Hand Sanitizer Case Study

This episode was about a man named Joshua who was very successful and pretty much had life figured out. He had a six-figure salary managing 14 different convenience stores. He also had a beautiful home, wife, and kids by the age of 21. But Joshua was overweight and at age 27 he decided to have gastric bypass surgery to help him with his weight loss. After the surgery, he wasn 't losing weight as quick as he wanted and he had back issues which prevented him from exercising. He was prescribed pain pills and started to abuse them, leading to extraordinary addiction to hand sanitizer. His addiction to hand sanitizer has severely impacted his life and caused him to start drinking as well. Joshua had little experience with AOD history before he had gastric bypass surgery causing him to become addicted to pain killers and eventually hand sanitizer.

He was the manager of 14 different convenience stores, so he was always running back and forth between the stores. But his weight and physical health didn 't allow him to accomplish as much as he wanted to, which lead to his medical history issues. At 27 he had gastric bypass surgery and studies show that there is accelerated drug and alcohol absorption after gastric bypass surgery, which was exactly the case for Joshua. He abused the pain pills that he was given and when his prescription ended, he somehow got hooked on hand sanitizer. Most hard liquor is 40% alcohol, while hand sanitizer is 70-90% alcohol. He would drink anywhere from 12-28 ounces of it a day. This caused his liver and kidneys to start to go bad. He also had seizures, was put on life support, and started losing his eyesight. Psychologically, he started to fall apart. Within a year he lost his kids, got a divorce, and lost his job. He has to move back in with his mom and talked about committing suicide nearly every time she would take away his hand