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If one feels sick when they stop drinking for a few days has to drink to keep from feeling sick they are an alcoholic. Drinking alone, or bottles all over the house stuck in different hidden places.
Alcohol is one of those things where you can die from withdraw causes seizures and DT's.
What constitutes a "disease" is a medical thing, not a personal opinion thing.
The term "alcoholism" does not refer to a specific disease, it isn't a medical diagnosis. However, alcohol use disorder is a medical diagnosis, as is alcohol dependence.
They are mental illnesses, and there are decades upon decades of medical research on the subject, you can find many of them with a simple google search.
I'd say alcoholism is a disease on three different levels:
I kind of think that any behavior that can not be controlled by the person and that can kill you is a lethal disease.
With that logic, living is a lethal disease.
You will die, no matter what you try to do about it. You have zero control over your fate. It can't be prevented. The only way to cure living, is to die.
Some people can drink one drink and never be able to stop. Is this an actual disease or is it a really bad habit? Seems to me that most of the people I know that overdrink would be considered alcoholic but they like the way alcohol makes them feel. So they do it and do it. When do they become an alcoholic? What differentiates an alcoholic from an over-drinker that can go months without drinking?
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They said the same happens to cocaine,some just get hooked on day 1
The phenomenon of cravings. Somewhere along the way I developed cravings and was unable to control my intake. Compulsion required me to take the first drink but once it hit my body my brain screamed more. It wasn't always like that. When I started drinking anything over three would make me sick and dizzy. Once I built my tolerance by heavy drinking that's when the trouble began. There are lots of stages and heavy drinker was one of them for me, I call it the adaptive phase. I had more acute alcoholism as in it took ten years to run it's course. If I hadn't stopped when I did I would be dead. Some people can last decades as alcoholics. I call those people chronic. They get really bad but then stop short of full implode.
I think that chronic substance abuse can change the brain to the point where you have to have more and more of it in order to feel normal. In that sense, you might say addiction is a disease, although a self-inflicted one.
I think that chronic substance abuse can change the brain to the point where you have to have more and more of it in order to feel normal. In that sense, you might say addiction is a disease, although a self-inflicted one.
You reply is a thoughtful one..made me think...
If a person eats a crummy diet, doesn't exercise, and has a lot of unrelieved stress and develops heart disease (or diabetes), isn't that, too a self-inflicted disease?
You don't "catch" heart disease from someone else--it's caused by destructive behavior--much as alcoholism is...
Many diseases manifest because of a lifestyle that causes them....
I think that chronic substance abuse can change the brain to the point where you have to have more and more of it in order to feel normal. In that sense, you might say addiction is a disease, although a self-inflicted one.
Yup. With alcohol, that phenomenon is called alcohol abuse disorder, and it is a diagnosed disease. It tricks both your brain and your body - because if you have this disease and try to stop "treating" it with alcohol, your body presents symptoms of illness such as delirium tremens (DTs), heart palpitations, sweat, fever, aches, a variety of mental illness symptoms that can range from just "brain fog" to full-blown psychotic episodes.
Alcoholism is the phenomenon of someone who has one (or more) disease caused by use of alcohol. But alcoholism, the term itself, is not the disease. It's the category in which the diseases are placed.
Sort of like "eating disorder" is a category. "Anorexia Nervosa" is a disease, and is in the category of "eating disorder."
I think that chronic substance abuse can change the brain to the point where you have to have more and more of it in order to feel normal. In that sense, you might say addiction is a disease, although a self-inflicted one.
If someone becomes physically dependent they can die without it. That's how much your body adapts to be poisoned.
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