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Do not suddenly stop drinking alcohol as a new years resolution if you have been consistently using alcohol most days

Your body gets used to the presence of the alcohol as a sedative in your system

Suddenly removing the sedative you are chemically accustomed to is like suddenly removing the wall you are leaning on - you will topple over

You brain electricity gets overexcited

This causes seizures

This causes sudden onset dementia (Wernicke's encephalopathy)

This causes brain damage

If you use alcohol often (even in moderate amounts)

Or in large amounts

Or you have ever noticed you get shakey tremors and anxious when you stop drinking

Then your body is chemically dependant and you need to be very careful coming off alcohol otherwise you will cause brain damage

Slowly wean down the amount you drink over days or weeks

Talk to a doctor about your goals to quit and ask about support options

Medically supported withdrawal is a lot safer

If alcohol withdrawal goes badly there is a 15% chance it will kill you.

Do not go this alone

Quitting drugs can make you feel like you're dying

Quitting alcohol can make you actually die

Do No Do This Alone

This is open for public comment until the end of May 19th. Please comment and make your voice heard.

He figured out that this was because the doctors were dissecting corpses inbetween delivering babies, while the nurses weren’t, and came up with his controversial “hey, why don’t we all wash our filthy, filthy hands before sticking them in a woman?” theory.

The result, short term, was that the mortality rate on this one maternity ward decreased by a ridiculous amount. They went from “write your will before you come here, because you’re probably gonna die” to “we’re not 100% sure, but you’ll probably live”.

The result, long term, was that Semmelweiss was hated by absolutely everybody, lost his reputation and had his career suffer terribly.

His eventual reward was that eventually people finally started sashimg their hands with soap before operations, history remembers him as a misunderstood hero, and the instinctive angry and defensive reaction so many people give whenconfronted with new ideas that conflict with their established view of the world is now called ‘the Semmelweiss reflex’.