Dr Scott says: “There is a perception that this is an opportunity to give your liver a ‘break’, to make up for the excesses of December and the new year. But the reality is, you can’t simply reset or detox the impacts of alcohol on your health in a month.

“It’s a bit like a crash diet, in that you do it for a short period of time but it’s difficult to keep up so you just end up going back to what you did before. While cutting out alcohol for one month will leave you feeling much more energised and will help you to sleep better, there is very little benefit if you then continue to drink heavily once January is over.”

He goes on to explain that a lot of us will know how it feels to recover after the odd night when we had three or four drinks, and while we might not be feeling our freshest the next day, within 24 hours we’ll usually feel fine and suffer no lasting damage.

“But”, he adds, “if you’ve been drinking heavily – which is to say 15 drinks a week for men or eight for women – for 10 years, your cumulative exposure might be over 15,000 units. This will lead to more significant damage to your body, which will take a lot longer to recover from. The damage will vary from person to person and be affected by other factors such as diet and lifestyle, so it’s very difficult to say how long full recovery will take, but it could take years – if it’s even possible at all.

“For example, when it comes to the liver, alcohol causes a continuum of injury over time. It begins with fat buildup in the liver – so called fatty liver disease. This is a reversible process and the liver can recover over time if you stop drinking. However, over time – after, on average, about 10 years of heavy drinking – inflammation in the liver leads to scarring called cirrhosis. Once this has happened, there’s no going back even if you stop drinking. The liver can’t repair cirrhosis.”

This is just one example of why, even though doing Dry January is still objectively good for you, it won’t be a cure-all for hard drinking all on its own.

Sorry, doing Dry January isn’t going to undo a Christmas season’s worth of heavy drinking