Someone told me it is possible to get drunk on water. How does this work physiologically?
felicity, welcome to the SDMB!
Hate to be the one to have to tell you, but ya posted in the wrong forum. You wanted General Questions - in About This Message Board, the posts generally focus on technical questions about board operation, thus it is less likely that someone will come along who knows the answer to your question (like me - I don’t have a clue whether you can get drunk on water, though I’ve heard the same story).
No worries; happens all the time. You can either ask a moderator to move your thread, or just wait a little longer for your answer (odds are someone who knows will wander into this thread eventually). Don’t re-post your question in General Questions yourself, however; it takes up resources to have identical threads, and the Powers That Be frown on that.
Hope you enjoy your time here; it’s a lot of fun.
Sua
I’ll move it since I’m here.
It’s called water intoxication, and it causes restlessness, lethargy, seizures and coma. It’s due to low sodium from the dilution effect of excessive water intake.
http://www.aquaweb.org/proresources/manualandforms/instruct/intox.htm
and
http://diabetesinsipidus.maxinter.net/water1.htm
It can also cause death. Not a good idea to mess around with it.
Intoxication due to water was also a plot point in episodes of two different Star Trek episodes. Both “The Naked Time” from the original series and “The Naked Now” from TNG featured water-borne intoxication that was actually caused by a virus.
-Brianjedi
Exactly how much water are we talking about here? I drink around five liters a day, and now I’m worried I’m digging my grave with a dousing rod.
It’s very difficult to do, unless you’re an infant who reflexively drinks everything given, or have uncommon medical conditions like diabetes insipidus (NOT DIABETES MELLITUS AKA SUGAR DIABETES*). follow my links or go google with “water intoxication” for more info.
It is noteworthy that people with mental illnesses (usually obsessive-compulsive disorders) can override the body’s protection mechanisms to occasionally kill themselves this way.
You probably couldn’t do this to yourself by drinking Gatorade, as it has sodium in it, but you could induce sugar diabetes because of the excess calories it would bring into your diet.
Somebody told me that 14 litres of water would do it, apparently there’s some story about a woman told by her doctor to ‘keep drinking water’ - she did; litres and litres of the stuff; washed the electrolytes out of her system and died from some weird osmotic effect. (although it sounds a bit like an urban myth)
You could also get water intoxication (hyponatremia)if you perform endurance exercise events in hot weather and drink only water, no Gatorade or any other drink with sodium. It is rare this way, but ultramarathoners have died from it.
One afternoon I was bored and decided to see how much water I could drink before I overdose. I think I stopped at 19 cups. I was behaving quite drunk by then, and I started something of a fad (my friends were drinking water by the shot).
Then it all passed through my system (took about 5 hours) and I was back to normal.
there was an interesting news item in colorado about water toxicity a couple months ago. it was about this girl who overdosed on ecstasy, but she didn’t die of that. apparently, ecstasy overdoses tend to mimic feelings of dehydration in a lot of people. so she basically drank herself to death. when you really think about it, you can OD on anything. every substance has a threshhold to where it becomes toxic to your body.
How about sex? Can you od on sex?
I dunno, but I bet you wouldn’t want for volunteers.
I’m not sure if you can get drunk. I heard somewhere that you can get a weird disease or something if you drink more than two gallons a day for an extended period of time.