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5y ago
You’re not on Reddit. We actually frown upon dishonest and unethical behavior here.
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5y ago
Indeed. The one thing RationalWiki is good at is, when there’s some quack theory or junk science out there that’s not notable enough to grace the Wikipedia, RW often times has a page on it.
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5y ago
As an aside, I do not trust Rational Wiki to be a reliable source of information. Just one example: Their information about Alcoholics Anonymous’s effectiveness can charitably be described as a dumpster fire: https://rationalwiki
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5y ago
Earlier in the article, it states that “The review found 42% of AA participants were completely abstinent one year later, compared with 35% of participants who underwent other treatments like CBT.” Cochrane reviews are considered the gold s
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5y ago
Since the linked article mentions Glaser’s now-discredited 2015 article which falsely claims AA is not helpful: The latest science shows that Alcoholics Anonymous is a very helpful resource for many alcoholics, and that AA increases sobriet
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5y ago
Indeed. As one point of comparison: Solid scientific information showing efficacy for AA gets routinely upvoted here at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25493182 Compare this to Reddit, where some high-traffic sub-
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5y ago
> Their religion-based system has about the same probability of helping you recover from addiction as not going to AA/NA. Not this again. We know for a fact that treatments which encourage people to be a part of AA fellowships re
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6y ago
Comparing Pendery 1982 to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study?? That’s a really emotionally charged and completely invalid reach. I’m not sure how a reasonable conversation can continue. We’ve moved to a Twilight Zone alternate reality at this po
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6y ago
That’s not what the judge looking at this very issue felt: “Judge Hauk concluded that on balance it was more important to determine how the patients were faring following treatment than any possible breach of confidentiality and invasion of
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6y ago
Probably the most extensive critical account of that 1973 Sobell study, and how the Pendery 1982 follow-up came to be published, is the book Alcoholism: A Review of its Characteristics, Etiology, Treatments, and Controversies by Irvine Ma
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6y ago
The reference was for the fact some of the original patients tried to sue the Sobells. The “delighted” bit comes from Alcoholism: A Review of its Characteristics, Etiology, Treatments, and Controversies by Irvine Maltzman, which goes in t
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6y ago
When clicking on the link multiple times, Cochrane no longer gives access to the full report. It will become non-paywalled (or should I say, non-semi-paywalled) come March over at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl
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6y ago
Here’s the 2016 (i.e. done during the Obama administration) report from the US Surgeon General on some resources which help with recovery: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK424846/ Looking over at that Nice we
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6y ago
The full 2020 Cochrane review on AA is paywalled until March, so I’m linking to media summaries of the review until it becomes open access.
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6y ago
The subjects were delighted (Edit: See below for actual quote from one of the Pendery team researchers) to be contacted by another research group, and some of them felt the treatment they got in the Sobell group was so shoddy, they ended up
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6y ago
That article from The Atlantic uses outdated information. The figures Glaser used for AA efficacy do not come from peer reviewed science and are inaccurate. See https://www.thecut.com/2015/03/why-alcoholics-ano
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6y ago
This happened back in the 1970s when some researchers tried to get follow-up information about whether alcoholics can moderately drink again. Here’s what happened: The paper Sobell 1973 made the bold claim that alcoholics could moderately
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7y ago
The statement “by focusing on abstinence you are setting a significant part of your patients up for failure” sounds like advocating “moderate drinking” to me. If we’re not telling alcoholics that abstinence is the goal, we’re telling them t
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7y ago
It’s been established for a long time in the treatment field that AA (or pretty much anything else) works a lot better than no treatment. Brandsma 1980 is the only study I can think of off of the top of my head comparing AA (and a few other
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7y ago
That information is, at best, out of date. The new Cochrane study links to a number of studies which show a far higher rate of abstinence than 5% for subjects randomly assigned to undergo treatment which encourages them to be part of the A
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7y ago
That old 2015 article is out of date, and the brand new Cochrane review presents evidence which downright contradicts a number of its findings. Notably, that old article claims AA has a 5% success rate, but the new Cochrane review sees a 4
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7y ago
I am very skeptical about claims that heavy alcoholics can ever moderately drink over a significant period of time again. There are a lot of studies showing successful moderate drinking over the short term, but the studies are always short-
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7y ago
This reply will probably be ignored, since it has been two days and ycombinator has a pretty short attention span, but I have skimmed over the full study. There are about 10 findings, and the only “high” quality finding is that there appear
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7y ago
According to reference.com, “cocktail casual” is not formally defined: “Traditional cocktail attire usually consists of knee length dresses for women, dark suits with a tie for men and fancy shoes for both. Cocktail casual, however, [...] h
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7y ago
Here's the quote in context: >the dress code for the daytime sessions is business casual . For the Awards Dinner on Tuesday evening, we're trying to step it up a bit and ask that you dress cocktail casual ( Men: blazer/
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8y ago
AA does not have a 5% success rate. This misconception comes from someone misreading an old confusingly labeled graph. AA has, according to one study, a 67% success rate. The study saw that, of people who regularly went to AA, 67% were so
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8y ago
I managed to preserve the 500px one: http://archive.is/RLc2g
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8y ago
That may be true. A 2018 paper shows that other non-12-step fellowships are as effective as AA (as long as the goal is abstinence from alcohol, not moderation). Since the paper is still under paywall until later this year, here's a g
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8y ago
Here is a peer-reviewed paper which describes how meetings are beneficial, not addictive: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/108107397127806 (Note that this is a paywall link. Here is a quote to give
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8y ago
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746426/ That article shows that people who regularly go to AA meetings are more likely to be sober (e.g. 67% people who went to one or more meeting a week we
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