What do medical authorities think of A.A.?
Also see pamphlet: A.A. as a Resource for the Health Care Professional From its earliest days, A.A. has enjoyed the friendship and support of doctors who were familiar with its program of recovery from alcoholism. Doctors, perhaps better than any other group, are in a position to appreciate how unreliable other approaches to the problem of alcoholism have been in the past. A.A. has never been advanced as the only answer to the problem, but the A.A. recovery program has worked so often, after other methods have failed, that doctors today are frequently the most outspoken boosters for the program in their communities. Some measure of the medical profession’s atti tude toward A.A. was suggested in 1951 when the American Public Health Association named Alcoholics Anonymous as one of the recipients of the famed Lasker Awards in “formal recognition of A.A.’s success in treating alcoholism as an illness and in blotting out its social stigma.” A.A. is still new (or unknown) in some communities
