Through neglect and shortsightedness we tolerate a medical defilement of over ten million men and women who are afflicted with the disease of alcoholism. 

Alcoholism figures in 10 percent of all deaths in the United States, and it affects adversely the lives and livelihood of almost half our population.  It is one of the big killer diseases still awaiting cures, along with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and AIDS.  However, alcoholism is distinctive in that no one is seeking a cure for it.

The debate goes on, but there is on hand an overwhelming body of medical evidence to support the claim that alcoholism is a disease.  True, contributing conduct would seem to be an essential ingredient.  That is also true of AIDS but no one would dare suggest that efforts to find a cure for that disease be called off. 

Statistically, it seems evident that alcoholism is inherited.  Certain of its distinctive biochemical and organic characteristics are identified and defined.  The avenues of potentially rewarding medical research leading to a cure are apparent.  All that is needed is the devotion of money and research facilities to the task, and, above all, a curb on the blind-sided cant that alcoholism cannot be cured.

However, society's primeval and enduring inclination is to continue to treat alcoholism with contempt and alcoholics with pity and paternalistic voodooism, usually called spiritualism.  These attitudes are fostered and incessantly reinvigorated by the "talk treatment" professionals in the field of alcoholism.  Treatment,  which when stripped of its contrived adornments of professionalism consists of talk.  Alcoholics talk to the professionals; alcoholics talk to each other; professionals talk to each other.  No one is cured, just treated, that is, talked at.

The medical problem with the spiritual solution is an incongruity that is most glaring in alcoholic rehabilitation centers.  There are about 7,000 of them in the United States, each fondling its own petite and rigid notion about how alcoholics should be treated. 

These centers teach alcoholics about the medical and psychiatric characteristics of their disease, convincingly.  However, somewhere along the way the patient is bewildered to learn that these medical clinics offer nothing in the way of medical treatment.  Instead, after a month of internment and an expenditure of $8,000 or so, the patient is released with his disease intact and his ears ringing with the staff's exhortations to "stick to your program."  This means go to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings frequently for spiritual guidance and close fellowship with other alcoholics, of all people, one has to think.

The patient is warned that if he fails to go to AA meetings he will "relapse," jargon for a return to destructive drinking.  This is distressingly true.  But going to meetings guarantees him only an outside chance of staying sober for the rest of his life.  The average length of stay in AA, according to AA, is less than four years.    

We are, incidentally, only talking about the roughly 10% of the alcoholics who go into treatment, about a million.  The other ten or eleven million out there are never are treated, a statistic that says everything that needs to be said about the appeal of talk treatment.  So, viewing the present system on a national basis, we find that 10 percent of American alcoholics try treatment and of them about 10 percent succeed in the true sense, that is, they never drink again.  That leaves us then with a striking one percent national success rate for talk treatment.  Yet, the professionals, that is, those who make their living doing things to and about alcoholics continue to press legislatures, philanthropic foundations and health insurance companies for funds to perpetuate a program that has a smashing one percent success rate.  And funds for medical cure research?  None.  After all, we know alcoholism cannot be cured.

This is not to say that periods of abstemiousness derived by way of treatment clinics and AA should be scorned.  One day of sobriety for an alcoholic is a godsend.  The alcoholic can function very well in society while in a holding pattern.  However, even while the alcoholic abstains, the disease remains and continues to progress, as the American Medical Association said more than a generation ago.  Some alcoholics are able to stay abstentious for a week, some for years.  However, so long as the alcoholic lives in the talk treatment mode, he is haunted by the specter of recidivism, and almost all alcoholics ultimately experience this horror.  The disease needs to be cured, not treated.

Why is there no concerted attempt to cure alcoholism?  Partly because the talk treatment professionals have an interest in perpetuating talk treatment.  But, the primary reason is that alcoholics have never demanded to be cured.  The squeaky wheel gets the grease.  The alcoholic is not inclined to be squeaky.  He, like society, feels guilty about his affliction.  We see this in the AA name in which "anonymous" holds equal billing with "alcoholics."  Characteristically, the alcoholic, even in abstention, wants to be left alone.  He can associate comfortably in church basements with other alcoholics, but he does not care to advertise his ailment.

Both the active and abstemious alcoholics come to accept their disease as inevitable, enduring and God-sponsored for involved and thoroughly illogical reasons.  Alcoholics wrap themselves in a shroud of acceptance, passivity and contrived serenity.  Thus, alcoholics do not march in the streets with banners demanding that something concrete be done to cure their disease.  They have abdicated their say in their own fate.

The reason the alcoholic should be cured is the same reason that anyone should be cured of any deadly disease——to avoid a premature and agonizing death, the inevitable result of uncurbed alcoholic drinking. 

If in fact alcoholism is a disease, then conceivably it can be cured medically.  At least, we should try.  It really is time we dropped the last of our medieval attitudes toward a major disease and began to deal with it in a sensible, scientific way.