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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I guess I would say, and I could think of lots of successful accomplishments I'd apply this to, but I'll take the example of medical training, which is a successful accomplishment. I think I would be more present that we are always like rushing to the accomplishment, to the finish line, to sort of getting to the next goal.
And I think back and wish I had realized what an amazing journey it was in that moment and I mean, even things with medical training that I was I was never going to be a heart surgeon. But to stand in an operating room and look inside someone's chest and watch a beating heart is an experience that I'll never get again.
And I think in this journey to always achieve and move forward and get to the next exam and the next thing, we sometimes miss like the miracle that's right in front of us. And so I think I would have been even more present.
True for parenting, true for everything.
Spring of 27. So we have some time.
It is going to be about changing the narrative around addiction and about really reframing how people think about it to see it as a treatable, good prognosis illness and using some of the stories of people I've had the privilege of knowing to hopefully help people see things in a different way.
Yes, they can find me on LinkedIn, on Instagram. They can email me. Yeah, happy to connect and would love to come back after the book is out too.
Sure. So alcohol is a molecule. It's a water-soluble molecule that is readily absorbed in your body through your stomach and your small intestine when you drink it. And it affects all different parts of your body and body systems, in particular your brain, which is why we feel the effects of alcohol pretty soon after you start drinking.
And we can talk through what those effects are, but it impacts our behavior, our sleep, our mood, and many other parts of our body system. Okay. You talked about alcohol as a molecule.
Yes. I mean, the way alcohol that we drink... happens is through a process called fermentation. So something that has sugar like grape juice or you think about beer, barley or potatoes or other often starches are fermented. And in that transformation process, they form an alcohol molecule that then has a different effect on our body. Alcohol's found in all sorts of different things.
So obviously it's intentionally made through fermentation to ingest, but we also use it in cleaning products or like rubbing alcohol or mouthwash, hand sanitizer. So there are alcohols all around us and used for many different things. Huh.
It is. And in fact, some of my patients with the most severe forms of alcohol use disorder will drink hand sanitizer or rubbing alcohol or mouthwash if they can't get regular alcohol, which tells you really the power of addiction once someone gets to that level of severity. But it's the same molecule with the same effect.
Exactly. The actual alcohol molecule that we think of in a fancy cosmopolitan is not different from what's in rubbing alcohol, let's say. I never knew that.
Absolutely. I mean, that it is so socialized and a part of culture and a part of celebrations and events that I think it just feels like a part of life.
Yeah. So this is probably the most fascinating area of research where things have changed and gone back and forth over many decades of science. And it's actually a somewhat tricky question to answer, which is why I think there have been very confusing sometimes and conflicting studies about this.
So if you want to try to understand what is the impact of low risk drinking, moderate drinking, higher risk drinking, you have to figure out how do you study that. So you need to follow population over time to see what happens. And then you need to figure out how do we isolate the effect of alcohol.
And so early on, there were lots of studies showing that low risk drinking or moderate drinking were actually healthy. I think I remember something about like a glass of red wine is really good for you, the antioxidants. I don't know if that's the red wine lobby telling us that.
One criticism of those studies showing that low risk drinking is healthy is that the group that is often used as sort of the comparison group are people that don't drink at all. But it turns out that many people who don't drink at all may not be drinking because they have chronic health problems or because they actually used to have an alcohol use disorder and they're now in remission or recovery.
And they may have health consequences that are leading to higher mortality compared to people who are drinking at a low risk or infrequent level. So a lot of the newer studies have actually used infrequent drinkers as the sort of control group or the comparison group. And I think that's really helpful to understand the data that way.
There was a really big study actually this year that looked at hundreds of thousands of people that had been surveyed since the 1990s all the way through the mid-2010s and did a really elegant job of trying to answer this question. And the things they did differently than other studies is first they controlled for other healthy behaviors, lifestyle behaviors, chronic conditions.
Showing 341–360 of 484 · page 18 of 25
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