Treatment centers and Anonymous programs call it a disease... Insurance companies pay benefits so people can learn the dogmatic 12 steps. Please discuss. :seg:
It's pretty well known, that for some reason alcoholism and drug addiction seem to follow family lines. I think this lends credit to the disease theory, and really if you develop an addiction issue isn't it kind of likely you might have an issue later on. Like people who have bad gambling addictions, can read a book and be cured, and then go gamble only on the weekends and all will be fine? That's just not how it works in real life,and denying that addiction, in any of its self destructive forms, is not real is to deny reality. Maybe you haven't been around people who destroy their lives and watch everything they ever worked for crumble around them because of an addiction to drugs, or even gambling, or whatever. I think when you know something is bad for you, and you continue to do it anyways despite that knowledge it's probably an addiction. Tobacco is a common addiction that costs many lives, is that more like a common cold, something you can get over quickly and then smoke occasionally? Or is it more like a disease, where you want to avoid tobacco smoke altogether forever? I've seen too much evidence of addiction to dismiss it and claim that people are choosing to destroy themselves, so I am going to have to respectfully disagree with this. On a side not, if AA was as ineffective as people here claim, then why would insurance pay for rehab involving it? Surely they don't want the insured returning to rehab again, and again? That would cost them lots of money and they work hard to prevent that. Perhaps they know something we don't?