So, according to science, there are now two new questions GPs should ask you in order to work out whether they should intervene and do something about your drinking habits.
Erm... anyone else expecting a scary-looking letter from their doctor's surgery to land on the door mat any day now?
Scientists at the University of Leicester have looked at 17 previous alcohol studies, spanning over 5,500 people to see whether asking those two questions could provide an accurate foundation for intervention. At the moment, GPs don’t screen every patient for potential alcoholism because, amongst other things, the questionnaire takes too long complete for each patient. So, they’ve come up with two super-quick questions that correctly identify alcohol abuse 87.2 per cent of the time.
Except, how often do you go and have more than six drinks? Last Saturday? That random Wednesday post-work drink where you ended up in a karaoke bar at two am? And when was the last time you regretted something you did while drinking? Can we point you back to that Wednesday night karaoke session?
It’s worth noting here that this is a test to see if someone is abusing alcohol, not if they’re an alcoholic (the four-question CAGE questionnaire, which was developed in 1984 and is widely used to screen for alcoholics asks very different questions, for example). And let’s be honest, almost all of us abuse alcohol at some point or another - but does it mean we’re destined to become alcoholics? Of course not.
But we do live in a culture where drinking - and drinking a lot - is certainly normalised, if not encouraged. It’s easy to forget that alcohol doesn’t necessarily do our body any favours, and that drinking because we’re feeling sad, or because we’ve had a bad day, or because we want to pretend something didn’t happen, is probably a bad idea rather than Just Something We Do.
Making us feel bad about our drinking habits won't help - we've all Googled 'am I an alcoholic?' in the midst of a particularly remorseful hangover, and the results are never pretty. But anything that makes us consider how much we drink, why we drink, and what happens when we do drink a little bit more, probably isn't a bad thing. Apparently it's what the grown ups call mindfulness...
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Picture: Anna Jay
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.