Does Alcohol/addiction treatement work? (The Emperor has no clothes)

Does Alcohol/addiction treatment work?

For a very long time I have realized that Alcohol/Addiction treatment industries methods do not work (see my blog entitled The Dark Ages of Addiction Treatment) . Many will doubt this, especially treatment professionals. For the most part people become addicted to something esle (like meetings). This is not to say there isnt a cure for Alcoholism/addiction. There is a rare Church here and there that helps people find what they need: There are some links on this website to some of them.Here is a brief excerpt from article about whether threatment works:The question is why has the public been told treatment does work? Why are studies cited that allegedly "prove" that treatment works? It all comes down to interpretation of the facts. Such proclamations of treatment success are common among biased researchers with personal agendas. In fact, these non-scientific proclamations are so common and so ludicrous that the scientific community is now publishing articles ridiculing these reports. I direct your attention to An Invitation to Debate: How to have a high success rate in treatment: advice for evaluators of alcoholism programs by William R. Miller (Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico) and Martha Sanchez-Craig (Addiction Research Foundation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This article appeared in Addiction (1996) 91(6), 779-785. The abstract reads as follows: "Two seasoned alcohol treatment researchers offer tongue-in-cheek advice to novice program evaluators faced with increasing pressure to show high success rates. Based on published examples, they advise: (1) choose only good prognosis cases to evaluate; (2) keep follow-up periods as short as possible; (3) avoid control and comparison groups; (4) choose measures carefully; (5) focus only on alcohol outcomes; (6) use liberal definitions of success; (7) rely on self-reporting and (8) always declare victory regardless of finding." While Miller and Sanchez-Craig's humor is not lost to us, the tragic truth they expose is not humorous. Alcoholics and drug addicts are dying everyday because of studies that are published proclaiming treatment works when, in fact, everyone in the treatment industry with any ability to be objective knows that it doesn't.You can view the full article at:www.archivesinternational.org/AI/Historyarticles/pdf/treatmentd.pdf

And to be clear about this whole matter I am NOT saying that their is not a treatment that works. I AM saying that the modern Alcohol/Addict treatment industry hasnt found it.