Thanks for the correction. But if it’s an error to say that they’re synonymous, then Wikipedia isn’t the only one at fault. A quick search of Google Books shows a very great number of authoritative-looking medical texts (including at least one from the World Health Organisation) that explicitly define “the shakes” as a nickname for DT in general or for a mild/early phase of it.
As others mentioned, I think genetics plays a huge role. When I was in my early 20s, and weighed no more than 170 pounds, I drank a lot. I was also somehow one of those people who doesn’t “appear intoxicated” - I mostly drank with an older crowd (10+ years older than me), and I had more than one person tell me that I was the first person they’d ever met who behaved exactly the same way drunk and sober. I had two different bartenders, both much older than me and with decades of experience as bartenders, thank me for always cutting myself off, because they could never tell when I was drunk. The one and only time in my 20s that I was ever “cut off” by a bartender was when a particularly bitchy female bartender (her sarcastic nickname amongst the customers was “Sweetness”) refused to serve me on the grounds that I’d already “had enough”. Except I had just gotten off work after a long shift, and was ordering my very first drink of the day. I asked one of the other bartenders what was up, and he just shrugged and poured me a beer.
I’ve never experienced alcohol withdrawal symptoms in my life. When I was drinking my heaviest, I could still decide one day that I wasn’t going to drink (usually that decision was based upon “I have no money”), and I suffered no ill effects by not drinking. When, in my late 20s, circumstances led to my deciding it was time to stop drinking, I stopped cold turkey - no AA or any other recovery program, and suffered no ill effects. This was after years of drinking, at minimum, a half case (twelve 12-ounce cans) of beer every single day.
My wife, OTOH … one or two drinks and she’d be out of her mind, and she would go on a bender that would last for days, and would only end when she wound up in the hospital, followed by a stay in detox and a regimen of whatever drug that is that ameliorates alcohol withdrawal symptoms. She only came to the decision to quit drinking when one hospital stay revealed a genuine physical problem, and the doctors emphasized that, if she kept drinking, she was going to die. (She’s been sober for over a year now, and has reestablished relationships with her adult children and her parents, all of whom wanted nothing to do with her at the time I married her).
If you were drinking to become intoxicated, and not becoming intoxicated, what was the motive? Why not just drink water? It’s alot cheaper