Doubt Treatment Works? I Did.
Addiction is a chronic disease. But popular wisdom has it that treatment is futile because it doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, most people don’t know what Time Magazine reported as long ago as May 1997: “Yet treatment for drug abuse has a failure rate no different from that for other chronic diseases. Close to half of recovering addicts fail to maintain complete abstinence after a year — about the same proportion of patients with diabetes and hypertension who fail to comply with their diet, exercise and medication regimens.”1
The following chart, from the National Institutes of Health (http://www.nida.nih.gov/scienceofaddiction/treatment.html) compares relapse rates for addiction with three other chronic diseases.
One-year abstinence for half those treated might not seem like a very good record, but it’s par-for-the-course for a disease in which stable remission requires significant behavioral changes.
Over the past years a lot more has been learned about what kinds of treatment works and why. Additional drugs to treat addiction have been approved as well. Still, the perception treatment doesn’t work lingers, a result of unrealistic expectations (For more, click on Realistic Expectations and Relpase). Many don’t recognize that addiction is a chronic disease in which relapses are to be expected. (Click here for more on The Definition of Addiction.) Many also don’t recognize that obtaining stable sobriety takes time — a lot of time — years, not months.
1. Addicted, Time Magazine, May 3, 1997.
It seems to me that your focus is more on alcoholism rather than addiction as a whole, regardless of the domain name communicating a more broader focus. As someone who is a smoker, who hasn’t had an issue with alcohol, I find your articles hit a spot – just not mine. Good luck, and all the best