Rate of Recovery Studies :

Studies have determined that going to alcohol and drug treatment actually reduces the chance of recovery.

"Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is doing it, and right is right, even if nobody is doing it."
- Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

Perhaps you or someone you love has been to drug and alcohol treatment once, twice, or many times and then returned to drinking and/or drugging. Few people recover from drug and alcohol problems with methods used in conventional treatment. And many families spend thousands of dollars to pay for treatment only to find it doesn't work. The treatment community will tell you it is because you weren't ready. Or the professionals will say something utterly stupid like: "The program didn't fail you - you failed the program."

What these professionals won't tell you is that your chances are better for complete recovery without ever going to treatment. With the help of this workbook, the Jude Thaddeus Home Recovery Program, you can enjoy a complete recovery right at home. In fact, your chances of recovery are improved by not going to treatment and simply studying the Jude Thaddeus Home Recovery Program. The Jude Thaddeus Home Recovery Program serves as a brief intervention, which has repeatedly proven to be more effective than treatment and 12-step programs.

You should know the truth about drug and alcohol treatment before committing thousands of dollars on methods that don't work. Read on to find out what the experts have known for a long time, but the drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs prefer you not know. Stanton Peele, Esq., Ph.D. is a psychologist and author of fifteen books and pamphlets, as well as numerous popular and professional articles on addiction and alcoholism. He is a New Jersey psychologist and an attorney and a member of the Bar in both New Jersey and New York and is a senior fellow of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy think tank in New York and San Francisco. In an article published in the March/April 1998 issue of The Sciences, Peele makes the following observations about Dr. Enoch Gordis (Gordis is the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism): "Gordis' overoptimistic interpretation [that treatment works] notwithstanding, represents a public-relations triumph for the alcohol-treatment industry in America. But the blanket assurance that 'treatment works' does precious little for most people who drink too much..."

Peele goes on to report that "...Debra Dawson, an NIAAA epidemiologist, then analyzed interviews with 4,585 NLAES (National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey – 1996) who at some time in their lives been alcohol dependent." Dawson's study conclusively showed that untreated alcoholics are approximately twice as likely to get sober and stay sober than alcoholics subjected to treatment. The study showed that “no treatment” is better than treatment.

Peele also reported on techniques that work. He reported, "...a team led by the psychologist William R. Miller of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque has been examining many smaller such studies for two decades. In 1995 Miller and his colleagues rated forty-three kinds of treatment by combining the results of 217 controlled trials that had compared the effectiveness of a treatment [method] with either no treatment or with other alcoholism therapies. The treatment with by far the best overall score was 'brief intervention' - followed by social-skills training and motivational enhancements ... The Miller report described the standard treatment in the United States as 'a milieu advocating a spiritual twelve-step (AA) philosophy, typically augmented with group psychotherapy, educational lectures and films, and ... general alcoholism counseling, often of a confrontational nature.' Yet those same therapies ranked at the bottom of the Miller team's list, with far less proof of their effectiveness than other treatments. The conclusion, then, is startling: The most frequently used therapies in American alcoholism treatment are those for which there is the least evidence of success."

Miller's findings certainly supported the NIAAA Dawson Study that showed that depriving alcoholics of the standard type treatment actually improved the chances of recovery.

But these studies discussed by Peele are far from the only studies that have demonstrated that more people with alcohol problems recover without treatment than those who receive treatment. In the study Recovery from Alcohol Problems with and without Treatment: Prevalence in Two Population Surveys by Linda C. Sobell, Ph.D, John A. Cunningham, Ph.D., and Mark B. Sobell, Ph.D., published in the American Journal of Public Health, July 1996, Vol. 86, No. 7, the report clearly demonstrates that more alcoholics recover without treatment than those who receive treatment, at a rate of more than 3 to 1.

According to this study and many others, saying treatment doesn't work would be a gross understatement. Again and again the data indicates that treatment actually produces poorer results than “no treatment.” The conclusion then suggests that the type of treatment, such as conventional treatment for people with drug and alcohol problems throughout the United States, actually lessens the chances for recovery for alcoholics and drug addicts.

A report written by Dr. Enoch Gordis in 1987 called Accessible and Affordable Health Care for Alcoholism and Related Problems: Strategy for Cost Containment and published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol (48:579, 1989) states: "in the case of alcoholism, our whole treatment system, with its innumerable therapies, armies of therapists, large and expensive programs, endless conferences, innovation and public relations activities is founded on hunch, not evidence, and not on science ... To determine whether a treatment accomplishes anything, we have to know how similar patients who have not received the treatment fare. Perhaps untreated patients do just as well. This would mean that the treatment does not influence outcome at all. Perhaps treated patients do worse: that is perhaps the treatment is really harmful in unexpected ways so that patients who are not treated get better more often. Perhaps even if the treatment is helpful, a little bit of it is just as useful as a lot of it."

Even today Dr. Gordis, although less candid in his presentation, reports that treatment and “no treatment” achieve at least the same results and in most cases “no treatment” achieves better results. In Alcohol Alert, a publication of the NIAAA, No. 43, April 1999, Dr. Gordis reports the following: "Some studies conducted among alcohol-dependent patients have found that brief intervention is as effective as more expensive treatment approaches used in specialized alcohol treatment settings (8, 9, 41, 42). Edwards and colleagues (8) compared the effectiveness of one session giving brief advice to stop drinking with standard alcohol treatment among 100 alcohol-dependent men... One year later both groups reported a 40-percent decrease in alcohol related problems. After 2 years patients with less severe problems were more likely to report improvement if they received brief intervention than if they received intensive treatment. However, patients with more severe problems were more likely to report improvement if they received intensive treatment (43)."

Edward and colleagues’ findings regarding patients with severe problems are in direct conflict with the results of the NIAAA Study. According to the NIAAA Dawson Study, "For those whose drinking problems had emerged twenty years or more before, twice as many of the treated alcoholics as the untreated alcoholics were still abusing booze (20 percent versus 10 percent). Among the long-term group, fully 60 percent of the untreated subjects had reduced their drinking to the point where they had no diagnosable problem."

It is important to remember that Dr. Gordis is not without bias in his more recent publications. After all, his paycheck depends on there being a treatment industry. His turnabout from "treatment is potentially harmful" to "treatment works sometimes" certainly raises questions as to Dr. Gordis's integrity as a researcher.

In an answer to the bias of many researchers trying to prove the merits of conventional treatment, the scientific community has published several articles, including An Invitation To Debate: How to have a high success rate in treatment: advice for evaluators of alcoholism programs by William R. Miller (Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico) and Martha Sanchez-Craig (Addiction Research Foundation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada). This article appeared in Addiction (1996) 91(6), 779-785. The abstract reads as follows:

"Two seasoned alcohol treatment researchers offer tongue-in-cheek advice to novice program evaluators faced with increasing pressure to show high success rates. Based on published examples, they advise: (1) choose only good prognosis cases to evaluate; (2) keep follow-up periods as short as possible; (3) avoid control and comparison groups; (4) choose measures carefully; (5) focus only on alcohol outcomes; (6) use liberal definitions of success; (7) rely solely on self-reporting and (8) always declare victory regardless of findings."

While Miller and Sanchez-Craig's humor is not lost on us, the tragic truth they expose is not humorous. Alcoholics and drug addicts are dying every day because of studies that are published proclaiming that treatment works when, in fact, the treatment industry knows it does not.

Study after study and expert after expert agree that “no treatment” produces equal (or better) results than any of the current treatments. If the studies cited here dealt with any subject, other than drug and alcohol treatment, where the data so overwhelmingly demonstrated that the untreated group (control group) achieved equal or better results than the treated group (test group), there would be no controversy as to whether or not the treatment worked. If it was anything other than drug and alcohol treatment, it would be considered fraudulent to advertise that such treatment worked.

With the Jude Thaddeus Home Recovery Program, you have at least as good a chance of recovery as you would get by going to treatment. And the advantages of using this program are many: you do it at home, you don't miss work, you don't use up your vacation time, it's a fraction of the cost of treatment, and no one knows but you.

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