As far as being suitable for all, here is their section “Is A.A. for you?”
As for endorsing alternative therapies, I suppose they might consider such recommendations off-limits: “A.A. is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy; neither endorses nor opposes any causes.”
The book is online and I am not seeing it on the forward posted there. Perhaps the printed version is a bit different.
Wal-Mart is a profit driven organization which would make no bones about wanting you to shop in their store and nowhere else.
AA is a non-profit organization who presumably have as their only goal wanting to rescue people from alcoholism. If they were true to that desire they would surely have to recognize that AA is not for everyone and seek to point those people to other resources that may be of help to them.
That just looks like a test to determine if you are a problem drinker (alcoholic) and if so come see them.
Maybe I am missing something.
I take your point, wasn’t you. But this time it was, so really, whats the difference?
Oh, but it is, very much so. Scientology has been very effective at realizing its goal, of fleecing the gullible. AA has not been nearly so successful in realizing its goals. The nature of those goals are very, very different, and cannot be reasonably judged as being analogous.
It’s in the last paragraph of the 1955 Foreward
This has probably changed a little since I got my training, but the motivation for AA to avoid endorsing other approaches was historically to avoid liability. The first AAers wrangled long and hard over what made their group work, but had collectively had so many bad experiences with other approaches that they felt it was better to stay out of the endorsement business.
I want evidence of reliable anecdotes. You really haven’t provided a valid comparison. The success of program provided by anecdotes of success is far more reliable than anecdotes of statements that simply attribute negative results to a universal program by simple judgement. Its hard to argue with success. Its far more difficult to apply a cause of detriment of a universal program to the program itself.
I had pointed out the magnitude of success of AA. For myself and hundreds of others that I know of. Don’t think we don’t know of others who have quit drinking by other means. We just haven’t figured out why we are different. We really don’t know why the program works, which we know is a problem for science. But we don’t fucking care, because it worked for us, and we know a lot of lives are going to be saved if we ensure the program is available to others. You think you know everything about alcoholism ? Are you prepared to dissuade an alcoholic from trying AA? You better have a better answer buddy. Sure our program has failures. Many failures . Sometimes those failures turn out to be successes. When that happens, you bet your ass it makes us feel good and supportive of the program.
And you know, now and then someone has a relapse. But they come back to AA to recover. The program is a life long help line that no drug can match.
Here are AA’s guidelines, some of which describe how AA members can best work with alcohol treatment programs and other areas of the alcoholism field. They do not endorse specific programs, but they appear to contemplate that alcoholics can benefit by the cooperation of AA with other therapies.
Only if you take fleecing the gullible as Scientology’s goal. If you believe their stated aim of helping people achieve their potential, you can judge both as being analogous.
Addiction is a complex process, and there’s lots of understandable reasons why treatments would be difficult to test. However, for something this complex, what I would expect to see if AA didn’t work is a few studies showing it worked, a few studies showing it hurts, and a lot of studies showing it has no impact. And that’s what I do see.
I agree with you that it makes a sort of common sense that AA treatments could/should work. But, there’s lots of common sense things that fail. I wouldn’t be super surprised if AA was added to that list.
Of all the studies I’ve seen, the one I was most impressed by was the randomized study run in San Diego, which used objective measures of “effectiveness” for various types of treatment. In that study, AA scored dead last.
Okay, you’re right. Wal-mart is a bad example on my part. But what about The United Way? Goodwill? The Salvation army? I just looked at the front page on all three websites and found no mention of any outside resources on any of them.
What?
Do you know what an anecdote is?
Take anything, no matter how anti-scientific or stupid, and I can find anecdotes supporting it. That’s probably why science doesn’t rely on anecdotes.
I’ve an open mind. Could you please link me to this study ?
Reminds me of a joke: Famous doctor is discussing his latest procedure to medical students. He describes the procedure in detail and then asks for questions.
A student asks: “did you run a control test?”
The surgeon is furious. “If I’d run a control test, half my patients would be dead”!
The room is silent for a while, then a little voice pipes up from the back, “which half?”
“A Controlled Experiment on the Use of Court Probation for Drunk Arrests”, Keith S. Ditman, M.D., George G. Crawford, LL.B., Edward W. Forgy, Ph.D., Herbert Moskowitz, Ph.D., and Craig MacAndrew, Ph.D., American Journal of Psychiatry, 124:2, August 1967, Page 163.
Edited to add: this study is discussed on the Agent Orange website.
Make no mistake non-profits are Big Business. Particularly the ones you listed. They all chase finite and scarce dollars to run their organization and are, in a very real sense, in competition with each other. They may have a do-gooder mission but they want their do-gooder mission to succeed first and foremost.
AA, we have been told here, is distinctly non-money driven. They collect whatever people are willing to donate at meetings and that is about it. As such they presumably have a lot less of a money motive than other non-profits do.
Yeah; but if my hunch is correct and the “cult-like” aspect of AA is the reason why it works (assuming of course for the sake of argument it does), you would reasonably predict that people who were sentenced by a court to attend would not be affected much if at all.
Court-ordered medication ought to work, because barring the placebo effect, a drug ought to work whether it is court-ordered or not; not so, behavioural ‘therapy’, in which the voluntary-ness of the process is obviously going to be a greater factor and perhaps decisive.
Ok, but my point still stands. Czarcasm originally said:
Just because the website has no mention of something does not necessarily mean that the opposite is true.
Well, at the least it’s an argument against court-mandated AA treatment, which from earlier discussions has been found unconstitutional anyway, though some judges seem not to have gotten the message.
Still, in the study 100 people were ordered to attend AA meetings. You’d think that if even a few of them had gotten something out of it, and the others had gotten nothing, that group would have done better than the other groups. The fact that the AA group did the worst is troubling; is the AA approach actively harmful for a segment of the population?
I’ve heard that suggested about that study. However, one might make the opposite argument as well: Those people would have the threat of jail time as a extra motivator to do well in the program.
Possibly, for those forced to be there.
Think of it this way: for some, under the right conditions, no doubt belonging to a religious group does have many practical advantages having nothing to do with the existence of gods - for example, a ready-made social group, plus structure, personal leadership if they are lucky in their choice of priest or rabbi, and a caring community.
However, if I, noticing these advantages, order someone as the price of not going to jail to attend a church, mosque or temple, what are the chances that they would get any of these advantages? They don’t want to be part of that community. They don’t want a new social group. They are unlikely to accept the kindly leadership of a priest or rabbi. They may find the whole thing absurd and offensive. It may, in short, simply piss them off.