Some treatment facilities specialized in alcoholism problems claim to the best based on their success rates, and some of them actually are very good facilities providing modern and innovative solutions helping their patients in the always difficult recovery process. But the question is what exactly a great success rate is, and how they can get those numbers over the average treatment facilities.
Regular alcohol treatments will help individuals to address alcoholism´s physical effects and the psychological aspects involved in their addiction. Detoxification will take care of the physical effects. Detox is basically a process to eliminate the alcohol from the body, where the individual will basically stop drinking alcohol and any beverages containing it. This could be a very difficult process not just because of the urgency for alcohol consumption that the addict will present, but also the body itself could suffer some withdrawal symptoms. At the end this process will result in a stronger person, willing to be part of counseling sessions and the other steps involved in the treatment.
Group therapy and individual counseling will address the psychological part of the treatment. These counseling sessions will explore the possible causes of the addiction, and will propose real solutions to the problem. Individual therapy will focus directly on the individual to detect specific needs and come up with direct solutions for that person, while group counseling will provide the alcoholics with support, knowing that they´re not alone in this situation, by sharing experiences of success they will get the necessary mental strength to continue.
Treatment centers don´t provide their records for publication, mainly because they want to keep their patients´ information safe, actually there is very little information to measure the success of these facilities. This makes even harder the task of getting a better understanding of what success is.
In the past, a successful program was measured on how many of the patients relapsed after finishing the recovery process. But specialists realized that this was not the appropriate method to determine the success rate, since alcoholism is just like any other disease, and relapse is a possibility for every single patient who goes into rehab. Thinking about these terms, measuring the success of a treatment based on the relapse rate is really hard, even unfair, since every individual is an especial case. Treatment programs should be measured by how prepared an individual is to face the real life after completing the recovery progress, and what skills where developed while in counseling to have a happier life. It´s also very difficult to measure the success rate, but would be an important rate to measure.
Something is true, longer treatment programs seem to work better for individuals trying to break the addiction. Many programs are changing their shift form from standard 30 days periods to extended 90 days programs. Specialists agreed that longer treatments show more effectiveness when treating the cause of the addiction, therefore the relapse rates are decreasing accordingly, compared with the same category in short programs.
