Medicinal drinking through the ages

[Still Waters]

For hundreds of years alcohol claimed a prize place among the pills, potions and healing herbs of British pharmaceutical history.

A drop of gin was once advised to ward off the plague, a glug of wine to "defend the body from corruption" and a sip of absinthe to cure the body of roundworms.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...health-25712005

[Dumpnuts]

Now these sound like my kind of cures!

Edited January 17, 2014 by DumpsterJesus

[Ashotep]

Now it is said red wine is good for the heart. Just a glass not two pints.

[Neognosis]

I generally believe that anything that can be grown and then either dried or fermented without the addition of further chemical alteration or extraction is good for you if taken and used in reasonable amounts.

I think that the substances that nature has given us only become horribly dangerous and addictive when we process them.

I don't know if booze is "good" for you or cures anything, but I'm willing to give it a try!

[Frank Merton]

I bought into the stories that a glass of red wine in the evening is good for you. It contains resveratrol (although it begins to appear that that isn't the reason) and any alcohol tends to "clean" the blood vessels. I think people like reading that it's ok to drink, so newspapers publish such stuff.

Well you can get the benefits of the wine all sorts of ways, from peanuts and peanut butter to red grapes, and the slight benefit a little alcohol does for your circulation is way overcome if you have just a little more, and is even in very small amounts a leading cause of liver cirrhosis and cancer. (The French may not have the heart disease, but they more than make up for it with their livers).

I don't suppose, except for the slight harm to your health, that there is any point in getting upset over drinking, until it starts killing people in cars and so on. The industry and press, however, needs to tell the whole truth.