To begin with, let’s turn to a practical lesson from a school biology course. If you remember, there was an interesting experiment with blood dissolved in water – first, several drops of blood were placed in a flask with ordinary water, dissolving in which the blood colored the solution pink. Then, several drops of alcohol were placed in the same solution.
After alcohol got into the blood solution, lumps or flakes of blood appeared in this solution. The fact is that alcohol has the property of sticking together, gluing together red blood cells in human blood. But blood in the body flows through all organs, is found in all parts of the body, even the smallest capillaries.
Consequently, the danger of red blood cells sticking together into lumps lies in wait for any part of our body where blood flows, and this includes brain cells, and arteries and veins passing through the heart, and the smallest vessels that supply blood to the oculomotor muscles.
Every organ, every tissue, every vessel or the smallest capillary is exposed to the danger of red blood cells “collapsing”. Regardless of the strength and dosage of an alcoholic drink, it can cause irreparable damage to human health.
We can separately consider the effect of alcohol on the human brain (when it penetrates the holy of holies through human blood – the cells of the cerebral cortex, which are responsible for most of the control functions in the body).
Affecting many coordination centers, alcohol can lead to loss of coordination of movements, loss of balance, disturbances of orientation in space, weakening of memory and attention functions. Logical thinking and intelligence can also weaken. Deterioration of the functioning of the sense organs is observed. And this is only the beginning, as usual.
If alcohol has such a broad impact on the blood of an ordinary person, what can be said about a person with a weakened heart, who has suffered a stroke or heart attack, about a person with high cholesterol in the blood, which also contributes to the sticking and thickening of the blood.
Alcohol in such cases can be the last straw and overflow the cup of harmful substances contained in the blood. It can cause severe health problems or even death. In addition, the above-mentioned coordination disorders can create a serious danger not only to the health of the person who consumed it, but also to the people around him.
Вот почему категорически запрещается употребление алкоголя служащим некоторых профессий, связанных с повышенной концентрацией внимания, ответственностью, работой с людьми.
These are professions such as a builder (especially those specializing in working with cranes, carriers, lifts – the danger of working with which is extremely high), a driver of any vehicle (especially a freight or passenger vehicle), airplane and helicopter pilots, all types of dispatch positions, doctors with assistants and other specialties.
Let’s return to the experiment described at the beginning of this article. Similar experiments have been repeatedly conducted by many scientists from different countries with invariable results. The most famous is the experiment with a functioning eye of a living person. Using a special microscope, scientists observed the state of blood in a person’s eye.
Having discovered the presence of red blood cell plaques in the blood of some of the subjects, they established a relationship between them and mild alcohol intoxication of the participants in the experiment. After that, they decided to slightly change the course of the experiment and observe the state of the blood after taking a small dose of alcohol.
They saw the appearance of clots from 5 to 1000 red blood cells in the blood of the eye being studied literally within 15 minutes after drinking alcohol. Moreover, the results were clearly visible especially in those who were sober and who had clean blood before the experiment began.
This experiment gave rise to new studies that were able to answer another question – how alcohol has such a detrimental effect on red blood cells in human blood. The thing is that as a result of movement through the vessels in the human body, red blood cells acquire a negative charge due to friction.
And because they have the same charges, they repel each other according to the laws of physics. But when alcohol enters the body, this negative charge is removed and positively and negatively charged blood cells begin to attract each other and stick together into plaques, sometimes of quite impressive sizes, which are usually proportional to the amount drunk.
Such plaques can clog blood vessels (especially small ones like those in the eye and brain) and lead to the complete death of the cells to which these vessels lead. That is why drinking alcohol, especially regularly and especially uncontrolled (as in the case of alcoholism), causes great harm to the human body and is dangerous to health and life.
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