I got quite good answers. thanks to everyone for participating.
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The thing is that alcohol is effective at killing bacteria/viruses the same way it’s effective at killing everything else: at a high enough concentration, it essentially destroys all cells (and/or viruses) that it comes in contact with.
We could absolutely use alcohol to kill an infection, but it would require a dose that would also most certainly kill the patient.
Same reason we don’t use a nuclear bomb to trim your nails, it would damage other things too.
Alcohol kills germs in the same way you can use a flamethrower to kill bedbugs.
While it works, if you want a bed that is left intact afterwards, you need to target the bugs more specifically, avoiding damage to the surrounding stuff.
This is a common misunderstanding about medications in general. Making a drug that kills bacteria in your body is extremely easy. What’s very hard, is making something that both kills the bacteria, but doesn’t harm or kill you. To use alcohol inside your body at a concentration high enough to kill the bacteria would also kill you, or at the very least severely damage your own cells/tissue/organs. What’s more, alcohol would probably not be able to get to all the places that bacteria are in order to kill them. Medications are carefully designed both in terms of concentration, so that they have the desired effect with as few negative effects on the human as possible, but also to be able to get to all the parts of the body it has to go to be effective. To get to certain parts of the body, like the brain or fat tissues, requires a different type of medication than for it to just stay in your bloodstream
alcohol kills bacteria/viruses *on contact*. that’s why it’s useful in hand sanitizer and surface sterilization. but you can’t get it into your bloodstream and various cells without damaging things you don’t want damaged.
Alcohol kills most stuff, not just bacteria. So if you put it in your body, it’ll probably poison you. Methanol (i think) the stuff in hand sanitizer is pretty toxic. Ethanol alcohol, the stuff we drink is also toxic, but the body can break it down into something safe. But then its pretty pointless as disinfectant inside the body if its no longer what it was. Same with methanol, but thats very , very bad for you and it’ll break down into toxic stuff.
Alcohol is like an explosive weapon: good at doing damage but it doesn’t really care what it damages. So while it is effective at destroying disease causing microorganisms, it will also just as quickly destroy good microorganisms and healthy cells.
Every cell, bacteria, virus, etc… relies on special molecules called proteins. These are large molecules made from smaller building blocks that help the cell or organism do stuff. Anything from transporting waste outside of the cell to converting food into energy there are so many unique proteins that it’s hard to imagine. Alcohol and proteins do not get along.
Proteins are made from smaller building blocks, kind of like legos. The way you put together Lego blocks is very important to the final result. If I want to build a model plane out of legos I need to arrange the blocks in a different way than if I needed to build a mode skyscraper. Both things are made out of legos, and both use a lot of the same individual pieces, but the way they are arranged determines the final result. The same is true for proteins. The building blocks are strung together like beads on a string, but proteins often have reeeeaaalllly long strings with LOTS of beads. Proteins need to be compact, so they will fold and squish until they resemble a ball of yarn more than a string. The shape they fold into is EXTREMELY important and a protein may not work correctly if it loses that shape. The process of a protein losing function because of changing it’s shape is called “denaturing.”
Alcohol kills bacteria by denaturing its proteins. Alcohol will pass through the bacteria’s protective membrane and begin to change the shape of proteins it encounters. It will also cause these “denatured” proteins to clump up. At this point the proteins are irreversibly damaged and can no longer do their job. A bacterial cell could be destroyed within in seconds of exposure to alcohol. Unfortunately, the same thing can happen to the cells in our stomach, intestines, mouth, throat, and elsewhere so while disease causing germs might die, so will a lot of good, healthy cells.
To summarize: alcohol works by destroying important proteins responsible for doing all sorts of tasks inside of a cell. It doesn’t check to see if the cell or organism is beneficial first, so it will destroy both good and bad cells. This makes it good for disinfecting surfaces, but bad for treating diseases inside the body. Alcohol also doesn’t kill all bacteria or viruses so it’s important to know that disinfecting with alcohol is not 100% effective. Polio virus, for example, is not destroyed by alcohol
Because alcohol kills you at *much, much, much* lower concentrations than what is needed to kill bacteria and virus. If your blood suddenly consists of 70% alcohol, yeah bacteria in your blood will die, but so will you.
Alcohol is even more toxic to you than it is to bacteria. Many forms of bacteria can handle solutions containing several percent alcohol. Human lethal intoxication on other hand is measured in fractions of a percent, and our individual cells are not much better off.
Alcohol is a reasonably effective and cheap surface disinfectant, and can be used to disinfect skin because unlike bacteria you have 10-30 layers of dead skincells between anything living and the alcohol. If it wasn’t for those layers of dead cells it would be extremely painful and probably do more harm than good.
Centuries ago alcohol was somtimes used to clean open wounds. But then the same people were also using rods of red hot iron for the same purpose. We’ve gotten way better alternatives to both of those methods
You haven’t heard of pálinka, have you?
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