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Comment by tayo42 | Hacker News Reader

What do alcoholics do for recovery outside the US?

I'm in the former USSR; this thing is very popular among alcoholics I know personally or have heard of from friends and relatives:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кодирование_от_алкоголизма

The article in Russian is much more thorough than the English one, run it through Google Translate or something.

There are various ways it's practiced in my area, all of them can be summarized as follows: a medical professional performs some procedure (sometimes just hypnosis, but it can get more physical), which either "cures" your alcoholism, or convinces you that you're going to die horribly if you have even a drop of alcohol. The process depends on who is doing it.

It's basically just placebo and is pretty useless in practice (most alcoholics I know haven't stopped drinking for more than a couple of months), which doesn't prevent it from being widely used.

That seems insanely dangerous. As far as I know, once you are physically addicted to alcohol, you can't even go cold turkey without risk of literally dying.

If you get DTs after drinking for months, you will get proper medical treatment as in any other country. The "coding" is usually performed after you have been sober for some time and "stabilized", so to say.

Proper (most) of the facilities which do this require people to stop drinking for at least few days before procedure, and some offer paid service isolating patient for a few days under supervision, and then do a block. In cases when patient is already delirious from intoxication these facilities can force one to go cold turkey, but at the same time put patient on the IV with some supplements and issue anti-psychotics (by doctors of course).

So in general the system is well equipped to not allow patients die from abstaining.

This is why ex-USSR countries have so many programmers - we did a lot of coding :)

As Alcoholics Anonymous operates in 180 countries quite often people outside the US do go there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholics_Anonymous#Internati...

In civilized countries? Get support from Doctors, licensed psychologist and addiction counselors. In less civilized countries? Die.

> In civilized countries? Get support from Doctors, licensed psychologist and addiction counselors

All of these are available and common in the US.

12-step programs and AA are available in many countries outside of the US.

There wouldn't be any evidence that these groups, specifically AA have embedded themselves into the government and law system of the united states in particular and have used their influence to force non-religious people to join their little cult meetings, right? It's all optional of course!

Anyway, here's a list of court cases/news articles where it wasn't:

https://www.courthousenews.com/atheist-fights-court-ordered-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/alcoholics-ano...

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/1995/jul/15/aa-probatio...

https://aaagnostica.org/2014/10/17/atheist-punished-for-reje...

I'm sure you can find 20 more easily. Glad i'm not american.

you really got an axe to grind, huh?

> specifically AA have embedded themselves into the government and law system of the united states in particular

You could literally say the same about any special interest group in any country.

> Glad i'm not american.

Me too, but the difference is that you don't see me thinking I know anything about UK politics or special interest groups.

I'd even wager that you've never even set foot in a meeting in an attempt to alleviate your naivety.

> I'd even wager that you've never even set foot in a meeting in an attempt to alleviate your naivety.

I don't need to join a meeting to criticize what the organization setting up that meetings is widely publicizing as a treatment for a medical condition (addiction) when what they publicize is obvious religious nonsense.

I also don't join spirit healing conventions for cancer patients or homeopathic sales events to criticize those.

You seem to have a chip on your shoulder about Christianity, and that's your right. But in the course of that you may overlook that faith-based treatment of problems is a powerful tool that serves some people well. Consider the culture of people taking a break from alcohol over Lent for several weeks each year.

Get proper treatment by professionals.

Die by drinking and driving, mainly.

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