Dr. Sarah Wakeman
speaker
484 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Sarah Wakeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The amount of alcohol it takes to begin to cause health-related problems is much lower than you think. Okay, so if I have this glass of wine every day... You'd be in what we call moderate risk, which is associated with pretty much every form of cancer. So say that I'm drinking... If you're drinking two of those glasses, we're talking like a 40% increase.
But even drinking that amount, your risk of breast cancer would increase by about 5%. This much?
which for many people is very normal. So there's a lot of misinformation out there about how much should you drink, which I think people don't know. But I can take you through everything, so. Dr. Sarah Wakeman is a Harvard professor and addiction expert. Leading the charge against one of the biggest public health crises of our time. Addiction, bringing facts, empathy, and hard-earned truth.
One in three people may have a problem with alcohol at some point in their lives. And globally, 2.6 million people every year die from alcohol-related causes because pretty much every organ in the body is impacted by it. You can see here, this is a 43-year-old person where their brain looks the way a 90-year-old with dementia would look because of that brain damage over time from alcohol use.
But what drives people to use substances is probably the most important question. And if we look at studies, one is about 40% to 60% genetics. And the other half of the equation is trauma. And so we hear someone talk about alcohol gives them pain relief, whether that's emotional or physical. That's a very real thing. That's because your sort of natural painkiller system is activated by drinking.
It's an anti-anxiety and a pain medication sort of all in one.
The biggest problem is that people haven't been given the evidence and tools to understand addiction. But also many rehabs don't offer the things that we know are actually effective.
That's a great question. One of the most effective tools we teach people is something called... And they found that people drank much less after it.
My mission is really to change the way people think about and understand alcohol and drug problems, and also to give people the evidence and the facts, both to understand addiction, which are sort of problems related to alcohol and drug use, but also to just understand the science around, for example, how much should you drink? Is drinking healthy? Is it not healthy?
There's a lot of misinformation out there, and I want to give people the tools to make the right decision for them in their lives.
So I'm a medicine doctor by training. So I still do some general medicine like in the hospital, take care of pneumonia and heart failure and in the outpatient setting, take care of people's diabetes and depression. But I train especially in addiction medicine. So I'm board certified in addiction medicine. And that's been kind of my life's work.
I work in a big academic medical center in Boston, Massachusetts, where I would say my kind of focus professionally has been thinking about how do we bring addiction care back into the medical system so that it's not this separate and unequal and often very poorly done sort of siloed system, but actually just a part of the health care that people get. And then I train people.
So I'm program director of our fellowship program. So I train doctors who want to be specialists in addiction medicine.
Oh, how much time do we have? Where do we begin? I mean, I think at its core, the biggest problem is that we've all been taught and sort of infused in this idea that addiction is an issue of behaving badly, that it's an issue of morality, that people really need to kind of knock it off and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
And that this is like a criminal legal issue, that it's an issue of willpower. And so if you believe those things, then why would you think that someone should get medical care? Or why would you treat them with compassion and kindness if you think that they're doing something wrong?
And so really reframing how we think about addiction based on all of the science we have and what effective treatment looks like, which often is very different than what people may have experienced if they were trying to access care for themselves or a loved one.
Yeah, it's a great question because we use that term colloquially a lot. You know, I'm addicted to Netflix or whatever. So addiction is really defined by use despite consequences. So continuing to do something in your life despite bad things happening to you because of it. So we talk of addiction, we talk of the four C's as a way to remember it.
So one C is loss of control, meaning like you've tried to change and you haven't been able to. So you've tried to cut back or you've tried to stop and you couldn't. The other is compulsive use. So your use is like spiraling out of control that you're kind of using in a way that isn't really attached to your rational thinking. The next is consequence.
So continued use despite negative consequences either in your life, your job, your relationships, your health. And then the last C is craving, which is this sort of strong psychological urge to want to use. Like you can't get the idea of having a drink out of your mind. And so it's really those four Cs that we think about.
And then we make the definition based on how many criteria people meet out of this 11 list of different criteria. And then based on that, people can have a mild use disorder, moderate or severe. And so moderate severe is really what we think of as addiction. But it's that use despite bad things happening to you.
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