I got quite good answers. thanks to everyone for participating.
In: 2573
“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous – whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it.”
“And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting.”
Alcohol is very useful to disinfect surfaces. But if you take alcohol orally (ethanol) your liver will filter it out, and if you take enough of it you’ll get alcohol poisoning. If you inject if you’re also going to get poisoned due to changing your blood’s pH. Essentially you end up dead before the infection kills you.
Alcohol kills all cells, not just bacteria.
Medicine/antibiotics are like putting a stronger fighter in the ring against the bacteria/viruses. Alcohol is like filling the boxing club with lava. So you can use it outside, but if you wanna cure a human, you need more targeted medication.
Concentrated alcohol is effective at killing bacteria and viruses, by doing 2 things: it dries them out by seeping in and flushing out the water inside (then evaporating and leaving a dried out collapsed bacterium / virus), and also as a solvent, damaging the membrane / envelope of the bacteria / virus.
It can’t do that in medication to take internally because it needs to be concentrated alcohol, and a person would die of alcohol poisoning long before the amount of alcohol in their blood was enough to have any effect at all on viruses and bacterial.
You can make things that you can spread on external wounds that include alcohol. That’s what rubbing alcohol is, part alcohol and water. That can have some effect.
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Because alcohol can just as easily kill you. Disinfectant has ~70% alcohol usually. If you have just 0.7 % of alcohol in your blood, you are already dead.
Ethyl alcohol is used as a solute to make stuff like cough syrup and as sweeteners in medicine.
Isopropyl alcohol, the stuff you use to clean hands and surfaces, that stuff kills nearly everything it touches. This would include your own cells if you ingested/injected it as medication. There’s a reason why rubbing alcohol has a warning label on it.
Edit: Not Ethanol, had a brain fart.
Oh I regularly self-medicate with alcohol.
Jokes aside, alcohol is useful for disinfecting surfaces OUTSIDE the body, but inside the body is a different story. If you had ethanol or isopropanol levels in your gut high enough to kill bacteria and viruses, germs would be the least of your worries at that point 😉 Also, since even small amounts of alcohol would have unwanted side effects (obviously), using other means for killing bacteria inside the body, such as penicillin, is generally the way to go.
Thats kinda like asking why heat isn’t used in medicine. If boiling chicken kills pathogens why can’t we boil sick people?
Alcohol kills human cells at similar or even lower concentrations than what is needed to kill pathogens.
Alcohol is like napalm, you don’t exactly scorch the *inside* of your body when you’re sick
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