Patient and doctor then agree on a reduced-drinking goal. Brief interventions work best when they are integrated into ordinary health care so that the person's success is assessed at regular follow-up visits. In the 1990s, a number of tests, including international trials conducted for the World Health Organization that were published last summer, found that brief interventions helped many people succeed in reducing their drinking. Motivational Enhancement fosters people's own motivation to change. Therapists are careful not to confront alcoholics, but rather explore and accept their views of their own drinking.
Therapists encourage drinkers to compare the consequences of their drinking with their core values.
When the gap is sufficiently great, drinkers usually develop their own impetus to change. These include learning how to manage anger, how to relax, how to reverse negative thinking, how to be assertive and express needs constructively, and how to give criticism and accept feedback. In their 1995 Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches , Miller and colleagues performed a meta-analysis ranking all current alcoholism treatments. They rated only those studies that had randomly assigned alcoholics to at least one comparison group in addition to the treatment being evaluated. A total of 219 studies met the criteria.