Reply #115: what it is and isn't [View All]

"The Big Book says explicitly that there is no cure for alcoholism"

And what was the Big Book's author -- a psychiatrist? a specialist in internal medicine? a sociologist?

Cripes, can you expect me to take this seriously? AA is right because AA says it is right??

If the Big Book for sufferers of chronic ear infections said that there was no cure for chronic ear infections, and my doctor believed it and told me that the best thing I could do go to a lot of meetings, and go check into a 28-day program every couple of years and talk about it if the infection came back, somebody'd be getting some money. And it would be people trying to sell the ideas in that Big Book of chronic ear infections.

Me, I'd rather have pennicillin. Or at least somebody doing the research to discover it, instead of listening to a bunch of amateurs saying there is no cure for chronic ear infections.

There is no "cure" for any disorder that is at least in part a result of environmental influences on an individual's personality. Obviously. But there are some therapies that are more effective than others. And oddly enough, there are actually drug therapies for some "mental" illnesses.

But as long as the credo that addiction is a symptom of "spiritual" problems, and that it cannot be treated, has a stranglehold on the therapeutic community, the effort and money that are needed to research and test potential therapies, whether psychological or medical, isn't gonna be expended.

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