They drank far more than the five drinks. Medical dangers of alcohol. Routine as this heavy drinking is, students don't always understand the implications for their health. Dr. Booker Bush is a Boston internist who specializes in patients with alcohol problems. As he does in frequent lectures to college students, he showed us that heavy doses of any type of alcohol can wreak havoc in the body.
Alcohol affects all the parts of the brain.
If you keep going past those five or six drinks, you're going to start having impact on the brain stem. That's where your brain tells you things like breathe, tells your heart to beat, things like that. And you sedate that area, you're basically saying don't breathe, and you can die from it. And if that process doesn't kill you, Bush says another one might. If I can draw another illustration, this is your swallowing tube, and this is your stomach.