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Original

SOME NOTES ON THE NEW PARADIGMATIC ENVIRONMENT OF “NATURAL REMISSION” STUDIES IN ALCOHOL RESEARCH

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Pages 1443-1465 | Published online: 03 Jul 2009

REFERENCES

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  • Including Knupfer [3], Smart [4], Roizen et al. [5], Fillmore et al. [6], and Saunders and Kershaw [7] among others – and adding to a small literature generated over the previous decade
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  • Fillmore K. M., Bacon S. D., Hyman M. The 27-Year Longitudinal Panel Study of Drinking by Students in College, 1949–1976 1979, Final report to NIAAA (Contract Number ADM 281–76–0015),
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  • For the contemporary state of the Ledermann model discussion, see Miller and Agnew [13]
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  • Edwards, et al., [46] represents the NPHA paradigm's most recent comprehensive and authoritative expression
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  • Elsewhere in Skog's oeuvre [[22] p. 592, emphasis added] – and in the context of his discussion of the impact of wartime Paris' wine rationing on long-term “heavy drinkers”—can be found: “The control of the alcoholics' drinking was therefore not a voluntary, cognitive control but a strict environmental control.” This assertion may afford a more direct, if passing, glimpse of the relationship Skog perceives between changeability and voluntarism
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  • It may well appear odd to some readers for us to speak of the “problematization” of “alcohol problems.” Yet the concept of “alcohol problems,” as it derived originally from alcohol survey research, stopped short of the categorically problematized connotation it more often carries today. Lower-level positive alcohol-problems reports from survey respondents who reported “moderate” or “light drinking,” for example, were more often regarded by survey analysts as measurement error or byproducts of social frictions surrounding drinking in non-permissive normative environments. As Room [51] recently recalled, analysts viewed such positive problem reports with a measure of embarrassment
  • Sobell L. C., Cunningham J. A., Sobell M. B. Recovery from Alcohol Problems with and without Treatment: Prevalence in Two Population Surveys. Am. J. Pub. Health 1996; 86: 966–972
  • Language in the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism's most recent Alcohol and Health report to Congress [72] suggests the already-in-hand conventionalism of the change: “Growing evidence indicates that many people who experience alcohol problems can successfully stop or reduce their alcohol use without participating in formal treatment programs”
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  • A bumper strip one of us spotted in north Idaho reads—“Wife and dog missing, reward for dog.”
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  • De Lint and Schmidt's [41] original introduction of the Ledermann model to an English speaking scientific readership pointed away from bi-directional changeability and relied instead on Ledermann's unidirectional “snowballing” image of alcohol use—which held, summarized de Lint and Schmidt, that “an individual gravitates toward increasing consumption as a result of social pressures and the pleasureable aspects of alcohol use.” (We thank Robin Room for pointing this out to us.)
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  • Harford T. Risk Curves for Alcohol Problems [Comments on Midanik et al.'s ‘Risk functions for alcohol-related problems in a 1988 US national sample’]. Addiction 1996; 91: 1444–1445
  • Makela K. How to Describe the Domains of Drinking and Consequences [Comments on Midanik et al.'s ‘Risk functions for alcohol-related problems in a 1988 US national sample’]. Addiction 1996; 91: 1447–1449
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  • Resentment among early alcohol scientists toward the alcoholism paradigm commenced quite early in the paradigm's history and came to include even founding fathers of movement—including E.M. Jellinek [53], Selden Bacon [see Room, 1978, [54] p. 135] and Harry Tiebout. Tiebout—one of the early post-Repeal formulators and influential advocates of the alcoholism movement (as well as psychiatrist to Bill W. and Mrs. Marty Mann)—as early as 1955 publicly lamented the overselling of the disease concept's scientific credentials. “I cannot help but feel,” he wrote, “that the whole field of alcoholism is way out on a limb which any minute will crack and drop us all in a frightful mess. I sometimes tremble to think of how little we have to back up our [disease concept] claims” [(quoted by White [55]]
  • Jellinek E. M. The Disease Concept of Alcoholism. Hillhouse Press, New Haven 1960
  • Room R. Governing Images of Alcohol and Drug Problems: The Structure, Sourcems and Sequels of Conceptualizations of Intractable Problems. Ph.D. diss., Sociology, University of California, Berkeley 1978
  • White W. L. Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America. Chestnut Health Systems Publication, Bloomington, IL 1998
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  • Roizen R. The American Discovery of Alcoholism, 1933–1939. Ph.D. diss., Sociology, University of California, Berkeley 1991
  • Roizen R. Paradigm Sidetracked: Explaining Early Resistance to the Alcoholism Paradigm at Yale's Laboratory of Applied Physiology, 1940–1944. Presented at the Alcohol & Temperance History Group's International Congress on the Social History of Alcohol, Huron College, London, OntarioCanada, May, 13–151993
  • Room [60] noted approvingly in his commentary on the influencial WHO 1980 Expert Committee Report, that “the U.S. alcoholism movement itself is in the process of breaking its longstanding tacit alliance with beverage industry interests, and adopting a more ‘public health’ and ‘control’ oriented line on such issues as labelling of alcohol containers and control for alcohol advertisements.”
  • Room R. A Farewell to Alcoholism? A Commentary on the WHO 1980 Expert Committee Report. Br. J. Addiction 1981; 76: 115–123
  • Room's commentary [60] on the WHO 1980 Expert Committee Report notes: “Referring to Orford and Edwards ([62]) and other clinical trials and evidence on spontaneous remission, the Committee foresees ‘and increasing emphasis on quite simple forms of treatment, perhaps amounting to little more than firm advice to stop drinking or drink less.” Such assertions serve to connect the elaboration of the New public health paradigm with de-emphasis of more traditional alcoholism treatment
  • Orford J., Edwards G. Alcoholism: A Comparison of Treatment and Advice, with a Study of the Influence of Marriage. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1977
  • McLellan A. T., et al. Is treatment for substance dependence ‘Worth It?’: public health expectations, policy-based comparisons. Training About Alcohol and Substance Abuse for All Primary Care Physicians. Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, New York 1995
  • Holder H. D. Can Individually Directed Interventions Reduce Population-level Alcohol-involved Problems? (editorial). Addiction 1997; 92: 5–7
  • Babor T. The social and public health significance of individually directed interventions. Alcohol and Public Policy: Evidence and Issues, H. Holder, G. Edwards. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1995; 164–189
  • This factor has greater significance in the U.S.; where NIAAA's establishment in 1970 marked a watershed between non-governmental and governmental support for “alcohol science.” Elsewhere, of course, alcohol research establishments have had governmental support and public-interest orientations from their commencements
  • Moore K. Organizing Integrity: American Science and the Creation of Public Interest Organizations, 1955–1973. Am. J. Sociol. 1996; 101: 1592–1627
  • Makela K. What can medicine properly take on?. Alcoholism Treatment in Transition, G. Edwards, M. Grant. Croom Helm, London 1980; 225–233
  • “So-called public interest” might be a better choice of words, since the concept of the “public interest” opens up numerous and long-standing problematics
  • Fingarette H. The Meaning of Criminal Insanity. University of California Press, Berkeley 1974
  • Fingarette's [70] well crafted argument to the effect that psychiatric judgments regarding the insanity defense's involuntarist implication are inescapably metaphysical, political, and moral in character (rather than wholly medicoscientific) apply equally well to voluntarism/involuntarism judgments re alcohol problems
  • NIAAA. Alcohol & Health, Ninth Special Report to Congress. NIAAA, NIH, Rockville, MD 1997

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