Compare it with the 20 to 25 percent achieved via conventional treatment, the only kind available in most facilities. In light of this it's not surprising the death rate among treated alcoholics is nearly as high as it is among untreated ones, for whom drinking routinely knocks off about 20 years of life. One in four deaths in the treated is suicide. Most of these take place in the first year after treatment. 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.