Talk:The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited

Good article at first glance. Have skimmed over it. Will read more when I get the chance213.235.24.138 08:21, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

I am truly stunned at the shittyness of this Wikipedia entry. It is never pointed out that George Vaillant completely disproved AA's effectiveness. By his own well-researched study, 95 percent of people who entered AA failed to stop drinking within a year. How many failed when they did nothing? 95 percent. In other words, attending AA did nothing; AA did not change the course of the disease. Vaillant has no explanation of why he sits on the board of an organization which has no professional or legal oversight, does nothing statistically or empirically to help people quit drinking, and (by his own research) causes a tripling of the death rate and a 900% increase in binge drinking. In other words, Vaillant promotes an organization that actively promotes something that positively harms peopleBrprivate (talk) 23:49, 13 April 2015 (UTC).

The 95% failure rate figure this user is claiming is a myth. The old green-papers site refuted it quite nicely: http://web.archive.org/web/20150329052802/http://green-papers.org/ Since that page is offline, I will summarize why Brprivate's data is completely wrong. The Green Papers article states the following:

One of Vaillant's studies was of 100 severe alcoholics who sought help at a clinic. [...] All patients were encouraged to attend twice-weekly outpatient meetings, which in turn encouraged AA attendance. The final outcomes (p 191) after 8 years or death were: a) 29 patients achieved stable remission; b) 24 were intermittent drinkers; and c)47 were still chronic alcoholics. Fully 95% of the subjects had one or more relapses during the 8-year study [...]

At the end of 8 years, only 32 patients had attended AA meetings [...] Those who did attend AA had higher recovery rates. [...] 95% of patients had relapsed at some time during the study, even though many of these eventually attained sobriety.

On page 195 of "The Natural History of Alcoholism", there is a table showing that 48% of the people who experienced stable remission had attended 300 or more AA meetings, while only 2% of the people who were chronic alcoholics had attended 300 or more AA meetings.

Plain simply, there is no Vaillant study saying AA has a 95% failure rate; the 95% number is the number of total alcoholics studied and is not even the number of alcoholics who went to AA. Brprivate has no citations supporting his assertion. His information is not reliably sourced and has no place in a Wikipedia article. Defendingaa (talk) 14:47, 7 August 2015 (UTC)