Since the linked article mentions Glaser’s now-discredited 2015 article which fa...

deep-root · on June 2, 2021

All three links don't seem to conclusively support your comment and AA continues to be controversial for many reasons (e.g. adopting "alcoholic" as your identity). Quoting link #2:

"Mostly it [the new review] looks like studies of either sending people to AA or frequent counseling, and that yields similar results to other kinds of alcohol use disorder psychotherapies. That's what their main finding is," Saitz said. "And I, unfortunately, I don't think that tells us so much about AA effectiveness."

As an aside the average AA member attends 2.5 meetings a week and membership is 89% white[1], I had no idea. Where do non-white people get help in America?

[1] https://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/p-48_membershipsurvey.pdf

placer · on June 2, 2021

Earlier in the article, it states that “The review found 42% of AA participants were completely abstinent one year later, compared with 35% of participants who underwent other treatments like CBT.”

Cochrane reviews are considered the gold standard for meta-reviews. If the data, which does show AA [1] helps some alcoholics become abstinent, wasn’t scientifically sound, it wouldn’t had become part of the review.

Saitz either thinks a 7% improvement is a “similar result”, or he wasn’t familiar with the study when interviewed.

Obviously, people are free to think the science doesn’t “conclusively support” a given theory. Using this line of thinking, some people think radiocarbon dating doesn’t “conclusively support” the idea of the earth being older than 6,000 years -- but that’s hardly an evidence-based scientific line of reasoning.

[1] Since it’s not practical to use randomization to compare AA per se to non-AA recovery because of “contaminated control” issues, modern studies compare twelve-step facilitation (TSF) treatment with non-TSF treatment.