Tuesday, May 21, 2019

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.