don't have to stand next to a smoker, and I don't have to spend time with drinkers if I don't want to. I don't much care if other people want to do those things. I am not going to spend my precious activist hours on THAT. I am not going to come after you and try to take any of that away from you.
But, please don't talk stupid about it. If there are others out there like you who are self-proclaimed "heavy drinkers" and need a club to define them, I have no problem with that either. The saddest thing about your post is the selfishness in it. You're married. Maybe you have kids. Well, guess who is learning their coping skills from you.
FT
There's a lot of anger and negativity in what you wrote. If you really work with patients in a therapeutic setting, you may want to re-evaluate the tone and language that you use with people when communicating with them, if only for your patients sake.
In response to your argument, as I stated, I drink Friday night through Saturday night, once monthly. It works out to ~10 beers Friday, and ~20 on Saturday, for a total of ~400 units of alcohol a year. I doubt I'm loading up my liver catastrophically by having the equivalent of just over one alcoholic drink a day - at least not past the point of it being able to repair itself. The liver is the only internal human organ capable of natural regeneration of lost tissue; as little as 25% of a liver can regenerate into a whole liver.
Originally Posted by
suki44883 Again, if you didn't have some inkling somewhere in the back of your mind that you don't drink like "normal" people, I don't think you'd have been searching out message boards about alcohol in the first place.
I drink to get drunk. I know for a fact that I'm in the minority with that habit. The majority of people that choose to drink can have a good time by having a few drinks. I don't have a good time unless I get drunk. This is why I'm looking for others in my shoes to talk to. And, just like there's a difference between people who can have a few drinks and still have a good time, and me, who wants to get drunk, there's a difference between people like me that have the self control to only get drunk occasionally, and people who can't keep from getting drunk daily, or every weekend, to the point that instead of drunkenness being just an occasional indulgence, just another small part of life to be enjoyed, it becomes a way of life, to the exclusion of all other pursuits. What's so incomprehensible about that?