Our 4 Goals for Treatment

Education. Learn about alcoholism/addiction and its effects

Self-diagnosis. Identify the signs and symptoms of alcoholism and determine if they apply to you.

Treatment. Provide you with the tools to treat the disease — if you have it. And ways to never get the disease if you don’t.

Personal Responsibility. The sooner we take full responsibility for our actions in life, the better off we’ll be.

Is addiction a disease?

The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), the nation’s largest society of eminent doctors and neuroscientists in the field of addiction, define addiction this way:

“At its core, addiction isn’t just a social problem or a moral problem or a criminal problem. It’s a brain problem whose behaviors manifest in all these other areas. Many behaviors driven by addiction are real problems and sometimes criminal acts. But the disease is about underlying neurology, not outward actions.”

Drugabuse.gov agrees. They define addiction as “a chronic, relapsing brain disease… because drugs change the brain; its structure and how it works.”

No human is above the prospect of addiction.

People from all walks of life have it. Professors, pilots, plumbers, priests — anyone can be or become an addict or an alcoholic.

Good news: If you don’t have addiction/alcoholism, you never have to get it.

Some people who get into substance-related trouble aren’t necessarily addicts or alcoholics. But it is also true that if you aren’t you can become one by sheer volume of use over time.

If you find yourself in such trouble and you still can’t handle the idea of not drinking/using, then that may indicate a problem.  We hope that while you’re here, we can get you to identify the problem if indeed it pertains to you.

In 1954, the AMA classified alcoholism as a disease. Anything classified as a “disease” must have at least 5 criteria. Since alcoholism has these 5 features, the AMA classified it a disease.

Primary (stands alone)

Chronic (long lasting, recurring, can be treated but not cured)

Progressive (left untreated, gets worse over time)

Morbidity (makes us deathly ill)

Potentially fatal (Can kill you)

What happens if diabetics don’t take insulin? Blindness? Heart failure? Diabetic coma? Death. A diabetic has to treat their disease. So does any addict.

If you have any kind of disease, early detection is the best thing that can happen to you. The earlier it’s detected, and the more aggressively it’s treated, the better the chances there are for a good outcome.

The problem that people tend to have with the word disease is that it seems to give the addict/alcoholic an excuse.

We say: Even if you weren’t responsible for having the disease, you’re still responsible to treat it.