Not so very long ago, alcoholism was considered to be a moral failing. In the middle of the 20th century, the majority of medical professionals (along with the majority of most alcoholics themselves and most Americans in general) would have argued that that alcoholics became alcoholics for the same reason that some people robbed banks. Alcoholics (under this model) drink because they choose to do so and because they do not have the psychological (or moral or emotional) desire or ability to stop drinking. Alcoholics were simply drunks, and had no one to blame for the misery that their habit brought into their lives. Because treatment options for a condition arise from our understanding of what causes a condition, the recommended treatment for the alcoholic was to stop feeling sorry for himself or herself, perhaps to find God, and just stop drinking.
However, this once widely accepted view of alcoholism has been almost entirely subsumed as new ideas about the fundamental causes of alcoholism have emerged. From a model that posited alcoholism as a form of moral weakness, we shifted to a diametrically different view, which is that alcoholism should be is as a disease that is caused by a genetic predisposition toward the condition - a model that presents alcoholics as being exactly analogous to women who have a genetic predisposition towards breast cancer. In the past decade, the pendulum has swung back slightly from the alcohol-is-a-disease model so that it is now considered to arise from both genetic and environmental causes. (As is, we should note, the case for so many diseases, including cancer).
The importance of understanding the causes of alcoholism and therefore the best potential treatments for it can be appreciated by consider the breadth of the problem of alcoholism:
Approximately 10.6 million adults in the United States can be classified as alcoholics, and an additional 7.3 million either are alcohol abusers or have exp...