Re: My Wiew

[Guest guest]

At 08:02 AM 08/10/99 -0700, you wrote:

<snip>

>By the way, the early AA didn´t invent the disease theory.

>It´s the agressive Minesota people who make profit of this not ever

>proven theory.

>

>MC

Inventing the disease theory and cashing in on it commercially need not

have been done by the same people.

I have read somewhere that some early AA members in the 1940s thought that

their drinking was a result of an illness or disease, and Jelinek (?)

interviewed a number of such early AA's and wrote a paper on the basis of

these interviews which he called The Disease Concept of Alcoholism (or

something like that). This then could have been the first " official " use of

have term.

Another point that is not often mentioned is that Narcotics Anonymus places

far greater emphasis on the disease idea than AA does, even going to the

point of underlining that as the fundamental difference between the two

philosophies and I think this is feeding back into the belief system of

people generally and back into the treatment centres (where many NA members

work) and is responsible for a lot of what we attribute to AA. In the NA

" Basic Text " therew are many references to " our disease " , " the disease of

addiction " and so on, and naturally no references anywhere to any research

supporting that notion. The inference being- if NA says its a disease, well

then, it must be; who needs evidence when we're all being so spiritual?