Good to see the word is getting out

Reddit posted yet another repost of that old 2015 article from The Atlantic about how AA supposedly has a 5% success rate. However, this time someone actually researched the number and posted the following:

From Dodes' book " research indicates that only 5 to 8 percent of the people who go to one or more AA meetings achieve sobriety for longer than one year."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_Alcoholics_Anonymous#The_Sober_Truth
But that number is controversial (and the above wikipedia article gives a good overview of the conflicting views).

Point being, all of the effort I have gone to over the years to find accurate information about AA’s success and making the Wikipedia article on the topic reflect what science actually knows is paying off; people can no longer claim “AA has only a 5% success rate” without the claim being questioned.

The mid-2010s situation where a single doctor, without quoting any actual study, makes up a 5% success rate figure for AA by multiplying numbers from different studies together and not being questioned are behind us. Now, anyone interested in facts can and does find out that Dodes’s numbers were garbage.

AA has a 67-75% success rate among people who regularly go to meetings.  This is the number that science shows us; this number has been replicated across multiple studies and has been consistent since the mid-1950s.

Review: “US of AA” by Joe Miller

I will review “US of AA: How the Twelve Steps Hijacked the Science of Alcoholism” by Joe Miller. Since this blog focuses on the efficacy of AA (67-75%), I will look at how this book looks at AA’s success. To quote the book:

Perhaps the most widely known statistic showing AA's ineffectiveness relative to other treatment methods is the 5 percent success rate -- that served as a centerpiece statistic in The Sober Truth, a 2014 expose by former Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes of the bad science behind AA. In fact, he gathered the statistic from AA’s own surveys. Every three years since 1968 AA has randomly queried several thousands of its members for basic info -- age, career, gender, how they came to AA, and length of sobriety. One of the questions AA asks is the month and year when they first came into AA. In 1990, the AA member who analyzed the results used the data to "show the probability that a member will remain in the Fellowship a given number of months." He calculated that out of every hundred people who came into AA, eighty leave within a month. At the three-month mark, only ten remain. At one year, that number has dwindled to five.

Seems straightforward: AA fails ninety-five percent of the people who come in the door.

In other words, the author has completely disregarded any real research on AA’s success done in the last decade. Indeed, Miller did not correctly read The Sober Truth, since Dodes does concede that that old 1990 AA survey shows a 26% retention rate. Dodes’s book uses another trick to make up the 5% success rate figure, which is also inaccurate (he multiplies numbers from unrelated studies to cook up that artificial 5% figure).

If Miller can not get basic facts about AA’s success rate correct, I see no need to waste my time reading any more of this poorly researched book.

Fortunately, this book did not get the level of press that Dodes’s poorly argued 2014 polemic got.