How Substance Abuse Affects Your Organs
Dr. Travis Stork: Marranda has bravely joined us today. We also have joined us Doctor Keller Wortham, he’s the internist and an addiction specialist. And you know life hasn’t been fair to you. You know life has not been fair to you at all and you have type 1 diabetes, your pancreas doesn’t make insulin. When your pancreas doesn’t make insulin your blood sugar raises or the levels go up. If you don’t control those, if you’re out doing drugs, you're not taking your insulin overtime, blindness. You're going to loose the feeling in your extremities, your kidneys are going to stop working that means you're going to be in dialysis when you get older.
Three days a week going into doctor to get dialysis. You can stop that from happening if you take care of your diabetes. But you're not doing that if you're doing drugs. And the drug themselves, what they’re doing to your body beyond the diabetes is exponentially worst as well.
Dr. Keller Wortham: That’s right Travis, so Marranda you may have heard of an autopsy before which is usually what we do on dead bodies when we want to see what killed them. But today we’re going to do it on you and we are going actually show you what your organs are starting to do and what they might look like if we don’t make some big changes.
We’re going to start with your brain, now your brain is young and it’s still developing and when you take things like alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, it actually blocks the development of your brain. It makes it to those brain cells they don’t communicate the way they're supposed to. You do it too much they can burnout like that and your brain will shrink down and you don’t want a shrunken brain.
Alright, let’s move to your lungs. Smoking it’s horrible for your lungs. There's lots of chemicals in tobacco and marijuana that can do damage to your lungs. They blacken them, they scar them, they break the elastic fibers, they don’t expand and contract the way they're supposed to. You can’t get oxygen, you’ve got to carry your tank around it’s not fun.
This is your liver you can see it’s scarring down there, your liver it’s like the filter. It takes all the toxins out of your blood. When you drink alcohol which is a big toxin you can cause your liver to die to scar down. If it doesn’t work you’ve lost that filter and your body builds up with toxins, a lot of bad things can happen. You can go crazy from it, you can bleed to death. It’s really serious stuff.
The last thing we've got here your kidneys. Now, kidneys are another filter and they're very sensitive to sugar and you have diabetes which means we’ve got to take a really good care of them. When you're doing things like alcohol, like other drugs like Travis said you're not watching your blood sugar overtime, they can shrink down that work and you’ll be on that dialysis that he spoke about.
So the good news is just because you have diabetes it doesn’t mean that you are going to be able to live a long and happy life. But what it does mean is you’ve got to really take care of your body and you’ve got to do it the whole way and your organs right now they're just crying out for a break. And I think it’s time that you help them out.
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