Alcoholism: Disease, Learned Behavior, or Both? Why AA Is Wrong About Alcoholics.
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
The age old debate. Is alcoholism a disease or is it learned behavior? Is it a combination of both? If you waltz into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting right after you walk out of the inferno of initial detox, the sponsors and long-time gurus will indoctrinate you immediately. Alcoholism is a disease. You are an addict. You will always be an addict. You will always be diseased. Recovery never ends.
And it is true that in 1956 the medical community acknowledged that alcoholism is an illness. And since that declaration, now inching toward a century ago, it has been shown that the neurological system and brain undergo transformation with chronic and heavy alcohol use. They have proposed the infamous “alcoholic gene” that just sets up the poor soul for failure with alcohol once he puts that bottle to his lips for the first time.
I wouldn’t argue that the brain does undergo changes with prolonged heavy alcohol abuse. A poison is coursing through it every day and in heavy amounts. I wouldn’t argue that the person is in a state of illness when he is an alcoholic. But he didn’t just catch a disease like cancer or multiple sclerosis. It is completely self-induced, regardless of the reasons.
A few items must be noted with this so-called disease. First, the medical community isn’t remotely unanimous in this thinking. Surveys have shown that 49% of doctors actually don’t classify chronic alcoholism as a disease. And in one source, 75% surveyed gave result that it stems from personality and/or emotional disorders. So the AA community can stop acting like this is Yahweh’s law dropped from Mount Sinai. Second, the medical community can drift toward whatever is a trend in society. I know that as a provider. Decades ago, the American Medical Association determined that obesity is a disease. No, it’s not, almighty doctor. We didn’t have this rampant problem in the 1970s because we had a much better lifestyle. We now have a lazy population that lives on its iPhone while eating garbage at McDonald’s. Many medical doctors also state that much of the chronic pain epidemic stems from the mysterious disease, fibromyalgia, which has no origin and which resides in patients with high anxiety, poor lifestyle and usually a combination of both.
This is the point. Political correctness also affects the thinking of medical providers in my former field of physical therapy and in the M.D. community. But as time passes, the medical community is beginning to drift away from the idea that alcoholism is a disease. And the concept never was certain established fact, regardless of the constant wail from the rooms. But I can tell you that there are certain characteristics that all diseases have that makes an easy common-sense determination of whether someone has a disease or not.
A disease is something that happened to the person, usually through no fault of his own. You have a pain in your abdominal region that doesn’t go away and one day the scans reveal pancreatic cancer. You start losing the ability to walk for no reason and find out the famous ball player’s ghost, Lou, has decided to haunt your house. You were born with diabetes Type I and found this out at five. These are all diseases. Now I know I’m going to get a comment that cries: What about the lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver from cigarettes and whiskey? These didn’t just happen. Now you’re talking from both sides of your mouth, Charles.
Yes, they did. The root of the now diseases for these people was the abuse of those substances. Some people get away with the abuse and some don’t. Just like if I eat too much sugar well into my later years, I might develop diabetes Type II. The poor choice led to the disease. But the choice itself to abuse these substances certainly doesn’t fall into the disease category. The physical disease may develop later.
The second reason that alcoholism is not a disease is because a disease has three paths that it can follow. These are paths that have been in medicine since the dawn of time when the first rustic doctor used his neighbor’s sharpened rock to perform surgery. Many techniques in medicine were wrong in the history of medicine but the method of thought when dealing with disease has always been the same, whether it was in Caesar’s time or today.
The first one is it can be cured. How many patient histories have I read that showed cancer twenty years ago and the cancer, with treatment, went into remission and never came back? How about the person who had a tumor that was removed and underwent radiation therapy as a precaution and basically eliminated the cancer, the disease? You don’t walk into the doctor’s office and he determines that you developed alcoholism and gives a series of treatments, which cures the alcoholism. This would be because alcoholism is not cured medically. It is cured by refusing to touch alcohol again.
This is a fundamental flaw with the AA philosophy. They not only believe that you have a disease, they believe it can never be cured. But many of us are countering this irrational thinking. I am cured of alcoholism. Others, who are on social media attacking the AA method, are claiming cure. We are not only cured but are not leading the toxic lives that you see in the circles of the rooms. Other programs are claiming the word cure at high rates as well. We are starting to put cracks in the erroneous foundation of the AA tower. We stopped being addicts because we stopped indulging in alcohol use. But we aren’t cured from a disease. We are cured from an addiction.
The second path a disease might take if it can’t be cured is management. Diabetes Type I is managed with insulin. Certain non-progressive types of M.S. can be managed. There are medications for certain real chronic pain ailments like polymyalgia rheumatica. These methods don’t cure these diseases but make life better for those who suffer from them.
Alcoholics Anonymous thinks they are managing a disease by going to the rooms constantly. Again, you are managing something that isn’t a disease but a prior addiction. Ergo, you are convincing your members they need to devote themselves to AA mentality for the rest of their lives. Well, first, you have a dismal success rate. Second, how come so many of us who left AA remain sober and need no further intervention? The reason is because we realized that alcoholism is a choice. We understood that we had to investigate what caused our addiction besides your claim that it was genetic.
And we found that it was usually rooted in past childhood traumas, reinforced many times by family members who were alcoholics. This gives great ammunition to the doctors who are firing that the cause of alcoholism is personality and emotional deficits. That it is more instilled and learned. For if AA was correct, then we shouldn’t be able to stay sober without them. Not only are many of us sober today, but our lives are far more advanced on all of our planes than those who sit every night in the toxic circle, filling their lungs outside at the breaks with nicotine and continued addictive mindset.
The third path that a disease can follow is it simply kills you. You can undergo treatment for cancer and the cancer takes you anyway in the end. It can be managed for a time, maybe, but once The Reaper sees this person across the field, he breaks into a lockstep march to take him. The rooms will now cry: Wait a minute. How many of us did alcoholism take? How many die from alcoholism every year?
Yes. Many people die from alcoholism. I had a patient who was the nicest guy in the world. I told him that he needed to cross over to our side of sobriety. He didn’t quit drinking and he died in his late fifties. And that is very sad. But he died because of his choice to not quit drinking. He didn’t have a course of treatment that simply failed. The failure was to not put the bottle down from his lips. He had been to AA, by the way. Thanks for absolutely not helping this guy with your screwed up worldview.
The doctors who stand on the side of reason clearly see the difference in diagnosis between a disease and an addiction. They understand the physiological changes that happen once one is in addiction for a long enough time. But they conclude it is the addiction that harms the person, not some random disease that just happened to enter the addict’s body.
Many who grew up surrounded by alcoholism chose in their early youth not to ever touch alcohol. That is a choice. When I did touch alcohol intermittently in my late teen years, that was a choice. When I kept large amounts of alcohol strictly to the weekends in my early twenties, that was a choice. When I began drinking every night in my late twenties, that was a choice. When I knew I had a severe problem in my early thirties but kept visiting my friend, John Barleycorn, that continued to be a choice. And when I ended that friendship with him at age forty, that was the first good choice I made with alcohol. It has been a choice to never touch it again and I have honored that decision for seventeen years now.
I never had a disease. I developed an addiction. Possibly my genes were more prone to become addicted. I would grant that. But no one who is drinking twelve to fifteen beers a night, as I was in the end, thinks this is normal. The choice was still there whether my DNA was more prone to the barley or not. And I am very grateful that I never bought the AA mantra that I am forever an addict who needed to live in the rooms. For if I thought I was diseased and deficit, my life wouldn’t have been one tenth of what it has evolved to today.
To journey on a tale of epic transformation on a 2,660 mile trail check out: THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNINGWOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL
(Usually free on KDP)
(Usually free on KDP)
For the condensed and orderly version of how I beat the addiction of alcoholism check out: THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK
(Usually free on KDP)
John Barleycorn taken from Jack London's book John Barleycorn. First published 1913
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