Information about Alcohol Treatment,Alcoholism & Alcohol Treatment Centers
On any given day, more than 700,000 Americans are receiving some form of alcohol treatment.
Over the past 20 years, modern methods of evaluating medical therapies have been increasingly applied to the disease of alcoholism via alcohol treatment.
Alcohol treatment centers use both counseling and medications to help a person stop drinking. With support and treatment, many people are able to stop drinking alcohol and rebuild their lives. Alcohol treatment programs work for many people.
But just like any chronic disease, there are varying levels of success when it comes to alcohol treatment. Some people stop drinking and remain sober on their own. Others have long periods of sobriety with bouts of relapse. With alcohol treatment, at an alcohol treatment center, one thing is clear, however, the longer a person abstains from alcohol, the more likely he or she will be able to stay sober.
The type of alcohol treatment you receive depends on the severity of your alcohol abuse and the resources available. Alcoholism Treatment should include detoxification, in a detox center. Detox is the process of safely getting alcohol out of your system. There are promising types of counseling that teach alcohol abusers to identify situations and feelings that trigger the urge to drink and to find new ways to cope that do not include alcohol use. Alcoholism treatment is often provided on an outpatient basis. Because the support of family members is important to the recovery process, many programs also offer brief marital counseling and family therapy as part of the treatment process.
Researchers have made considerable progress in evaluating commonly used therapies and in developing new types of therapies for treatment of alcohol problems. One large-scale study found each of three commonly used behavioral treatments for alcohol abuse and alcoholism — motivation enhancement therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and 12-step facilitation therapy—significantly reduced alcohol abuse in the year following treatment. Other treatment has been evaluated and found effective in reducing alcohol problems include brief intervention for alcohol abusers and behavioral marital therapy for married alcohol dependent individuals. One randomized study of patients entering employee assistance programs compared inpatient alcohol treatment combined with AA with referral to AA alone. This study found that inpatient alcohol treatment, a combination of professional alcohol treatment and AA, will achieve better results for more people than AA alone. In cognitive-behavioral therapy, the therapist helps the client learn new skills to cope with problems and to change harmful behavior patterns, such as alcohol abuse. One year after completion of alcohol treatment, the three types of programs had produced comparable improvements on measures of alcohol consumption and related problems.
However, participants in the 12-step programs achieved more sustained abstinence and higher rates of employment compared with participants in the other two programs. Interpretation of these results is complicated by the nonrandom assignment of patients to the different treatment types. Alcohol abuse clinicians have access today to a wide range of treatment options for their patients. Some of these alcohol treatments, such as 12-step self-help programs, have been around a long time.
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