Your Thoughts on Alcohol Counseling

This is a weird question that I hope doesn't sound like a cry for help.  Do you have any good recommendations for alcohol counseling?

It's this friend of mine... No, actually, it's this blog itself.  The page on It's Pub Night that gets Googled the most -- I'm going to describe it obliquely so that the hits keep going there and not to this post -- is this one that describes a bad interaction between a common store-bought headache remedy and the intoxicant found in beer (click the link if that's too confusing).

What does that have to do with alcohol counseling?  Because that post comes up in a lot of (possibly remorseful) web searches, I got an offer earlier this year to insert paid text links into it, pointing to a website that purports to find you help with substance abuse.  It was easy to turn down the offer, because the website carefully obscured who was behind it, putting the ball in your court to either telephone them or send them your personal info.  On one level or another it was obviously a scam and not a professional service.  At best it would mechanically hand you off to someone in that line of work in exchange for a finder's fee; at worst it is a phishing operation.  No way to tell.

But it put the idea in my mind that I could put links to reputable rehabs or counseling services on my oft-searched page.  It would be purely a public service, not a paid advertisement, but only if I can find links that would truly be helpful to someone who wanted help with a drinking problem.

Got any recommendations?  Or is my whole idea ridiculous?

Your Thoughts on Sharing Tastes

Here, try this.

I'll probably never live this post down, but here goes.

With the beer festival season about to get into full swing -- don't forget to go to the first-ever Portland Fruit Beer Festival this weekend -- it seems like a good time to ask a question that I've been mulling over for a while.  How do you feel about passing the glass around a group of friends, to let everyone have a taste of this really good OR really bad OR really rare beer?  I don't mean splitting a bottle or a pitcher, I mean actually handing over your glass and saying "Try this".

• Are you worried about passing germs around?
• How well do you have to know someone before you'll share?
• Suppose you're just recovering from a cold or flu yourself:  how long do you quarantine yourself? 

Personally, I'm a libertine about sharing and accepting tastes, and of course alcohol doesn't just disinfect, it dis-inhibits.  But sometimes in the despair of a wintertime fever, my paranoid side wonders if I would still be on my feet if I hadn't taken so many sips from other peoples' glasses.

Any thoughts?

Alcohol vs. Acetaminophen

My Tylenol bottle thinks I drink too much.

Well, it's not every day that I drink three or more beers, but I drink some amount of beer most every day, and if I have one I usually have two. And, like anyone who likes to drink, I sometimes have way more than three.

It's great fun to make liver jokes -- the liver is evil, must be punished -- but I have a feeling that liver failure wouldn't be much fun. We all know that chronic alcohol abuse is bad for the liver. But did you know that acetaminophen poisoning is the most common cause of acute liver failure in the US? Apparently the recommended daily maximum dosage -- which the FDA is about to lower -- is only about half of the dosage that starts to overwhelm your liver, and the way over-the-counter remedies sprinkle in a little of this and a little of that can get some people over the line without them even thinking about it.

The combination of alcohol and acetaminophen can have immediate bad effects on the liver. First thing to remember: do not take Tylenol after heavy drinking. Like the next morning, when your head is pounding. I am not a doctor, but it looks like ibuprofen (Advil) is a safer bet for hangover help. Ibuprofen, like aspirin, is rough on the stomach -- take it with food. There's a place for each pain reliever, just don't combine alcohol and Tylenol. Furthermore, if you drink every day, only take half the maximum acetaminophen dosage (2 grams a day instead of 4 grams a day), even if you stopped drinking when you became sick. Here's a pretty good explanation of that, despite having been written by a lawyer.

Tylenol has made my life bearable the last few days, with this damn flu I've got. I'm looking forward to getting back to some beer drinking, though.