How Long Does Alcohol Detox Take
How long does alcohol detox take?
If you are looking to find out how long does alcohol detox take, look no further. What this article will give you is a very good foundation of knowledge upon which to take you from an uninformed student to a well-versed detoxification specialist. Ok, you won’t be a specialist, but you will have the information you need. Alcohol, that most fermented fruit, grain, seed or vegetable is a drug. Yes, it used to be a grape, potato or artichoke. But now it is an intoxicating substance which makes people look like they are walking in a funhouse at the carnival and talk as if they their words were being taken by somebody before they could get them out.
The reason people get drunk is that the liver processes the alcohol, but only up to a point. It is able to metabolize the fermented drink into sugars and send these into the blood-stream. Again, up to a point is this possible; after inundating this system with booze, the liver is going to be ineffective and the alcohol will have won the battle. At this point, the body is not able to take the alcohol and turn it into sugars to store as fat somewhere on the body, and so there is all this left-over alcohol. The alcohol enters the blood stream and gets to vital organs like the heart, lungs, brain, and kidneys. The longer the drinking continues, the less able to handle these organs are, until the brain starts to spinning, the heart slows down, and, with luck, sleep disables the heavy drinker from continuing.
After so many days, nights, weeks and so on, of that kind of systemic damage, the body is ready. It knows there will be alcohol coming in, and so quits doing certain things that would be normal otherwise. There are certain hormones and neuro-transmitters which are no longer created by the body because they are not needed, are too expensive for the body to make when so much alcohol will be tumbling in on a regular basis. How long does alcohol detox takes becomes a question of how long did the alcohol abuser continue on that dark path? If it was a month, the detox should probably take two days total, from the last drink to a system that remembers its jobs.
In serious, long-term drinking cases, the question, how long does alcohol detox take, can be answered with the following; if drink is what the body came to rely upon on a daily or nearly daily basis for an extended period of time, including many months or even years, then the consequences of removing the alcohol too quickly might be fatal. The detox period in this case is more likely weeks. There are drugs to safely bring an alcohol addict off safely, and a week will go by before the person begins to feel the slightest big “normal”. The body takes longer to get back what was lost, but within three weeks, systems are usually restored to order.
