Lance Dodes' book The Sober Truth is, bottom line, bad science. I have read it and compared what it
says to the papers Dodes cites; in multiple cases, Dodes makes
fundamental errors in his research. For example, Dodes claims that
Fiorentine 1999 showed a 40% sobriety rate among active AA members;
however, reading this study shows that it actually demonstrates a 75%
sobriety rate. As another example, Dodes claims that Moos and Moos 2006
didn't look at how many active AA members stayed sober; actually Moos
and Moos 2006 reports that 67% (or 77 people) were sober 16 years later.
I
am not the only one who finds Dodes' reasoning flawed. The New York
Times calls it a "polemical and deeply flawed book." The esteemed
doctors Chad Emrick and Thomas Beresford, who find Dodes entire
reasoning process questionable, looking at the second way Dodes tries to
claim AA has a 5% success rate and say that "Albeit harsh to say, it
appears that Dodes and Dodes did not let facts get in the way of drawing
their second conclusion about AA’s effectiveness." The psychiatrists
Jeffrey D. Roth and Edward J. Khantzian, in their review of The Sober
Truth called Dodes' reasoning "pseudostatistical polemic." Addiction
experts John Kelly and Gene Beresin also found Dodes' reasoning flawed.
For the record, the scientists criticizing Dodes' work come from the best schools: John Kelly, Eugene Beresin, and Edward J.
Khantzian are all from Harvard. In addition, Jeffrey Roth graduated from
Yale, and Thomas Beresford graduated from Stanford. I see a lot of very
prestigious doctors strongly criticizing Dodes' work.
The outrage press (NPR, The Atlantic, Salon) placed far too much weight on the opinion of one doctor and his son even though so many other experts have looked at his reasoning and found it
deeply flawed.
