The assumption then, as now, is that if alcoholics would only get their act together, they would recover from their affliction. Emphasis is on the underlying psychological reasons' for needing to drink. Dr. Larson says this approach does not work because alcoholism is a physical illness that devastates body and brain. Substance abuse routinely produces a staggering array of emotional and physiological dysfunctions. At HRC they've worked out an outpatient regimen that detoxifies and heals in record time, allowing clients to benefit, for the first time in many cases, from traditional rehabilitation.
Heredity looms large in the picture.
Besides familial research, there are indisputable racial and ethnic differences in vulnerability, Larson says. About ten thousand years ago, when nomadic people no longer could meet their food needs by hunting and gathering, they began to settle into communities, for the first time planting crops to feed their growing numbers. They've been making alcoholic drinks from grains, fruits, etc. for at least seven thousand years-long enough for generations of those severely afflicted by alcoholism to have been weeded out, while the not so susceptible survived. You have a 10 percent chance of becoming an alcoholic if you drink. Because of harsher climates these areas were peopled and farmed much later, so the folks have been drinking alcohol for only 1500 years.