Your doctor told you to never to take only one antibiotic. Unless you take a pill twice a day until the bottle is empty, the antibiotic will not be effective.
Likewise, Alcoholics Anonymous is not going to be effective unless you do what is suggested: Regular attendance at meetings and working the 12 steps as written in the first 164 pages of the Big Book.
Lance Dodes, in his anti-Alcoholics Anonymous polemic (When calling this book a "polemic", I am quoting The New York Times, which called the book a "polemical and deeply flawed book"), argues that AA doesn't work because only some small percentage of people who attend even one meeting get sober and stay sober.
This is a meaningless number; the majority of alcoholics out there do not want to get better. AA is a program for people who want it, not for people who need it. In fact, there has never been developed an alternate treatment which is more effective than AA -- AA, or any other treatment, is only going to be as effective as the percentage of alcoholics who want to get sober.
Valliant, in his classic The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited, has a table on page 197. I ran the math on this table: 74% of the people who went to 300+ meetings had stable remission, 21% of the 300+ meetings attenders had intermittent alcoholism, and only 5% of people who went to 300 or more meetings were still chronic alcoholics -- numbers, that, interestingly enough, agree with the figures in the preface to the second edition of AA's own Big Book, which states that 50% got sober right away, 25% got sober after relapsing, and the rest showed improvement.
So, yes, Alcoholics Anonymous works. As long as you take all of the pills in the bottle: Making a habit of going to meetings and working the steps with a sponsor. Claiming the AA doesn't work because most alcoholics do not work it is dishonest.
