by Doug Thorburn
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Product Description
More than 100 widespread myths about drug and alcohol abuse are enumerated and then dispelled in this book about the reality of addiction. Questions such as Does proper parenting and involvement prevent alcoholism? and Do alcoholics lack willpower? are addressed, and a myriad of addiction-related falsities that the general public and even medical professionals have considered true are identified and refuted. Specific attention is paid to defining and understanding alcohol addiction, including guidelines on identifying symptoms of alcoholism in social settings and detailed information on the biological difference between the disease in its early and late stages.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Understanding why you are alcoholic, 2008-05-03
What Doug Thorburn's book "Alcoholism Myths and Realities" does is give solid answers to many of the questions a newly diagnosed alcoholic is asking.When an individual is confronted with the reality that they have a fatal disease, if left untreated, the mind is overwhelmed with questions like,why me,what's the treatment?Can I ever be cured? Will I be able to drink like normal people? This is really no different than a newly diagnosed cancer patient would feel. Being confronted with ones own mortality is indeed a sobering experience.
Emotions come flooding out.Can I survive this?Why me?After all I am a well educated, prosperous business owner how could this happen to me. Your mind is spinning and clouded by emotions like guilt,shame and remorse just to name a few.After all aren't most drunks living in the gutter somewhere. That's certainly not my case, but here I am and the facts are overwhelming, I am an alcoholic.Most of all you have questions,questions,questions and very few answers.I literally thought about nothing else for months on end. Trying to make sense of what was happening to me. How could this possibly be? Sure, I enjoyed a cocktail as much as the next guy but doesn't everybody? Haven't I overcome every obstacle thrown my way my whole life?
Into this highly personal drama/trauma a miracle was thrown. A thin little book,only 192 pages grabbed my attention; titled,"Alcoholism Myths and Realities". Maybe I could get some answers from this book. I bought it and started reading (It's organized and numbered Myth #4 etc.)and quickly found it was like a reference book to the myriad questions I had. I thumbed through the index, found the questions I was interested in and read the answers. I quickly devoured the material I found relevant and, for the first time since I realized I had this horrible disease, I felt some understanding.
I came to understand my disease was inherited. That my brain reacts differently to alcohol than the average person. The only thing I could do was not drink. I found out lots of successful people had the disease. You find out about the alcoholic mind and get answers to many other questions. I CAN'T RECOMMEND THIS BOOK ENOUGH TO YOU IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU LOVE HAS THIS HORRIBLE DISEASE Buy it and it will open your eyes and answer your questions.
7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
 Inaccuracies and assumptions, 2006-09-23
While I applaud the author in tackling this subject, I found his book to be full of inaccuracies and assumptions. Alcoholism is a complex disease. Some explanations for myths were somewhat accurate. However, there were many that were not. For instance, Myth #66 "He's probably just a harmless big talker," illustrates his overuse of assumptions and inaccuracies. He states about Hugo Chavez (the Venezuelan President, which the author calls,"the megalomaniac de facto dictator"), "While there is no definite confirmation yet of alcoholism, he is known to drink ten espresso coffees per day. Unpublished studies seem to suggest a very high correlation between alcoholism and an ability to sleep despite drinking large quanities of caffeine at or near bedtime. There's a possibility that like Adolf Hitler, he uses stimulants to get up and barbituates, alcohol in pill form for the alcoholic, to come down." I'm not a supporter of Chavez, but I will not condone assumptions and inaccuracies made by the author. He does a similar dissecting of Bill Clinton in Myths #49 and 59, by basically saying "Bill Clinton's adolescent-like misbehaviors are strongly suggestive of alcoholism." He has no evidence to support his claim and is making assumptions based on limited exposure to Clinton's life. I do not recommend this book. There are other books on this subject that prove to be more helpful in understanding alcoholism.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
This book is like a dictionary for alcoholism, 2006-03-04
Reading one myth after another, I find them quite interesting.
I especially like the chart of myth #7. While I already have a general idea about it, the chart makes it quite clear and easy to follow. The most educational part is about maintaining and increasing the BAL.
At page 40, I started to get bored. Things started to be repetitive in a way. I flipped through the rest of the book, and was surprised to find that it is all myths! (not happily surprised at this point)
As I flip through the rest of the book, while it appears that most of the myth headlines do not relate to people I know, but some do! Then I decided to just read the headlines, slowly this time. What I found out is by reading just the headlines; it started me thinking about things that I did not notice before. Headlines I did not think concerns me started to look very different.
This book is like a dictionary for alcoholism. It helps one to look for clues of alcoholism when you don't even know what you are looking for. Then it helps you to understand and deal with it properly.
5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
My Opinion on "Alcoholism Myths and Realities", 2005-06-09
I found the article on "Alcoholism Myths and Realities: Removing the Stigma of Society's most Destructive Disease" to be quite helpful. I truly believe that this book will also help anyone that has a family member or friend with any kind of addiction or personality problem. Just because a person has another kind of personality problem doesn't mean that it isn't as destructive as alcoholism. My daughter is a control freak. Her problem has caused many hurtful problems in our relationship. I've been told that I have to be firm when dealing with her, but her manipulation made it so hard. For years I have walked on eggshells around her. Since reading this article I now know that it is not only okay for me to be firm with her, but it is also essential if I want things to improve. I now have more hope for good relationship in our future.
32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
The Unexplainable...Explained!!!, 2005-06-05
Anyone who has a drinking problem or is associated with someone who has a drinking problems will benefit enormously from reading this book. Many people who deal with alcoholics live in a world fraught with uncertainty and illogic. This book attempts and succeeds in making sense out of the senseless. Thorburn does a masterly job of identifying the problem and explaining the chain of events which occurs in alcoholics' livers, central nervous systems and brains.
This book also does a great job of identifying the resulting behaviors and misbehaviors while explaining their underlying causes. To put it overly-simply: the alcoholic's behavior is the result of distortions in perception because he has turned his brain into a toxic waste dump. Once the alcoholic has gotten enough clean-time for the toxins to filter out of his system, many of the behavioral abnormalities disappear.
Thorburn also offers practical advice on how to deal with alcoholics. Basically, get tough, stand your ground and be prepared for the alcoholic to try to manipulate anything and everything to his own advantage. Once you have a basic grasp of the inner-workings of alcoholism, you will know that the most helpful thing you can do for them is to let them reap the consequences of their delusional behavior. Beyond that, you really are powerless to do anything else.
If for no other reason, this book is a priceless tool for spotting typically alcoholic behaviors. Many of the personality traits common to most alcoholics manifest themselves in surprising and subtle ways which most people would not suspect as being indicative of an addiction problem (e.g. - self-favoring memory recall). Recently I have avoided two potentially disastrous relationships (one business and one personal); subsequent events confirmed addiction problems which no one else suspected at the time.
I am an alcoholic in recovery and I have learned more from this book than anything else I have read (and that's a long list). The complex concepts are explained clearly and simply without compromising the subject matter.
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