Conceptualising alcohol consumption in relation to long-term health conditions 

A study investigated how people with long term conditions, who take multiple medications, experience and understand their alcohol use. The study objective was to explore how people conceptualise the risks posed to their own health from their concurrent alcohol and use of medicines.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 24 people in the North of England taking medication for long term conditions who drank alcohol twice a week or more often.
Alcohol was consumed recreationally and to aid with symptoms of sleeplessness, stress and pain. Interviewees were concerned about the felt effects of concurrent alcohol and medicines use and sought ways to minimise the negative effects. Interviewees associated their own drinking with short-term reward, pleasure and relief. Risky drinking was located elsewhere, in the drinking of others. People made experiential, embodied sense of health harms and did not seem aware of, or convinced by, (or in some cases appeared
resigned to) future harms to their own health from alcohol use. The study has limitations common to exploratory qualitative studies.
The authors suggest that health risk communication should be better informed about how people with long-term health conditions perceive health outcomes over time, and how they adopt experience-based safety strategies whilst medicines adherence is expected. Supporting people to make active and informed connections between medicines, alcohol and potential personal health harms requires more than a one-way style of risk communication if it is to be perceived as opening up rather than restricting choice, they add.
Source: Conceptualising alcohol consumption in relation to long-term health conditions: Exploring risk in interviewee accounts of drinking and taking medications. Madden M, Morris S, Stewart D,
Atkin K, Gough B, McCambridge J. PLoS One. 2019 Nov 7;14(11):e0224706.