Many doctors are on board with new guidelines urging them to ask patients about alcohol use, but they also note hurdles — people lose track of how much they drink, some lie, and many don’t know what constitutes a single serving.
The guideline for family doctors encourages them to ask patients how often and how much they drink to determine potential excessive drinking patterns. That includes asking female patients how often, in the last year, they have had more than four drinks on one occasion, and asking male patients how often they have had more than five drinks.
“We have more hospitalizations in Canada per month related to alcohol comparatively to heart disease, and we still don’t throw the dollars and the evidence-based approaches into alcohol. We need to do a better job, and that is the whole purpose, I think, of these guidelines.” A study published in July in the journal Addiction by researchers at the University of British Columbia and the BC Centre on Substance Use says that between 2015 and 2019, fewer than one quarter of people in the province who met the criteria for alcohol use disorder were prescribed medications. It notes less than five per cent of patients with a moderate to severe addiction received medications for the minimum recommended time of three months.
“We’re afraid that we are either somebody with no problem at all or we’re totally on the other end of the spectrum and a full-blown alcoholic,” she said.