Eli5 Why shouldn’t I drink alcohol before surgery?
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Because alcohol can mess with your clotting factors. You need to be able to effectively clot after a surgery so you don’t bleed to death, even from just the incision.
Alcohol is a physical depressant. It slows your heart rate, it affects your central nervous system, and it thins your blood.
When you’re under anesthesia, it makes it hard for the anesthesiologist to properly dose you or monitor you.
When they do surgery they want to keep you from being awake, in excruciating pain as they cut you open and do whatever they need done. To that end they administer anesthesia, a chemical cocktail designed to reduce your awareness, prevent you from forming memories, and stop reflexes which could interfere with the surgery. For example if they are taking out your appendix not only do they not want you screaming in pain they also don’t want you to cough and squirt your intestines out either.
But what this means is that when you are under general anesthesia both your heart rate and breathing will be reduced significantly. It isn’t easy to keep someone in the sweet spot of “unconscious, cooperative, but not-dead” which is why anesthesiologists are paid so well.
When you drink alcohol you are taking a poison into your body which is a central nervous system depressant, reducing your brain function and neural activity. Now when the anesthesiologist tries to put you under instead of your heart slowing down it might just stop completely. Or maybe you stop breathing entirely. This is generally considered “not good” because you die. Also alcohol reduces the ability of the blood to clot, which is sort of important when you are being cut open because stopping you bleeding to death is a big part of that process. Making that harder is not in your best interest.
Alcohol affects a lot of different parts of your body. It can affect how well your blood clots up, its depressant effects that we drink it for slows down your heart rate and nervous system.
Anesthesia that puts you out or numbs you up is only one error away from being a dangerous poison rather than simply putting you out, and if alcohol is already affecting your body in an unpredictable way, that makes it harder to dose properly. As for clotting, well, surgeries usually involve cutting something open, doctors would generally like that to stop bleeding as soon as possible for everyone’s sake.
alcohol hurts the parts of your body that make blood cells (ie bone marrow) and the part of your body that makes blood clots (the liver). it also makes you pee a lot (causing dehydration) and you loose important minerals in the pee (like magnesium and potasium).
It would be a waste of perfectly good alcohol. Why drink if they’re going to put you to sleep?
Anesthesiologists have to be VERY careful putting you under during surgery because what they’re doing can stop your heart if they’re wrong. But they’re good with it 99% of the time because the body is rather predicable that way, and they’re good at their jobs.
Alcohol screws with how predictable your body is in ways that interfere with how much anesthesia will not kill you by stopped heart.
Also alcohol thins your blood. Thinned blood can’t heal you as well. You bleed a lot in surgery.
Let me try an explanation for a 5 year old. Also, im an anesthesia provider.
Anesthesia drugs are some of the most potent drugs in regards to the function of your brain. Adding ANY substance that changes the way your brain functions causes DRAMATIC changes in how the medications affect you. Therefore, it makes it way to easy to kill you.
Big science time: there is a thing called ED50 and LD50. That means the Effective Dose to get the desired effect of a drug in 50% of the population, and the Lethal Dose in 50% of people. For most medications the ED50:LD50 ratio is big, like 1:50. So one dose of a drug is effective for 50% of people and 50 doses will kill 50% of people. For most anesthetic drugs the ratio is closer to 1:2-1:3.
Now throw in some alcohol, or weed, or cocaine, or whatever the kids are into these days. And it becomes really easy to kill somebody.
I am not a doctor, but here goes:
You should not drink alcohol before surgery if you prefer not to die from the anesthesia. Drinking before surgery could leave alcohol in your system which could make the anesthesia work too well, which could kill you.
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