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It’s hard to imagine this as a life-saving procedure, but it’s true… doctors saved a man’s life by pumping 15 cans of beer into his body.
It happened on Christmas Day in the central Vietnamese province of Quang Tri. A 48-year-old man, named Nguyen Van Nhat, had been rushed to the hospital. Doctors discovered that he had deadly levels of methanol in his body.
Methanol is a dangerous form of alcohol, and not the mostly ethanol-based alcohol people normally consume in liquor.
At first thought, many people would assume that giving someone alcohol – that was already dying from alcohol poisoning would be a sure death sentence. But in this case – it saved a man’s life.
When the man arrived with methanol poisoning, he was moved to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where the doctor immediately administered three cans of beer (approximately 1 liter) via a transfusion. Over the course of the same day, doctors administered the equivalent of 15 cans of beer, at a rate of roughly one can per hour.
The reason the doctors gave the man more alcohol had to do with the type of alcohol poisoning the man was affected by. The man was suffering from methanol poisoning. And by administering ethanol-based alcohol, it slows down the rate at which the man’s liver processed the methanol, thereby saving his life.
In the final treatment procedure, the physicians used a dialysis process to completely remove the alcohol from the man’s body.
The way the liver metabolizes ethanol is to eventually break it down into acetate, which is further broken down into water and carbon dioxide, then eliminated from the body.
However, with methanol, it is broken down into formaldehyde – which is a highly toxic compound to the body. The formaldehyde is further broken down into formic acid, another harmful byproduct.
Both of these, besides potentially causing death, can also cause other problems including nervous system depression or permanent blindness.
The doctors knew that adding significant quantities of ethanol, will slow or even stop the liver from converting formaldehyde into formic acid. This is due to deliver always prioritizing breaking down ethanol over methanol.
Both methanol and ethanol are byproducts of the fermentation process of making liquor. However, commercially produced alcohol that consumers drink tends to be composed of mostly ethanol since spirit manufacturers remove methanol during their production process.
Nonetheless, since methanol is also a byproduct of fermentation, very small amounts are present in commercial liquor, beer and wine. Methanol can be fatal, and deadly in far smaller doses than that of ethanol.
One danger of buying bootleg liquor or distilling your own alcohol is that the methanol may not be removed, or removed in the amounts that commercial producers ensure.
Methanol can also be found in a variety of products such as paint thinners, paints, cleaning products, adhesives, inks, gasoline and antifreeze.
