Posted: Friday 18 March 2011
Talking Points: Professor Anthony Pelosi, Psychiatrist
Peter Aitken [S6] reports on a lecture on the dangers of addiction.
Professor Anthony Pelosi, Consultant Adult Psychiatrist at Hairmyres Hospital in Lanarkshire and honorary professor of psychiatry at the University of Glasgow, spoke to S6 this week about the perils of addiction and his own working experience of dealing with those who are suffering from addiction.
He began by describing the topic of addiction as a "hot potato" and stated frankly: "My mind has been addled by the things I've seen over the years."
Professor Pelosi told S6 that being an adult psychiatrist in the West of Scotland can be "disheartening", but also extremely rewarding. The patients he sees suffer from addiction to drugs and alcohol. He told us a shocking story of a patient addicted to heroin who had run out of veins in his upper arms and attempted to inject what he thought was the femoral vein in his upper thigh. Instead of injecting his femoral vein, however, he injected his femoral artery and, as a result, lost his left leg.
Alcohol, he told S6, was the biggest issue that affected Scotland. He regularly sees men over the age of 50 who have no short-term memory as a result of drinking excessively since they were young: "volumes of alcohol which were lethal", he said. He showed the audience various graphs relating to alcohol consumption in the UK since 1900. It showed clearly that consumption of all types of alcohol consumption has increased dramatically. Levels of cirrhosis have also increased greatly over the years.
Buckfast, the tonic wine drink favoured by young people around the area of Hairmyres Hospital,"has had the profoundest effect on my career" he told us.
Anthony Pelosi studied medicine at Glasgow University and did postgraduate clinical and research training in Dundee, London, Baltimore and Edinburgh. He has a special interest in trying to use scientific research to improve routine mental health care. He is currently a consultant psychiatrist at Hairmyres Hospital in Lanarkshire and an honorary professor of psychiatry at the University of Glasgow.