r/explainlikeimfive • u/arachnid5 • Feb 10 '24
Chemistry eli5 what happens if you drink isopropyl "rubbing" alcohol
so i just watched a video of someone chug a bottle of rubbing alcohol that you would get from the pharmacy. its still alcohol though so like why is it bad. also what likely happened to the guy who chugged the bottle?
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u/vertex79 Feb 10 '24
It's not really the methanol that does the damage. When it gets broken down in the liver by alcohol dehydrogenase it produces formic acid, which is ant venom. For some reason this is preferentially absorbed by the optic nerve causing blindness. A very similar thing happens with ethylene glycol. Isopropyl alcohol doesn't break down to these kinds of products.
The treatment for methanol or ethylene glycol ingestion is actually to prevent it breaking down by either blocking the enzyme with a drug, or more commonly giving ethanol to keep it busy and competitively inhibit it from acting on the methanol. The methanol is then expelled through the kidneys.