How water can transform your health
In May of 2015 I caught a trip to the theater with my son who is the oldest to see Mad Max: Fury Road. The reason I am mentioning this is because one the characters in the movie (who reside in a place where water is a finite resource) advises someone else not to get "addicted to water". As soon as I returned home from the film, I went immediately on Google or Google Scholar to check if there was any articles written about 'water addiction''.
Dr. Mark Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction and Director of the International Gaming Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Nottingham Trent University (UK). He has medication management published more than the 620 research papers he has refereed five books, more than 150 book chapters and more than 1500 other papers, and has received 18 international and national prizes for his work.
Experience the dry mouth sensation characteristic of the condition
It's not surprising that there were a lot of reports in the media about people who were 'addicted' to drinking water, but there was very little research literature. One example is that an American online report described the tale about Sasha Kennedy:
"[Sasha] is addicted to water, drinking 25 liters of the stuff a day, far exceeding the USDA Recommended Daily Water Intake of 2.7 liters...What surprised me most was that the condition had a name: Psychogenic polydipsia. It is 'an uncommon clinical disorder characterized by excessive water-drinking in the absence of a physiologic stimulus to drink' and is typically found among mental patients on phenothiazine medications. Kennedy appears to be completely sane, although she does experience the dry mouth sensation characteristic of the condition...You'd think drinking so much water would do something to her health, but transformation health services medical experts confirmed that there is nothing wrong with her. She doesn't even have hyponatremia.
Sleep every night before having to wake up to drink some water
Where cells swell due to too much water in the blood. She's perfectly healthy and her blood isn't diluted. Then again, her habit started when she was two years old, so maybe her body acclimatized. Her lifestyle, however, is drastically affected by her addiction. She has to go to the toilet 40 times a day and can only get about an hour of sleep every night before having to wake up to drink some water or go to the loo. She carries large bottles of water with her everywhere she goes, and once quit her job because the tap water quality wasn't up to par".
