[The acute manifestations of alcoholism and their treatment (author's transl)].

The effect of the ethyl alcohol on the system involves a symptomatology of clinical variable expression. The ethanol has an incontestable psychotrope effect. In small dose it calms anxiety but in large dose it mostly has an anesthesic effect and disturbs consciousness. The well-known acute inebriety beside, there is the pathologic hallucinatory and delusive inebrieties. The practitioner must affirm the correlation between the observed perturbations and the absorption of alcohol, eliminate some disease simulating an acute inebriety and take the therapeutic decisions which assert themselves in a dramatic atmosphere. In that emergency treatment, the use of the new neuroleptic, the tiapride looks us very interesting for it has a sedative effect on agitation; it respects the vigilance and it improves the consciousness.