Tyndale: What's wrong with pensioners have a pint or two?

Jun 26 2011 by George Tyndale, Sunday Mercury

BEHIND the net curtains, there’s a nation of hidden addicts – pensioners gorging on multi-vitamins and sherry.

It’s a chilling prospect: all these over-65s behaving like lushes, getting smashed out of their brains and then nodding off in their orthopaedic chairs.

I raise this hideous spectre in light of the latest nannying health warning, this time from the fruitcakes at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

It thinks pensioners can’t cope with going on the lash and a report, published last week, paints a picture of drunken oldies crippling A&E departments with alcohol-induced admissions for broken hips.

The Royal College of Shrinks has quite arbitrarily decided that older men should not consume more than one-and-a-half units of booze a day.

That equates to about half a pint of decent strength beer or three sips of what the younger people unamusingly call “wife beater” lager.

The current recommended safe upper limit is between three to four units a day, which is hardly at the liberal end of enjoyment.

It’s worse for women over the age of 65, poor dears. According to the mindbenders, the accepted upper limit – two to three units a day – should be slashed to as little as one.

Have a quick nip of the communion wine, ladies, and you’ve already had your daily dose of the unholy spirit.

The mentalists, in a report called Old People Should Have A Really Miserable Time, claim there is a generation of “hidden addicts”. As soon as these junkies cash their pension cheques, they leg it to the off-licence and binge on the latest offer for cut-price Ukrainian wine.

Poison

Consultant Dr Tony Rao, who helped to write the booze report, says older drinkers are cursed with memory problems and physical ailments. They are less able to flush alcohol from their bloodstream than young ’uns. Livers struggle to clear the “poisons” in alcohol and pensioners’ bodies take a battering.

Dr Rao, whose cocktail parties must be a riot, said: “The effect of what we would currently call the safe limits is actually more damaging for older people.”

Due to the ageing process, old people get tipsy quicker and this, it is claimed, can lead to co-ordination problems, prompting falls and fractures and rescheduled early appointments with the Grim Reaper.

Are there any statistics to back this up? I’m not aware of dire warnings from A&E managers about an influx of intoxicated oldsters suffering booze-related injuries.

There’s plenty of evidence about drunken young girls needing medical treatment after getting up the duff and smashed young males inundating casualty as a result of beer and alcopop-induced fights and general thuggery.

Sadly, senile old folk do end up lost, bewildered and injured at hospital, but the suggestion that there is a group of elderly drunks menacing society appears to be nothing more than another dose of myth-making by the medical profession.

Shrinks and pill-pushing GPs like nothing more than “medicalizing” a non-existent problem. It keeps them in employment. Sadly, old age for many people is a time of distress and ill-health. Husbands and wives may have died and party invites are replaced by requests for attendance at So-and So’s funeral. Many are not party to the taxpayer-funded lavish pensions enjoyed by medics. They have to scrimp and save. And with few comforts in life, it’s hardly surprising that many pensioners enjoy a few glasses. Unless they are dipsos, alcohol consumption will make no difference to their lifespan.

Many are more than capable of standing toe to toe with younger people without falling off bar stools and snapping their hips. These people aren’t addicts. They are chronically under-valued members of society. Stigmatising old folk for having a good time is one of the more disdainful slurs the medical fraternity has come up with for some time.